Read an Excerpt
The Improbability of Othello
Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood
By JOEL B. ALTMAN
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2010 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-01610-8
Chapter One
"My Parts, My Title, and My Perfect Soul": Ingenuity, Apodeixis, and the Origins of Rhetorical Anthropology
In Act I, Scene 2, as Iago urges Othello to conceal himself in the Sagittar, where he has taken Desdemona after marrying her, the Moor replies:
Not I. I must be found. My parts, my title, and my perfect soul Shall manifest me rightly. (1.2.30–32)
This is a voice confident of its merit, and it describes that merit in terms of self-evident proofs. Othello is committed to public intelligibility and convinced that his relationship to the world need not be negotiated. A man may be known by signs that are transparent and stable—immediately and identically meaningful to everyone. To find Othello is, in effect, to define him, by recognizing his natural components of substance (soul) and accident (parts and title).
By way of contrast, let us listen to the voice of Iago as he begins to plot his revenge:
Cassio's a proper man: let me see now, to get his place, and to plume up my will In double knavery. How? How? let's see, after some time to abuse Othello's ear that he is too familiar with his wife. He has a person and a smooth dispose to be suspected, framed to make women false.... (1.3.391–97)
This voice takes up an image—handsome Cassio—and wonders what it can make of it. For Iago, a man is not so much a stable essence qualified by accidents as he is an aggregate of accidents that can suggest any number of imputed essences. Cassio's smooth dispose may indeed be framed to make women false or, as Iago later remarks, his daily beauty can become a diacritical sign of one's own ugliness (5.1.18–20).
Where do these voices come from? In this and the following chapter, I shall trace the rhetorical genealogies of the Moor and his ensign, the better to understand their distinctive ways of apprehending the early seventeenth-century world they inhabit and of situating themselves in that world. We will find, I believe, that Shakespeare's early modern imagination draws upon an ancient anthropological tradition tensed between ingenuity and apodeixis that is very much alive in his day and readily available for theatrical transvaluation.
I
In the history of speech theory, these two voices may be traced to the early fathers of rhetoric. In Iago, we can hear the notorious side of Protagoras—a figure well known in the renaissance—who argued not only that human understanding is limited to the world of appearances, but that things are capable of appearing in many different ways and of being as they appear. In turning away from the speculations of the eleatic philosophers on the nature of being, Protagoras confined his inquiries to the perceptible world of becoming, declaring a limit to what man could know. "as to the gods," he wrote, "I have no means of knowing either that they exist or that they do not exist. For many are the obstacles that impede knowledge, both the obscurity of the question and the shortness of human life." His vision of the phenomenal world was Heraclitean. He taught that "matter is in a state of flux, and as it flows additions are made continuously in the place of the effluxions." In the distinctly human sphere, "the senses are transformed and altered according to the times of life and to all the other conditions of the bodies." What happens, then, in what we call the objective world has its counterpart in the subjective, though Protagoras makes no clear distinction between the two. Indeed, the two realms impinge upon one another, and cognition results from the fortuitous conjunction of the perceiver and that which he perceives, in the peculiar state each happens to be at the time. Since this is never the same, a man never encounters the world in quite the same way twice. Identities must always be negotiated.
Protagoras's epistemology was derived from an ontology that held that there are no pure essences in the world but that all things are composed of opposing principles, or logoi. This means, writes Sextus empiricus, that "the 'reasons' [logoi] of all the appearances subsist in the matter, so that matter, so far as depends on itself, is capable of being all those things which appear to all" (1.218). That is, since all "objects" are composed of dissoi logoi, two opposing principles, each of these principles is immanent in visible phenomena, though at a particular moment they may be harmonized in such a way that one or the other is dominant and therefore more evident. reality is then susceptible of opposing descriptions—verbal dissoi logoi—because it is itself able to appear in two opposing ways. Thus the utility of arguing in utramque partem (on one side of the question or the other), which becomes a staple of rhetorical inquiry, draws its power and justification from the matter itself. But the human situation is more fluid still:
men, he says, apprehend different things at different times owing to their differing dispositions; for he who is in a natural state apprehends those things subsisting in matter which are able to appear to those in a natural state, and those who are in a non-natural state the things which can appear to those in a non-natural state. Moreover, precisely the same account applies to the variations due to age, and to the sleeping or waking state, and to each several kind of condition. Thus, according to him, Man becomes the criterion of real existences. (1.218)
Such is the basis of the famous Protagorean dictum, "Man is the measure of all things." Or, in the more ontological formulation of Mario Untersteiner, man is the "master of all his experiences," since "nature, in order to exist, must manifest itself, reveal itself ... conform to the conditions of cognition" (Untersteiner, 47). In respect to things that concern him, then, man is in one sense all-powerful, since the configuration of the world depends ultimately on his particular disposition at the moment of cognition. From a wider perspective, though, both he and his world are creatures of chance, since his apprehensions are triply fortuitous—the incalculable result of the conjunction of an internal and an external harmonia.
