SHAKSPER 2000: Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

From: Hardy M. Cook (editor@ws.bowiestate.edu)
Date: 01/25/00 

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 11.0164  Tuesday, 25 January 2000.

[1]     From:   Patrick Dolan <paddyd@ia.net>
        Date:   Monday, 24 Jan 2000 10:58:26 -0600
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0151 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

[2]     From:   Sean Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
        Date:   Monday, 24 Jan 2000 08:59:57 -0800
        Subj:   Re: SHK 11.0151 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Patrick Dolan <paddyd@ia.net>
Date:           Monday, 24 Jan 2000 10:58:26 -0600
Subject: 11.0151 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0151 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

>This makes all such lenses equal, which seems to be the claim that
>Marx's dictum at least appears to be avoiding.  Moreover, the fact that
>spiritual nature is unchanged strikes me as a more modest suggestion
>than that class struggle is the basis of all human social reality, and
>on par with the (widely accepted) notion that the materiality of the
>material is continuous.

It strikes me that the claim that human spiritual nature is continuous
(rather than "the same," the weaker formulation is closer to what I
believe) is either tautological, arising from one's definition of human
or a matter of faith. In neither case do I suppose that it's at all
"modest" to claim that all humans who have ever been or could ever be
have the same, a similar or a continuous spiritual nature. It's even
less modest when you start defining that spiritual nature as precisely
as any religion worth the name must define it. As a Buddhist, for
example, I don't believe that human beings possess the kind of spiritual
nature that yearns for God. When I was a young Catholic boy at Brebeuf
Jesuit in Indianapolis, I believed precisely that. If I were reading an
explication of Shakespeare that depended on my belief in such a yearning
(rather than his) I'd probably go read something else. I wouldn't waste
my time trying to falsify the premise.

I think the notion that of "class struggle" is slightly more
falsifialbe. After all, if you're careful, you can cash it out as an
empirical claim. I happen to think that when you do so, you find
that‹inductively‹class struggle does not, in fact, underlie all social
reality.

Which doesn't mean that Marx can't provide us with an enabling discourse
for understanding specific features of specific historical events.
(Playhouses, books and certain social anxieties for example.)

[2]-------------------------------------------------------------
From:           Sean Lawrence <seanlawrence@writeme.com>
Date:           Monday, 24 Jan 2000 08:59:57 -0800
Subject: 11.0151 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility
Comment:        Re: SHK 11.0151 Re: Marx, Religion, and Nobility

I enjoyed reading Abdullah's thoughts on Shakespeare's thought, and just
wanted to add a couple of (very small) thoughts of my own:

1. Talking about "Shakespeare's thought" would mean, I think, treating
him as a theorist instead of as something to be theorized.  We don't
even approach Shakespeare's thought as long as we try to make him
exhaustively symptomatic of the ideas of his age (and yes, Tillyard is
as guilty of this as anyone else), or turn him into an illustration of
our own hobbyhorses (in the Elizabethan, not the 20th century, sense of
the term, hopefully).

2. I'd borrow the distinction between totality and infinity which
Levinas develops at length to explain totalitarianism.  Whereas an
infinity is open-ended (the relationship between Self and Other is
Levinas's perennial example, but one might compare the relationship
between man and God from the dialectical theologians), a totality is
closed.  In Levinas's terms, it always begins with the self and its
knowing.  Such totalizing thought can't actually be disproven, since
nothing would ever count as evidence against it, but it can be put aside
or the issues within it can thought differently.

I see a closed system (such as the elephants all the way down idea) as a
mechanism by which nothing ever escapes the knower's grasp.  He'll never
be faced with the absolute failure of his world-view, only a puzzle to
be solved by extending it.  Lear explaining completely unrelated things
(the weather, for instance, or Tom's madness) in terms of ungrateful
daughters comes to mind.

Another way to look at totalitarianism, by the way, is that of Sir
Isaiah Berlin, teacher to most of the leading lights of Canadian
left-wing politics.  Totalitarianism is always utopian, in the sense
that it feels there's a total answer to all human sorrows, and one
achievable in this world.  Any amount of human misery can therefore be
justified on the expectation of a total liberation in the future.  It
strikes me that this might be an interesting way to analyze Jack Cade's
rebellion in H6:  sure, there's human misery in the short term, but when
we're done the price of bread will be less than the cost of production
and wine will flow in the pissing-troughs.  What Berlin advocates, on
the other hand, is something more openly dialectical and less
teleological, without a final vision of a future society.  Perhaps it's
closer to the end of the Tempest, where Prospero returns to the world of
mortality, imperfection and Italian Renaissance politics, unarmed with
magic (assuming that he actually does give up his magic, which has been
debated on this list).  Berlin also, incidentally, advocates abandoning
any sort of grand synthesis of all previous philosophies.

Note that neither a utopia nor a totalizing system has to be rigorous.
It just has to be able, in practice, to explain away everything else,
therefore rendering its own interruption impossible.  It's not the
rigour of Nazism to which one objects (the whole thing is the motive
hunting of motiveless malignancy, as you pointed out), but it's ability
to explain everything in terms of race or power.  I'm thinking, to
return to one of our favourite plays, of how Othello's race becomes an
exhaustive description of everything that there is to know about him.
Anything he does can be explained on racial grounds, especially by Iago,
who's also given to explaining women away on sexual grounds.  I don't
think that this is "Shakespeare's thought", but it shows how racial or
sexual determinism can be inescapable-not because it's not disprovable
by Othello's fascinating life, his noble birth, his Christian baptism,
or whatever, but because none of these things would count as proof to a
truly racist critic (such as Iago is).  He'd always argue that one has
to look beyond, to what he would consider the fundamental racial cause
of things.

I'd like to add, finally, that I'm grateful for your thoughts on these
issues.

Seán.


about SHAKSPER | current postings | submitted papers | browse SHAKSPER | search SHAKSPER
  
Copyright © 2002, Hardy M. Cook, design by Eric Luhrs. All rights reserved.