The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was, famously, not a fan of William Shakespeare. He wrote in 1946 that “Shakespeare's similes are, in the ordinary sense, bad.” But Wittgenstein’s opinion was not only one fuelled by aesthetic dislike. Professor of Philosophy William Day argues that Wittgenstein sees in Shakespeare a fellow explorer of skepticism, but one willing to travel down dark alleys that Wittgenstein himself sought to avoid.
Ludwig Wittgenstein may have had a fraught relationship with the English language, his adopted tongue. But his animosity towards Shakespeare can't be explained by the foreignness of Elizabethan English. His remarks on Shakespeare aren't much to look at: they occupy two brief moments in his notebooks, amounting to no more than a handful of pages that can be read in about five minutes. Yet they fascinate by offering an engagement with Shakespeare’s language different in kind from the excursions through philosophical temptations and their diagnoses that are the work of his Philosophical Investigations. Consider the following summary remark on Shakespeare that Wittgenstein wrote in 1950:
The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry. It seems to me as though his pieces are, as it were, enormous sketches, not paintings; as though they were dashed off by someone who could permit himself anything, so to speak. And I understand how someone may admire this & call it supreme art, but I don't like it. – So I can understand someone who stands before those pieces speechless; but someone who admires him as one admires Beethoven, say, seems to me to misunderstand Shakespeare.
It's hard to explain away the brashness of this appraisal. Even if it were defensible as a thesis about Shakespeare, Wittgenstein doesn't present it as part of a thesis. He doesn't do more with his few remarks, and their aim is not to present a conclusion of criticism so much as to articulate a feeling or intuition. I think they spring not from a philosophical disagreement with Shakespeare – let alone from a sense that Shakespeare lacks philosophical weight – but from a difference in philosophical temperament, the nature of which marks two distinct possibilities in responding to the threat of skepticism and to the naturalness and inevitability of tragedy.
The most striking assertion in Wittgenstein's critique of Shakespeare may be this, written in 1946: "Shakespeare's similes are, in the ordinary sense, bad. So if they are nevertheless good – & I don't know whether they are or not – they must be a law to themselves." What makes Wittgenstein think he can lay claim to such a judgment? Part of the answer may lie in Wittgenstein's own remarkable talent for similes and figures of comparison. Given their importance to his way of doing philosophy, it shouldn't surprise that he was good at making them, and knew he was good.
Here is one example, drawn from a remark he thought to include in the Foreword to the Investigations: "Only every so often does one of the sentences I am writing here make a step forward; the rest are like the snipping of the barber's scissors, which he has to keep in motion so as to be able to make a cut with them at the right moment." Compare this marvelous image – revelatory both of its author and of the process of writing, so often felt as a movement without forward motion – to a Shakespearean metaphor that Wittgenstein once mentioned to a friend, from Richard II. There Mowbray says, "Within my mouth you have engaol'd my tongue / Doubly portcullis'd with my teeth and lips." Part of Wittgenstein's critique of Shakespeare's figures might be the obviousness of such an image as the teeth and lips as a gate for the tongue, even when one acknowledges that here it is closed to keep something in rather than to keep something out.
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Wittgenstein does not misunderstand Shakespeare.
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See whether you think Shakespeare's portcullis'd tongue is as striking as the similative tongue in the following, from Wittgenstein's so-called "Big Typescript": "The philosopher strives to find the liberating word, and that is the word that finally permits us to grasp what until then had constantly and intangibly weighed on our consciousness. (It's like having a hair on one's tongue; one feels it, but can't get hold of it, and therefore can't get rid of it.)" In these examples at least, it seems fair to say that Wittgenstein could hold his own against Shakespeare. So when Wittgenstein says that Shakespeare's similes "must be a law to themselves" (because he was a "creator of language" who "could permit himself anything"), he’s disagreeing with the conventional wisdom that Shakespeare's writing exhibits his linguistic mastery.
Wittgenstein does not misunderstand Shakespeare. He sees himself as speaking neither from understanding nor from misunderstanding, but from that particular poverty of one who wants to articulate the cause of an absence in himself, the lack of appreciation for a body of work generally praised as the best of its kind. In a remark from 1949 he compares the effect of Shakespeare's language to that of a dream: "Shakespeare & the dream. A dream is all wrong, absurd, composite, & yet completely right: in this strange concoction it makes an impression. Why? I don't know."
Wittgenstein's stumbling block, I believe, arises from an anxiety or fear that The Bard's language stirs up in him. The telltale evidence for this is the sentence that concludes his disparaging of Shakespeare's similes. Wittgenstein writes: "That I do not understand him could then be explained by the fact that I cannot read him with ease. Not, that is, as one views a splendid piece of scenery." The notion of an inability to read "with ease" is related to a concept that occupies Wittgenstein throughout his later career and that he names "aspect-seeing." The iconic figure for illustrating the meaning of "aspect-seeing" is the duck-rabbit – a line drawing that can be seen as either duck or rabbit. Wittgenstein notes the ease with which we typically effect the gestalt-switch from one to the other. But to someone incapable of exercising this freedom or ease in reading the aspects of the world, Wittgenstein gives the name "aspect-blind." And a characteristic of the aspect-blind is the inability to register how something invites the seeing of different aspects.
