Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama (review)

As the title indicates, Double Vision has its eye on two different realms and audiences: that of Shakespeare criticism and that of philosophy—less “moral philosophy,” actually, than philosophy and / or / of literature. The book’s largest claim is to speak of “the gratifying insights that [Shakespeare’s] writings yield when brought into close dialogue with philosophical concerns” (xiii). This aim obviously commits the author to specifying the “gratifying insights”—an oddly hedonistic conception of knowledge—that each play (supposedly) produces. And this formulation also suggests that “philosophical concerns” are being brought to the plays rather than arising from them. Part of Zamir’s courage is his willingness to specify the insights the plays contain, although this sometimes involves him in banalities or dubious metaphysics. The charge that his method involves seeing philosophy as something outside the plays being studied is one that he is prepared to answer, since he views the issues he treats as ones of interest to the plays themselves. Zamir would perhaps be better off in treating all literary criticism as (implicitly) philosophical, so that “doing criticism” with a certain self-consciousness is also “doing philosophy.” This is the route that Stanley Cavell takes, and his work shadows Zamir’s. But Zamir has a defensible investment in keeping “the philosophical” a particular category.

The opening chapters in part 1, “Philosophical Criticism in Theory,” specify what sorts of insights literary works (of high quality) provide. Zamir pushes hard for the value of what he calls “rational nonvalid argument” (11). These are claims that are not strictly provable but that can be justified by appeals to particular and general experiences, rationally examined. Zamir is quite convincing on the importance of this realm, its place in the history of rhetoric, and its neglect by (most) philosophers. These sorts of claims are, mostly, those on which we run our lives. Where Zamir gets into trouble is in trying to demonstrate that great literature and art teach morally approvable values. His analysis of Michelangelo’s David as teaching us something about the virtue of courage is a disaster, since it has almost nothing to do with the experience of viewing this statue. Here, the danger of letting a thesis about the work eclipse the work is (unwittingly) dramatized. Zamir’s claims about the importance of terms like “deepening” and “enriching” (3, 22, et passim) are much better in relation to what works of art do, but he does not provide an analysis of these terms. It would be helpful if he did more philosophy at these moments. Talk about art offering us “a more real life” (31) cannot be taken seriously, although there is a plausible claim lurking here about the importance of concrete examples, and of examples worked out with skill (Zamir is oddly and needlessly nervous about intentionalism). He is also nervous about doing “old” (that is, humanistic) criticism (45) and also about falling into anachronism, but he rightly rejects the sharpness of the new/old split and deals intelligently with the anachronism issue—although again with more anxiety than I believe necessary. He offers an excellent rationale for why an “anthropological interest in culture” should be interested in the specifically literary—such an approach “requires that one respect the differences among discourses even when they do overlap” (56)— but in trying to specify the thing that literature uniquely does, he falls into cant and vagueness: “unique and irreducible modes of thought and transformation that go to the heart of existential reflection” (60). Surely, this is no help.

Zamir is capable of wonderful formulations. The book starts with a sentence about the purity of Shylock’s feelings: “Hatred, it seems, cannot be bought” (xi). If Zamir had always written thus, it would, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, have been needless to praise him. But such moments are rare. More characteristic is the attempt to provide a motive for Shylock’s “‘merry bond’” (Merchant of Venice, 1.3.173)¹ —Shylock wants...