Literature without Philosophy: ‘Antony and Cleopatra’

Summary

Major claims have been made both for and against Shakespeare as a man of ideas – of his own time and for all time. These point to larger doctrines about the relation between literature and philosophy. In this paper I shall consider Shakespeare as a dramatist of ideas and his contributions to philosophy in literature.

Philosophy and Literature, Philosophy of Literature, and Philosophy in Literature have only one thin in common: each has been designated a non subject. Of course this is a slight exaggeration, since it is true of the first two but not of the third. Philosophy and Literature is a piece of academic entrepreneurism, motivated by the mutual desire to make philosophy concrete and literature profound. It succeeds in neither. At best, it functions as a part of the history of ideas, using both literature and philosophy as reflecting mirrors of each other; at its worst, it is a series of distorting imitations of imitations, to borrow a phrase from the master.

Philosophy of Literature is a piece of philosophical imperialism, sponsored by the obsession that all disciplines have a philosophical dimension that awaits articulation and scrutiny. All that deserve examination, however, are those aspects of literature as an art that distinguish it from the other arts. Traditionally, aesthetics has regarded this problem of the differentia of literature as its proper domain. I see no need to recast or to reject this traditional role and discipline: there is nothing in philosophy of literature that is not already in aesthetics.