by Iris Murdoch
‘Freud refers to various ancient myths in these connections [dreams], and claims that his researches have now explained how it came about that anybody should think or propound a myth of that sort. Whereas in fact Freud has done something different. He has not given a scientific explanation of an ancient myth. What he has done is to propound a new myth. The attractiveness of the suggestion, for instance, that all anxiety is a repetition of the anxiety of the birth trauma is just the attractiveness of mythology. “It is all the outcome of something which happened long ago.” Almost like referring to a totem. Much the same could be said of the notion of an Urszene. This often has the attractiveness of giving a sort of tragic pattern to one’s life. It is all the repetition of the same pattern which was settled long ago. Like a tragic figure carrying out the decrees under which the fates had placed him at birth. Many people have, at some period, serious trouble in their lives – so serious as to lead to thoughts of suicide. This is likely to appear to one as something nasty, as a situation too foul to be a subject for tragedy. And it may then be an immense relief if it can be shown that one’s life has the pattern rather of a tragedy — the tragic working out and repetition of a pattern which was determined by the primal scene.’
(‘Conversations on Freud’ in Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, p. 51.)
Wittgenstein here expresses a particular view of tragedy (or use of the concept) as concerned with a determined primal doom. Whether or not one wishes to ‘dismiss’ the work of Freud, or to question the empirical evidence upon which weird concepts such as ‘penis envy’ are based, one can appreciate the sense of this criticism of a way in which his ideas might be used. The sort of consolation indicated in this example is indeed very widespread and familiar. The (any) explanatory aesthetic ‘tragic pattern’ gives dignity to aspects of human conduct which might otherwise simply appear base, mean, contemptible, vile, criminally stupid. The ‘mythical explanation’ rescues us from this sort of self-condemnation and self-abasement. It also removes the pain of contingency, which is a shadow of death. The awful suffering, the irrevocable loss may be accidental, but it is not (we persuade ourselves) trivially so (if only he had not caught the train that crashed, etc.); it is somehow accidental on a cosmic scale, a result of some sort of natural law or profound uncontrollable life-pattern, and so in a way not really accidental at all. This might be seen as a debased (fatalistic) form of ‘obedience’. (Simone Weil’s obedience is realism exposed to good.) So we may escape both responsibility and subjection to spiteful chance. ‘It was God’s will’ can also serve this purpose. And when we consider how horrible human life can be we may be inclined to forgive the frequent use of such devices.
I suggested in discussing Wittgenstein’s ethical views that he seemed, in the Tractatus, to want to gather all contingency together into the limited whole of the factual world which the mystical subject could then contemplate from the outside, from the factless realm of value. Wittgenstein, using the same imagery, expressed his stoicism in a more positive form in the (earlier) 1914-1916 Notebooks. (20.10.16.) If we accept all the facts we can be both happy and good. And the acceptance of all the facts must (of course) exclude the ‘softening’ influences of art or popular science. (There are no art-facts or pseudo-science-facts.) Virtue (freedom and happiness) consists in our (ineffable) mode of approach to the facts. This defiant stoical, one might add quasi-existentialist, position separates fact and value, intellect and will, in a simple radical way which is essentially un-Kantian. Existentialism is close to stoicism. Sartre uses not dissimilar imagery. There is a satisfying neatness about such separations, all ‘fact’ classified together, all ‘value’ totally pure. Schopenhauer was right to complain that Kant robbed us of our ‘rich field of perceptions’. (What else are we all the time concerned with?) Philosophy has different ways or styles of being abstract, and its mistakes too arise from its abstractness; but it is formally abstract and must beware of art (the poetic), as Plato saw.
It also seems appropriate to quote here some of Wittgenstein’s remarks about Shakespeare in Culture and Value.
