Dante and Shakespeare
I have just caught up with this controversy. How utterly laughable – Shakespeare is better than Dante because "more modern." As though everything is fine and dandy within modernity. I've heard some stupid criticisms, but this one takes the biscuit. An amoral modernity that knows neither good nor evil in substantive senses is the benchmark. Follow that logic to its conclusion if you dare. Some are just beginning to notice the damaging consequences of rejections of objective reality and truth. Until recently, the same people were happy to accept the reduction of morality to being no more than a series of value judgements, irreducible subjective opinion and preference. Now the same reasoning applies to truth they are beginning to object. It's a package deal, for reasons that Nietzsche gave. And here we are, "beyond good and evil." To proclaim the superiority of Shakespeare in anticipating this "amoral" landscape - basically sophistry in which power decides - is insufficiently alive to Shakespeare's trepidation in face of the world that was emerging. This article is hilarious. It is too dumb for words:
'But perhaps the most damning assessment was his comparison of Dante with Shakespeare. Widmann wrote that “Shakespeare, in his amorality, was light years more modern than Dante’s effort to have an opinion on everything, who dragged everything before the judgment of his own morality.”
That's damning! It is hilarious to see Shakespeare’s ‘amorality’ judged superior to Dante’s moral landscape. By what criteria? By that of the meaningless, purposeless, pointless, godless, valueless, soulless and disenchanted modern world. Shakespeare was ‘more modern’ than Dante. That’s condemnation rather than praise.
In the Dante book I wrote in 2013, I compare and contrast Dante and Shakespeare in the first chapter, and judge Dante infinitely superior, precisely on account of his substantive moral concern and ontology of the good. Of course Shakespeare is ‘more modern’ in reducing ethics to value judgements beyond good and evil. “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” wrote Shakespeare. Are you happy with that view, folk? Do you understand the implications? It's not the 'postmodernists' and the 'woke' etc who are the architects of the rejection of objective reality, truth, and goodness, the idea that there is a reality outside of personal preferences. Foul is fair and fair is foul. Dante would have challenged and exposed this kind of reasoning. (In fact, he did). Shakespeare gives expression to it, a mirror with misgivings. Only now, as people assert the right to choose the truth in the same way that they choose the good, are people beginning to see the deleterious consequences of subjectivism. Solipsism beckons in this pointless universe. And that’s superior to Dante! Of course Dante doesn't share this 'amorality.' That's precisely his value. The amoralists have zero to offer here. Some days you just have to laugh at the utter cluelessness of supposedly smart people, sophists adapted to a demoralised terrain. “A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ‘merely relative,’ is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.” (― Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey).
As Lewis Mumford argued, if life really is pointless and meaningless, then there is nothing more pointless and meaningless than the science and philosophy that says it is so. Enjoy your victory Shakespearians! Personally, I have always suspected that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic, and that this informs his better views. But it is difficult to say, seeing as you can read anything you like into Shakespeare. You can't do that with Dante. There is this big difference between the pair: Dante stood up for justice in politics and suffered exile as a reward; Shakespeare was happy to use his pen in the service of power and propaganda, lickspittle to the Tudor regime, rewriting history for his lords and masters.