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Wittgenstein imagines his difficulty reading Shakespeare as akin to the aspect-blind.
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Now notice that Wittgenstein describes his difficulty with Shakespeare in the language of a condition (aspect-blindness), rather than as a temporary aesthetic difficulty. For comparison, here is Wittgenstein describing how we see a depiction "with ease": "I might get an important message to someone by sending him the picture of a landscape. Does he read it like a blueprint? That is, does he decipher it? [No.] He looks at it and acts accordingly. He sees rocks, trees, a house, etc. in it." But Wittgenstein imagines his difficulty reading Shakespeare as akin to the aspect-blind, someone who reads a picture of a landscape the way we read a blueprint. To read a picture as if it were a blueprint is to merely know what it is about without seeing it. That seems to be how Wittgenstein understands his condition as a reader of Shakespeare. While Wittgenstein professes aversion to other writers and composers, his most concentrated articulation of a failure to understand another's writing is reserved for Shakespeare.
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Like Wittgenstein, Shakespeare can be read as responding to the threat of skepticism.
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And yet, I think Wittgenstein is being disingenuous. Casting himself as suffering from a condition (an inability to read with ease, a blindness), he avoids coming to terms with what lies behind his condition: something he does see, an aspect of Shakespeare's words that is blocking understanding. There is a likely candidate for what lies behind Wittgenstein's uneasiness over Shakespeare. Like Wittgenstein, Shakespeare can be read as responding to the threat of skepticism, just as Descartes can be read as skirting that threat. The argument is made in Stanley Cavell's readings of Shakespeare, which he offers alongside his understanding of Wittgenstein's diagnosis and treatment of our modern condition, our interest to turn our relation to the world and to others into matters of knowing, and so into matters of doubt. Here is Cavell on tragedy's revelation of skepticism:
This is what I have throughout kept arriving at as the cause of skepticism – the attempt to convert the human condition, the condition of humanity, into an intellectual difficulty, a riddle. . . Tragedy is the place we are not allowed to escape the consequences, or price, of this cover.
If one grants this connection, one is likely to wonder how Wittgenstein could have failed to see in Shakespeare's tragedies, as he saw in Augustine's Confessions, a working out of his own most pressing concerns. But we need not imagine that he missed it. To miss how philosophy's skepticism of the existence of others mirrors our failed relations with others, and how Shakespearean tragedy trades in the extreme consequences of these failed relations, would be to simply misunderstand Shakespeare. Such a reader would be left to praise Shakespeare for all the wrong reasons (e.g., for his linguistic mastery). Wittgenstein is not such a reader. Rather than missing how Shakespeare shares his concerns, Wittgenstein is merely covering his ears to the sound of them.
But for fear of what does Wittgenstein cover his ears? Recall the charges leveled by Wittgenstein against Shakespeare's language: its unnaturalness; its dream-like strangeness; its disturbing asymmetry and spontaneity, the sense that anything is permitted. This is a picture of the natural world as seen from the side of chaos, or in which chaos and madness threaten to break out at any moment (as they do in King Lear, in Othello, and even in the late-Shakespearean romance The Winter's Tale). If Wittgenstein doesn't miss the skeptical problematic running through Shakespeare, then what he covers his ears to is the sound of the raw motives to skepticism, and of words gone wild, absent from the philosophical elaborations and filigrees that help to preserve Wittgenstein even as he does battle with them.
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What Wittgenstein covers his ears to may be just this silence, this nothing, that the Shakespearean tragic hero craves.
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It is Shakespeare's tragic expression of skepticism, a skepticism untamable by the methods of Wittgenstein's grammatical investigations, that Wittgenstein has in mind when he declares: "The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry." Perhaps Wittgenstein's fastidiousness with regard to formal design betokens in this case a wish to repudiate what the unbridled unfolding of events in a Shakespeare tragedy – the turns of mind that lead to turns of fate – itself betokens. And that would be something Cavell means by the truth of skepticism: that humans naturally desire, not only an end to the bumps that the understanding gets by running its head up against the limits of language, but an end to the consequences of speaking altogether (the consequences of expression, the consequences of acknowledging others).
What Wittgenstein covers his ears to may be just this silence, this nothing, that the Shakespearean tragic hero craves. But if it is, then what is revealed in Wittgenstein's dislike for Shakespeare is the anxiety or fear that – as in King Lear – something will come of this nothing.
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