‘I do not believe that Shakespeare can be set alongside any other poet. Was he perhaps a creator of language rather than a poet? I could only stare in wonder at Shakespeare; never do anything with him. I am deeply suspicious of most of Shakespeare’s admirers. The misfortune is, I believe, that he stands by himself, at least in the culture of the west, so that one can only place him by placing him wrongly. It is not as though Shakespeare portrayed human types well and were in that respect true to life. He is not true to life. But he has such a supple hand and his brush strokes are so individual, that each of his characters looks significant, is worth looking at. “Beethoven’s great heart” – nobody could speak of “Shakespeare’s great heart”.’
(p. 84.)
‘The reason why I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry. His pieces give me an impression as of enormous sketches rather than of paintings; as though they had been dashed off by someone who can permit himself anything, so to speak. And I understand how someone can admire that and call it supreme art, but I don’t like it. So if someone stands in front of these pieces speechless, I can understand him; but anyone who admires them as one admires, say, Beethoven seems to me to misunderstand Shake-speare.’ (p. 86.)
‘I do not think that Shakespeare would have been able to reflect on the “lot of the poet” [das Dichterlos]. Nor could he regard himself as a prophet or as a teacher of mankind. People stare at him in wonderment, almost as at a spectacular natural phenomenon. They do not have the feeling that this brings them into contact with a great human being. Rather with a phenomenon. I believe that if one is to enjoy a writer one has to like the culture he belongs to as well. If one finds it indifferent or distasteful, one’s admiration cools off.’
(p. 85.)
George Steiner, in his interesting and perceptive W. P. Ker Lecture, A Reading against Shakespeare, quotes Wittgenstein’s views. The indictment may be expressed, in Steiner’s words, as: ‘the manipulative sovereignty and singularity of Shakespeare’s spectacular skills generates a merely phenomenal significance. And mere phenomenality is untrue to life.’ Wittgenstein’s ich mag es nicht (tamely translated as ‘I don’t like it’) conveys, Steiner says, ‘a colloquial intensity of distaste’. Steiner draws attention to Wittgenstein’s sentence: ‘Was he perhaps a creator of language rather than a poet?’ ‘War er vielleicht eher ein Sprachschopfer als ein Dichter?’ Steiner goes on:
‘Sprachschöpfer [which Wittgenstein has underlined] can be translated: the archaic but also (if I am not mistaken) Joycean term “wordsmith” renders the appropriate stem and connotations. But “poet” does not translate Dichter. And it is this gap, indeed it is very nearly an abyss, which is the crux of Wittgenstein’s entire case.’
‘The authentic Dichter is of the rarest ... For the Dichter is “one who knows ethically, who object-knows” (an inadmissible fusion in English, but imperative to the implicit notion of meaning). The Dichter’s knowing is antithetical to “knowingness”, to encyclopaedic myriad-mindedness (as so many have found it in Shakespeare). In the Dichter knowledge, cognition and re-cognition are, in a sense not unlike that of Plato’s epistemology of the loving intellect, moral acts.’
‘In Martin Heidegger, Wittgenstein’s secret sharer at so many decisive points in the philosophy of hermeneutics and the investigation of language, the term Dichter is cardinal. The Dichter – Sophocles, Hölderlin above all, Rilke and Paul Celan among the moderns – “speaks being” ... More than any other man the Dichter is, for Heidegger, the “shepherd of being”.’
Steiner quotes Wittgenstein’s remark, ‘I do not think Shakespeare would have been able to reflect on the Dichterlos’, and continues:
‘a term again resistant to translation into English and into the entire register of Anglo-Saxon sensibility, but signifying something like the “calling”, the “destined ordinan
ce” of the poet.’
‘The contrast with Dante, with Goethe, with Tolstoy, die Dichter par excellence, is glaring. Where is there a Shakespearean philosophy or intelligible ethic? Both Cordelia and Iago, Richard III and Hermione are instinct with the same uncanny trick of life. The shaping imagination which animates their “spectacular” presence is beyond good and evil. It has the dispassionate neutrality of sunlight or of wind. Can a man or woman conduct their lives by the example or precepts of Shakespeare as they can, say, by those of Tolstoy?’