I've been chased by Shakespearian mobs armed with pitchforks and torches from place to place, but I remain adamant on this celebration of "amorality." OK, we can talk about "liberating doubt" and existentialism and the burden of moral choice that falls on each and all - all of which is known to Dante, he insists on free-will and personal responsibility as central to moral agency. But he also insists on there being a greater reality outside of that personal choice, and he insists that we may use reason to come to know that reality. It has practical implications, too. In the work I've just done I emphasise the socio-political framework that runs throughout Dante's taxonomy of virtues and vices, how the warm sins - lust etc - harden by habit into cold sins - down to treachery - and have social implications that impact deleteriously on others. Shakespeare? I saw a debate in which conservatives, liberals, and socialists were all claiming him to be conservative, liberal, and socialist. He can be all those things and none, it depends. I'd love to know where Dante would place him. With the neutrals and the indifferent, I'd suggest - not even Hell wants them, since they refuse to make a stand. But I really am interested in how many make this "amorality" a mark of advance. Frankly, that merely mirrors a cold, indifferent Nature (read on Einstein's god, the harmonious unfolding of the universe in indifference to human affairs). Mirror that in society and we have mere power quanta, stated at its best by Nietzsche, but actually cold and pitiless in its assertion of power. I don't say that this is Shakespeare's 'view' (insofar as there is one). I say that Shakespeare did see the loss of the overarching and authoritative framework that defines modernity, Nietzsche's 'death of God,' and saw the dissolution of morality into existential choice in a meaningless universe, irreducible subjective opinion, a situation in which no-one can offer good reasons to persuade others. So we have this endless clash of the endless yes/no, a situation in which we are drawn into the unwinnable games of irreducible subjective preferences. I say that it is possible to detect Shakespeare's concern with this situation. I have long suspected that Shakespeare may even be a closet Catholic who found the emerging 'amoral' universe troubling and that certain passages express his more critical view. But I am speculating there. Dante is open, clear, and forthright on this reduction of morality to value judgements, which each choosing the good as they see fit. I am hopeful that people may start to understand that this supposed liberation is actually an enslavement to immediacy and sensualism, now that we are finding an increasing number of individuals starting to assert "his," "her," and "their truth" in the same manner that they assert the good. That loss of objective reality and truth is now being commented on. It's in the DNA of modernity and I, for one, am glad that Dante did not share it. Honestly, this criticism that x is "more modern" and therefore better than Dante is utterly dumb. Oddly, I cut chapters which defended Dante against charges of being 'outdated,' using Plato and Aristotle as examples. The reason we may actually be able to learn from past thinkers is that they do not share our conceptions. I argue that, in terms of the view of the universe, Plato and Aristotle were 'outdated' at the time they wrote, and knew it, challenging the atomists, Democritus, Heraclitus, the 'all is flux' school which seem to mirror contemporary conceptions closely. So why did Plato and Aristotle become so influential? Because they offered something different. As for science, only yesterday I was exchanging views with someone who is a big fan of Carlo Rovelli's relationalism. I know Rovelli as a huge fan of Dante's science "How Dante mapped the universe – six centuries before Einstein
The medieval literary giant produced a convincing map of our universe. So why don't we take him seriously as a scientist? (By Carlo Rovelli)
Having narrowed my 3,000 pages down to a 1,000 for further editing, an article like this makes me want to recover the chapter I cut defending Dante against stupid accusations of being 'outdated.' Truth has naught to do with the date at the top of a newspaper. Back in 2013, I wrote a book called "Dante's Enamoured Mind," chapter four of which compares and contrasts Dante on precisely this point of Shakespeare's 'amorality' and modernity. Being entirely fair to Shakespeare, I saw him as anticipating the irreducible existentialism to come, and not being too keen on it. Is there a way out? If there is, Shakespeare doesn't offer it. Is it important? It is if you think truth, moral as well as scientific, about reality matters, and that reality is something more than existential choice. Does Dante offer an alternative? Yes. Not being a party to the irreducibility that followed. But then, I was never as keen on Shakespeare as others were. I much prefer Milton and Blake and Gerrard Manley Hopkins and Shelley and (this list could go on)
“We do not know what Shakespeare thought about any major question,” according to Oxford professor A.D. Nuttall in Shakespeare the Thinker. “The major question of the years through which he lived was religious,” but Nuttall cautions that the absence of “Protestant ferocity” in Shakespeare’s work does not equal “evidence of crypto-Catholicism.” Shakespeare’s plays are, rather, “a huge vanishing act” according to Nuttall, “a chronicle of immaculate absenteeism” according to Wilson. The playwright “took care to hide any hint of specific allegiance — and this is itself the political and religious import of his work,” Nuttall concludes.