This would suggest a radically contingent mode of cognition, indeed, since both man and the things he encounters are never disposed to one another in exactly the same way. That is the burden of Socrates' wry exposition of Protagoras's doctrine in Plato's Theatetus (159–160a). It is also contingent in a broader sense, in that man's grasp of the world never escapes the limitation inherent in an immanent interpretation of appearances. But he may better his cognitive condition, Protagoras suggests, by realizing the constructive possibilities of these limitations. If experiences are apprehended in diverse ways, through many experiences a man can multiply his apprehensions and by reflecting upon them "universalize" his understanding, as aristotle will later claim when he explains epagoge, or induction, in the Posterior Analytics. Protagoras insists, however, that this larger understanding is no "truer" than his earlier one, only better—comparing them to the differing perceptions of healthy and unhealthy men: "to the sick man food appears sour and is so; to the healthy man it is and appears the opposite. Now there is no call to represent either of the two as wiser—that cannot be—nor is the sick man to be pronounced unwise because he thinks as he does, or the healthy man wise because he thinks differently. What is wanted is a change to the opposite condition because the other state is better" (Thea. 166e–167a). In the realm of practical and ethical thought, to change to the opposite condition is to change "the lesser possibility of knowledge into a greater possibility of knowledge," as Untersteiner translates the Protagorean claim to make the weaker argument seem the stronger. This metaboly, according to Protagoras, is not a work of crafty subversion on the part of the sophist, but a process of enlightenment that involves a change in the subject's cognitive disposition:
So too in education one must bring about a change from one state to that which is better: the doctor effects a change with medicines, the sophist with arguments. Actually, no one has ever caused another who holds false opinions to change them for true ones: it is not, indeed, possible to think what does not exist, nor anything other than what is experienced: this is always true. But, I think, the man who because of an inferior state of mind holds opinions of similar inferiority is led by an improved condition to hold opinions correspondingly improved. Some through ignorance call these notions true, I however call the one kind better than the other, but in no way truer. (Thea. 167a–b, trans. Untersteiner, 52)
It can be seen that Protagoras's view of education is in many respects like that of Socrates: the teacher aims not to impose ideas but to bring about a new condition of responsiveness in his student. He accomplishes this by questioning him about his own beliefs, offering him opposing views, and allowing him to compare and examine their implications. As a result, the soul of the student is, in a measure, "redisposed," and accordingly he has a "better idea" of the subject under discussion. The crucial difference, of course, is that Protagoras's student does not desire, nor is he encouraged, to transcend the world of appearances in order to apprehend intelligible being. His "greater possibility of knowledge" grows out of his own collective experiences and those of his fellow citizens—marshaled for his examination by the skillful arguments of the sophist who, as Protagoras's medical analogy suggests, undertakes a kind of therapy. His new understanding is described as the acquisition of political wisdom or prudence, which Protagoras claims to teach in Plato's dialogue bearing his name. Even though the individual remains divorced from absolutes and restricted to subjective encounters with phenomena, he may, by experiencing his own multiplicity and that of others, learn "prudence in his own affairs, so that he may manage his own household in the best way, and prudence in the affairs of the city, so that he may be most effective in action and speech in matters concerning the city" (Protag. 318e).
For a fuller understanding of Iago (and, as we shall see, of Shakespeare's language of theatrical potentiality), the teaching of Gorgias, the younger contemporary of Protagoras, is even more important. If Protagoras proposed that opposing aspects of things can be equally true because they represent the inherently conflicting logoi or "reasons" of things, and explained how one's differing experiences could be argued, gathered, and compared so as to better one's grasp of reality, Gorgias emphasized logos in its function as speech and at the same time insisted that spoken words are incapable of representing the logoi inherent in things. For Gorgias, the fact that human understanding is confined to the phenomenal world meant that speech could neither communicate being nor convey from speaker to listener even the perceptibles of the lower realm of appearances. In his treatise On Not-Being, he asks if any "thing" can be revealed by one person to another, and replies negatively:
For that by which we reveal is logos, but logos is not substances and existing things. Therefore, we do not reveal existing things to our neighbors, but logos, which is something other than substances.