Steiner mentions T. S. Eliot’s ‘more guarded but no less divisive preference of Dante over Shakespeare’.
I turn now to Eliot, Selected Essays, ‘Dante’, and ‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’. ‘Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third.’ (p. 265.)
‘In a comparison of Shakespeare with Dante, for instance, it is assumed that Dante leant upon a system of philosophy which he accepted whole, whereas Shakespeare created his own: or that Shakespeare had acquired some extra – or ultra-intellectual knowledge superior to a philosophy. This occult kind of information is sometimes called “spiritual knowledge” or “insight”. Shakespeare and Dante were both merely poets (and Shakespeare a dramatist as well); our estimate of the intellectual material they absorbed does not affect our estimate of their poetry, either absolutely or relative to each other. But it must affect our vision of them and the use we make of them, the fact that Dante, for instance, had behind him an Aquinas, and Shakespeare behind him a Seneca. Perhaps it was Shakespeare’s special role in history to have effected this peculiar union – perhaps it is part of his special eminence to have expressed an inferior philosophy in the greatest poetry. It is certainly one cause of the terror and awe with which he inspires us.’
Well, Dante was moved by his own religious faith and his love of Aristotle. But great poets are not philosophers, and thinkers do not stand ‘behind’ them in the sense implied by Eliot. The idea is certainly out of place in the case of Shakespeare, who made some uses of Seneca and certainly read Florio’s translation of Montaigne. But then the whole world was his, he imbibed everything, he transformed everything. His ‘dispassionate neutrality’ is his calm sense of justice, his compassion, his profound understanding of human nature. ‘Spiritual knowledge’ or ‘insight’, not to be dismissed as ‘occult information’, is indeed what Shakespeare possesses. He is in his own unique way a religious poet, he knows about good and evil. He did not didactically ‘express a philosophy’. He did not (fortunately) ‘regard himself as a prophet or as a teacher of mankind’. Both Dante and Shakespeare in their different ways show us what religion is.
After so much quoting I might be expected, or expect myself, to reply, on behalf of ‘the Anglo-Saxon sensibility’, to George Steiner’s elegant and spirited attack upon Shakespeare. In fact I think the essence of my defence is contained in the brief criticism of Eliot. Another thing one may say of Eliot concerns his famous argument in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ essay, about a ‘dissociation of sensibility’, ‘from which we have never recovered’, and the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. ‘Tennyson and Browning are poets and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.’ Shakespeare is not at all like Donne; but it might be said (when speaking of their dissimilarity) that the ability to feel thought like the odour of a rose (whatever exactly that may mean) was possessed by Shakespeare in a more profound and purer form. We know very little about Shakespeare, he is hidden behind his work, and perhaps in this respect is an ideal artist. Invisible and modest, he ‘disappears’ his wisdom into his art. He is not didactic, he is, as artist, selfless, it would never have occurred to him to comment on his writings or discuss what it is to be a poet. His ‘philosophy’ and his ‘ethic’ is ‘consumed in anonymous work’. Shakespeare does not speak formally about religion, this aspect of his life is obscure. But the plays are ‘showings’. They are indeed ‘criticisms’ of vast areas of human life, offered to us by a just and compassionate intellect: not ‘beyond good and evil’, but goodness made perfectly into art. They are not philosophy or philosophical, but may be compared, mutatis mutandis, with Plato’s dialogues in being full of light and truth, and, to steal Steiner’s fine phrase, the epistemology of the loving intellect. The range and profundity of this intellect is so seemingly effortless that it may look to us transparent, as it were invisible. Shakespeare’s people, enduring individuals known all over the world, are like icons, secure inhabitants of an art which comprehends human nature from its deepest evil to its highest good, together with its funniness, its happiness and its beauty. All this, needless to say, implies no disrespect for the great Dichter mentioned by Steiner. Great poets come in felicitously various kinds.