Here is the amoral, meaningless, purposeless landscape - it's all up to us to make our choices. Fine. But if the landscape is empty, those choices will be empty too, and sooner or later we will come to realise it. It is like playing football without goals at either end. Sooner or later, exhausted at chasing the ball around, someone will ask "what's the point?" And when no one can give an answer we will all stop playing. I suspect all the fierceness and the frenzy, all the anger and the hatred, in the playing of political games, as if our very souls depended on it, constitute evidence of a neurosis, an endless activism that ensures we never stop to contemplate the meaninglessness of it all. Politics isn't 'everything' as many of the players are asserting. Politics is about disagreement and dissensus, the airing and, hopefully, reconciling of differences. If you make 'everything' politics you extend division over the whole of society and will be fighting it out without end to kingdom come. Power and activism are the necessary accompaniments of meaninglessness and pointlessness, an attempt to cover the impossibilities of living on the destinationless voyage. A surrogate - and perverted - religion, entirely without mercy and forgiveness, replacing redemption with damnation. As Lewis Mumford wrote, even half a picture, or even a false picture, is better than no picture at all - human beings need to see themselves as parts of something larger. Without it, there is only a neurosis that turns in and against itself. I've read and read and read for decades, and as things stand, Dante gives me more than any other writer.
For me, Max Weber’s ‘iron cage’ of ‘mechanized petrification’ expresses Dante’s cold pit of Hell well, Dante describing the frozen immobility of all that is vital (and nailing the overblown modern indulgence that Hell is sexy and the devil has all the best tunes - Hell is monotonous, repetitive, mechanical, and boring). I also think Weber spells out the bleakness and meaninglessness of existential choice in an objectively valueless and meaningless universe. As he writes in ‘Politics as a Vocation’:
“It would be nice if matters turned out in such a way that Shakespeare’s Sonnet 102 should hold true:
Our love was new, and then but in the spring,
When I was wont to greet it with my lays;
As Philomel in summer’s front doth sing,
And stops her pipe in growth of riper days.
But such is not the case. Not summer’s bloom lies ahead of us, but rather a polar night of icy darkness and hardness, no matter which group may triumph externally now. Where there is nothing, not only the Kaiser but also the proletarian has lost his rights.’
- Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation.’
Shakespeare saw it coming. Now what? He gave us "nothing" and told us to make our own choices - projecting meaning upon a meaningless universe. The choices cannot but be substantively empty.
Dante holds that there is ‘something,’ something to live for, something to accord to. If you want to cleave to truth, then you are going to have to commit an act of faith. If the name of the game is survival and reproduction, and nothing more, then reason is secondary, and coercion and propaganda could serve just as well. If you read evolutionary biology, it becomes apparent that human beings are conceived to be rationalizing beings rather than rational beings, deceiving others as well as themselves. The commitment to truth on the part of human beings as truth-seekers comes from elsewhere - the world as intelligible to intelligent beings, the likeness to God, the return to origins and ends in a divine ecology. This is Dante's view, and it is infinitely superior to the slough that the moderns have found themselves in - an expansion of means accompanied by a diminution of meaning.
Suppose God exists. Where does God get his morality from? His nature perhaps or perhaps because he finds certain ethics appealing on some grounds.
Suppose God does not exist. Where does a human being get his or her morality from? Essentially in the same way God would. From human nature or because certain ethics are appealing to humans on some grounds.
The fact that you find the first alternative intellectually satisfying and not the second is because you are only satisfied when you are told what to believe by an authority figure. You have a slave mentality.
To this there is a standard objection. Surely a God-based morality has the advantage that there is a single moral standard. With human morality, every person's morality can be different.
In chapter four of Dante's Enamoured Mind, I compare and contrast Dante and Shakespeare in greater depth.