Patrick Gray, professor of literature at the new University of Austin (UATX), was recently interviewed on Peter Adamson’s podcast The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. He argues there that Shakespeare was combating a neo-Senecan ethics of autonomy in much the same way that common good conservatives today combat the liberal/Kantian ethics of autonomy:
Rome for Shakespeare is the Rome of Seneca. This connection is important not least because Seneca is the model and inspiration for a contemporary of Shakespeare, the Dutch political philosopher Justus Lipsius, who in turn exercises a considerable influence on Kant. Kant’s emphasis on individual autonomy as in effect the greatest good is a legacy of the influence of Seneca. And it is a touchstone for the present-day liberal consensus as regards morality as well as politics. To put the connection a different way, when I was working on Shakespeare’s Roman plays, I wanted to find a contemporary point of view that most closely resembles his. Is he conservative? Progressive? Marxist? Libertarian? What? And what I realized is that the closest analogue of Shakespeare’s thought about politics in our time is what has come to be known as “post-liberalism” or “common-good conservatism,” such as we find in the works of authors such as Alastair MacIntyre and Patrick Deneen. Moreover, that similarity makes sense. Both authors, Deneen and Shakespeare, argue that a society where each individual is trying to maximize his or her autonomy at the expense of everyone else is a society that is doomed to oscillate between brittle autocracy and merciless civil war. Shakespeare sees this dynamic in a pre-Christian society, Rome; Deneen sees it in a post-Christian society, our world today.
Gray points out that since most stage directors and literature professors are left-liberals, Shakespeare’s political/ethical outlook is foreign to them. Their solution is often to distort the text:
Like most of the Englishmen of his day, he was a conservative patriotic Christian. Most of his critics today, by contrast, and even more so, the theater professionals who produce his plays, are progressive, cosmopolitan, and secular. Within the arts and higher education, the establishment today is actively hostile to Shakespeare’s moral and political vision. So, people who like Shakespeare, who are professionally committed to teaching or performing Shakespeare, try to find all sorts of workarounds. On stage, directors tend to cut, change, or undermine with irony any passages that might pose a challenge to a modern sensibility. I think that this tendency is a disservice both to Shakespeare and to ourselves. Theater should not be a kind of liturgy for progressive atheists but instead, at its best, the experience of encountering moral, political, and religious perspectives very different from our own. Theater, ideally, should compel us to take seriously the opposite of our own beliefs. Among critics, the most pervasive workaround, by contrast, is to cite Keats on Shakespeare’s “negative capability” and to maintain as a kind of axiom that Shakespeare has no fixed opinions about ethics or politics. Shakespeare always presents both sides of every question with equal weight. This claim is implausible. Everybody has opinions — even Shakespeare. So, why is it attractive? The claim has the hold that it does because it makes Shakespeare a precedent and an authority for the delusion that the philosopher Carl Schmitt very accurately discerns at the heart of liberalism: the belief that it is possible for human beings and even institutions to be neutral, to escape tough decisions about ethics and politics altogether.
He clarifies, however, that Shakespeare does indeed show the full force of the ideologies that he combats, this is indeed part of the power of his plays:
Shakespeare does present both sides of important questions, in the sense that he presents what I call a dialectic of faith and doubt. He asks himself, what if the opposite of what I believe were true? What if the moral vision, for example, that Falstaff represents, or Cleopatra, or Coriolanus, is in fact the case? Then he follows that thought experiment through to its conclusion. Yes, it’s fun to be Falstaff, at least for a time, but it also has a human cost. It ends badly. Yes, it’s fun to be Cleopatra, but it’s also unsustainable. Shakespeare entertains misgivings about the claims of Christianity but not to the point of losing his faith. He gives force and weight to the nihilism and antinomianism that he encountered in the works of Machiavelli and Seneca, not to praise this rival, proto- modern point of view, but instead to more effectively exorcise its nagging hold upon his consciousness: to attain what I have described elsewhere as a kind of catharsis of doubt.
If Homer was the teacher of the Greeks, Shakespeare is the teacher of the English world. If we are to recover what is best in our ethical and political tradition, we would do well to heed Shakespeare.