With Shakespeare we return to the concept of tragedy and how it prompts the idea that art must not console us too much. Here, in the interests of truth, the artist must inhibit his magic. Well, must he? Who says so? Not every concept that seems deep is deep, even though it may inspire lofty thoughts. Is there not something wilful in the attempt to define tragedy, making it out to be something interesting and ideal? Why not treat the tragic plays as individual works, full of aspects and ideas and multifarious stuff? The general notion may be incoherent, but we are inclined to feel that the concept, the fact that it has been coined and treated with such respect, indicates some kind of end-point, a remarkable break in the continuum of art. It tells us something too about the nature of speech, of poetic speech. All tragedies are written in poetry. Prose candidates can readily be seen to belong to other genres. Tragedy is sometimes called the highest form of art because (we feel) only great poetry can raise language to the pitch of clarified moral intensity which enables it to display the horrors of human life in dramatic form. This idea also prompts suspicion. After all, tragedies are theatre. A tragedy, unlike a novel, cannot be very various or very long. Shakespeare gets away with irrelevancies and comic patches which would have shocked the Greeks. Iago can be partly played as a comic character. (So incidentally could the watchman at the beginning of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon.) It is very difficult to reach and maintain the required pitch, and with tragedy, unless you are doing it very well you are not doing it at all. Tragedy (we feel) is the point where art nearly breaks down but triumphantly does not. Tragedy must mock itself internally through being essentially, in its own way, a broken whole. The tragic poet breaks the egoistic illusory unity which is natural to art and is able to look at human evil with a just and steady eye. He positively prevents his client from using the work as private magic. Tragedy must cause us distress: its subject matter is contingency and death, the profound difference between suffering and death, the connection of truth and justice with the apprehension of death, the elevation of morality to the religious level. That someone must die in a tragedy is not a mere convention like that which decrees deaths in detective stories. In tragedy the compulsory nature of death is an image of its place in life. Such are the solemn thoughts which a contemplation of this great concept may inspire in us.
But is all this really happening, or is it just something that we want to happen? Surely no artist can really defend himself against his client, nothing can prevent any object from degenerating in the eye of the beholder. And what about the charm of the work? Hölderlin’s epigram on Sophocles:Viele versuchten umsonst das freudigste freudig zu sagen,
Hier spricht endlich es mir, hier in der Trauer sich aus.
Many vainly attempted to speak the most joyful in joy,
Here at last in grief it speaks itself to me.
Great poetry can reach heights of clarified intensity and dread, but can also give supreme pleasure. Antigone, a marvellous evening in the theatre. Can art actually convey the horrors of life better than the television news? Perhaps all actual tragedies are failed tragedies, fake romantic ‘tragedies’, even if not bathetic absurdities? And if so, what can t
he high concept tell us, is it still valuable as a mirage? (An Idea of Reason?) I think interested parties would agree that there are very few candidates. Apart from the Greeks, a few plays by Shakespeare, one or two by Marlowe, Webster, Racine, a few more and one begins to hesitate and fish around. And even Shakespeare. Antony and Cleopatra, a romantic love story with a brilliant portrait of a nasty woman. Othello, about sex, the degraded sex of lago, the idealised sex of Othello, the innocent sex of Desdemona, the Liebestod, the magical consoling marriage between sex and death, murder scene as love scene: the redemption of death by its identification with sex, the exact opposite of a tragic theme. Hamlet, also about sex, the Freudian classic, the romantic ironical hero, the most delightful character in drama, every actor’s favourite role. Of course these plays are full of thrills and marvels and deep psychological insights. But pity and terror? The horrors of human life? Real evil? Real death? Perhaps after all only Aristotle’s Greeks could do it. Macbeth comes closest to Schopenhauer’s definition, people committing awful crimes with their eyes open because they have somehow taken a path which makes these crimes into an inevitable duty.