In this view, speech is absolutely nonreferential. It is provoked when external things impinge on our psyches and thus may be said to be stimulated by things, but it cannot accurately name or describe them. Human beings communicate within a circuit that is divorced not only from the intelligible world but also from the phenomenal world of nature. This means that logos, freed from correspondence to metaphysical reality and from mimesis of physical reality, is the instrument of an autonomous psychic reality—governed by peitho, the compelling power of persuasion, and apate, a form of deception that links disparate words and thoughts together in a "logical sequency" that induces the listener to forge meaning out of what had been only meaning-possibilities. Without these two auxiliary forces, logos is mere power (dynamis) confronting static opinion (doxa), which has lost its etiological itinerary and is capable only of repetition. This intellectual incapacitation, however, can be "overcome by the irrational power of logos, which deceives, persuades and transforms a disconnected knowledge into a knowledge that creates or discloses links and relationships" with the aid of peitho and apate (Untersteiner, 116).
It does so, however, through a force only vaguely articulated by Protagoras, who was the first "to emphasize the importance of seizing the right moment" (Diog. Laert. 9.52). This is the force of kairos, which has ontological and psychological dimensions. In the Pythagorean doctrine of the unity of opposites, it is kairos that harmonizes opposing logoi so that at one moment they appear in one manifestation, at another in a different one. In Gorgias's teaching, kairos is also the opportune conjunction between the logoi at play in the perceiver and at play in what he or she perceives—as exemplified in his Encomium of Helen by Helen's sudden passion for Paris, who appeared irresistible because of the fortuitous conjunction of their dissoi logoi. Extended into the activity of oratory, it is the speaker's mastery of kairos—his skill in exploiting that moment in which his words, his subject, and the receptive disposition of his audience coincide harmoniously—that marks his expertise. Charles White describes such mastery as "a process of continuous interpretation in which the speaker seeks to inflect the given 'text' to his or her own ends at the same time that the speaker's 'text' is 'interpreted' in turn by the context surrounding it." As a result of this momentary capture of the interplay of ontological and psychological forces, Gorgias offers—in lieu of a speaking that conveys enduring cosmic reality—a factitious verbal heterocosm, shaped by aural figuration, founded in the instant. Which means, as White observes, that "the authority of the truth derives from the particular context of rhetorical persuasion, from the always provisional persuasive artifice of the speaker, who plunges into the swarming continuum of experience in order to retrieve from it a knowable world that is, in the last analysis, purely a verbal figment able to persist so long as thinking goes on" (36). In such tendentious reciprocity we can discern the operational, and perhaps the voluntarist, roots of the motive-seeking of a motiveless malignity.
To appreciate the social implications of Gorgias's view that speech operates within an enclosed interpsychic circuit through the power of persuasion and of Protagoras's claim that one may better one's condition through logotherapy, we must turn to Isocrates, a student of Gorgias and Socrates, and a slightly older contemporary of Plato. Isocrates shared with Gorgias an awareness of the psychagogic powers of artfully constructed speech operating in a world of appearances, and with Socrates and Plato the conviction that education must in the first instance possess an ethical character. For these reasons he abjured both abstract speculation about the nature of being, as practiced by the presocratic philosophers, and the training in eristic disputation offered by contemporary sophists. His moral concern allied him to Plato and his school, but his disdain for the exact sciences and his exaltation of public speaking set him apart from them. He believed politics to be the most meaningful human activity, and recognized that it was conducted in the world of eikos—probability—where experience was the best, if a necessarily imprecise, teacher. In his Antidosis, or self-defense, he claims that what he teaches, though neither abstruse nor exact, is truly philosophical: "For since it is not in the nature of man to attain a science by the possession of which we can know positively what we should do or what we should say, in the next resort I hold that man to be wise who is able by his powers of conjecture to arrive generally at the best course, and I hold that man to be a philosopher who occupies himself with the studies from which he will most quickly gain that kind of insight" (271).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Improbability of Othello by JOEL B. ALTMAN Copyright © 2010 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
