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  • Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama
  • Harold Schweizer
Tzachi Zamir , Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 234 pp.

Nature's "beauteous forms," Wordsworth writes famously in "Tintern Abbey," exert "no slight or trivial influence / On that best portion of a good man's life, / His little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of kindness and of love." Like the ethical impact of the aesthetic, such spontaneous acts of kindness and love are inherent characteristics; they should remain "little, nameless, unremembered," not something accomplished, assigned, or even fully understood. Although it would no doubt be good enough to have good deeds performed by bad people, ethical motivation should be deeper than that occasioned by opportunity or necessity.

Literary and aesthetic experience, as Tzachi Zamir argues in his insightful book Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama, enables and develops this deeper ethical motivation. Zamir's assumptions seem as implicitly Kantian as Wordsworth's when he claims that art and literature "not only create the conditions for moral thought but also form character, facilitating an understanding of phenomena in their distinctness, thereby enabling life to reach, at least in some moments, its fullest possibilities" (35). Or: "Aesthetic articulation enables gaining a hold on life's essentials, maintaining connections with evasive moments that escape us as they create what is most important" (29). What is most important and most importantly fostered by literature, he argues, is as inaccessible to analytical philosophy as it is to the evasive skepticism of post-structuralism, since literature engenders an "experiential understanding" of intimate human motivations and qualities (85).

Such experiential understanding —unique, suggestive, subjective, non-paraphrasable but nevertheless communicable —must, in the course of Zamir's beautifully attuned readings of several Shakesperean plays, be distinguished from other critical approaches that have, he claims, insufficiently argued the connections between "beauty, truth, and betterment" (60). Zamir's own argument positions itself between claims that literature merely reflects cultural values (57) and that it is, as the neo-romantic New Critics would have insisted, merely beautiful. Zamir performs a perilous balancing act between "the limitations of standard argumentative prose," whose conceptualizing, generalizing tendencies he attempts to overcome "through reflection that is interpenetrated with literature" (47) and New Critical formalism whose esthetic idealism he nevertheless replays in such terms as the unique, the singular, the particular, the unparaphrasable, the transhistorical. [End Page 503]

Indeed, Zamir's affinity with the idealism of a Kantian aesthetic —whose purpose after all, like Zamir's, is to present a symbol of the morally good —is overtly traceable in his comments on Michelangelo's David early on in the book: "Those who participate in the aesthetic experience are free of the all too real considerations of actual participants. They could thus absorb more of the experience of distilled courage, endowing it with greater reality than the brief moment of the historical event" (30). It remains to be seen, how and why the "greater reality" of the esthetic ought to be greater than the historical "all too real." The intimate, "nonlinguistic expression" (46) of Lucrece's plea to Tarquin in The Rape of Lucrece seems to figure as the greater reality of the esthetic, transcending the socially and historically available discourses that would have muted, Zamir claims, the intimate pain that he hears in her beautiful alliterations. But Lucrece, one might insist, cries with strategy and moans with wit. Her pleas, despite Zamir's protestations to the contrary, seem to me eminently literary and overtly rhetorical as they attempt to deflate Tarquin's lust, "harder than a stone": would that he "melt" at her tears, that "[s]oft pity enters at an iron gate" (Lucrece ll. 594–95). It appears then that the "greater reality" of the esthetic need not be in conflict with the "all too real" considerations of a play's actual audience. Indeed, Zamir's criticism is not, he declares, in competition with but rather complementary to political readings. Complementary or contrary, his own readings repeatedly aspire to escape any systemic constraints, political or philosophical, to attain an "aporetic response" (87) in tune with the incommensurable aspects of a character's innermost motivations, in keeping with what we...

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