If your taste is presidential history, with a penchant for progress or change you will want to venture to the lovely old town of Staunton, Virginia, birthplace of Woodrow Wilson. A museum has been constructed to Wilson’s honor, and the house where he came into this world and lived for a few months is open to visit. I would say the same thing if your taste is for a certain brand of pop country music, with an admiration for a bass voice. Staunton happens also to be the birthplace of the Statler brothers, recently inducted into the country music hall of fame. As you enter town, on the outskirts, you cross Statler Brothers Boulevard, which, with its fast food outlets and closed failing auto dealerships is not exactly up to Wilson’s standard of dignity. Perhaps not all change is progress after all.
There is a third reason, however, to visit Staunton, which is William Shakespeare. So far as I know he wasn’t born there, though Staunton in Shenandoah does have a remote resonance to Stratford on Avon. But Staunton has the Blackfriars playhouse, a replica of the London original, and the wonderful Shenandoah Shakespeare Company. So what better way to spend a Sunday afternoon than to make the trek over the mountains from Charlottesville, with all three fellows from the Program for Constitutionalism and Democracy (PCD), to view The Comedy of Errors?
I won’t even try to summarize the play except to say that it is the ultimate experiment in identical twin observation before modern science took up this theme and subjected it to all the rigors of the modern experimental method. The twins are so identical (there are two pair of them) that they cannot be distinguished. They are so identical that one twin, stranded in the city of his brother (Ephesus) and likened by everyone to his brother, begins to question his own identity. And so does his brother. Is he who he thought he was? Here is perspectivalism carried to its outermost limit. It is funny, but also horrifying — or at least Gadamer thought so. The key passage is uttered by Antipholus (of Syracuse): “Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?/ Sleeping or waking, mad or ill-advised?/Known unto these, and to myself disguised?”
For those going into the play are looking for nature, this was most disquieting. My faith in the “one true and common world perceived in waking” — a world of common sense perception that can serve as a starting point for all thought — was thrown suddenly into question. Does such a starting point exist? Or is even the starting point “constructed”? Alas, poor phenomenology, I knew it well.
In the end, Shakespeare brings us back to reality when the twins at last discover themselves and everything gets sorted out: All’s well that ends well.
June 1st, 2009 | 10:44 am
Pretty existential, even ontological there, Mr. Ceaser. (Not that I’m surprised.) The starting point sort of exists, as you know, but we need to take responsibility for it. It’s not simply “there,” present before us. That’s why we’re postmodern conservatives, no? (See my reply to Poulos’ reply to me below, a propos of Taylor’s Secular Age.)
June 1st, 2009 | 2:35 pm
JWC: you really are the most peripatetic member of the profession. I always liked Comedy of Errors and am disspointed it hasn;t been taken more seriously—part of the point, I think, is the uniqueness of human personhood and the limits of theory in capturing it–it’s hard to reason to one’s identity just as it is, in Cartesian fashion, to rationally demonstrate that one is awake.
June 1st, 2009 | 2:35 pm
ralph, yes, shakespeare–with his character hamlet’s “to be or not to be” musings–put me into a pretty existential mood as they began, but the good fellowship of the pcd fellows plus lynn uzzell’s fine cuisine, enjoyed while overlooking the most beautiful green pastures and hills of virginia, cured me of any individualistic angst. “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.” on the individual, i acknowledge your point about Hobbes’ “invention” of the individual. and yet, an invention was perhaps needed to free humans of an overbearing community that subordinated the individual too much to a place in the community and the cosmos. hobbes perhaps helped to break those chains, albeit perhaps by consigning us to another set of them. still, every time some new communitarian tries to shove us too back under the warm bosom of the “we,” I rejoice again at a spirited defense of the “I,” knowing in the end that it will be one’s own death and not charles taylor’s, much as it might be nice to share it.
June 2nd, 2009 | 1:36 pm
so I’m all fo the spirited defense of the “I” against the We-izers run amok, who exist more on blogs and in various other media than in real life these days. But the postmodern insight is that there’s no deep real conflict between having a personal identity and being authentically relational, and that in fact we’re stuck with being personal, relational beings.
June 2nd, 2009 | 2:12 pm
[...] differentiated from Nietzschean, or any philosophical, inventions. “On the individual,” Dr. Ceaser remarks, I acknowledge your [i.e. Dr. Hancock's] point about Hobbes’ “invention” of the individual. [...]
June 2nd, 2009 | 2:28 pm
It might be that the “I” is not really comprehensible without understanding it’s relation to others, or the “We”…the problen with the Hobbesian invention of the individual is that it is in fact an invention and doesn’t correspond to any genuinely empirical account of real personhood. I’m not sure that there is no tension between one’s individuality and relational being–it often seems that the modern tendency is to replace any tension with the primacy of the WE (the absorption of the inidividual into something, like the state) or the liberation of the individual from any constraints….all in all, I’m probably more worried about an excessive intoxication with the autonomous ME than I am about the indentity-stultifying tendencies of WE mongers.
June 4th, 2009 | 10:20 am
You must have been born near Twinsburg, Ohio to have such insight.
June 9th, 2009 | 3:58 pm
How odd that a post about Staunton, VA, and _A Comedy of Errors_ would pay so little attention to the text of the play itself?
First, as for Staunton’s replica, it is quite wonderful. I actually saw this very same production back in April and found it superb, although not as exciting as when last year King Lear gave me a flower from his crown. Yet, the fact that the theater is a replica indicates the company’s attempt to recapture a lost historical moment, at least hoping to introduce Shakespeare as the English did when he first produced plays. How fitting, then, that we, ahem, postmodern Americans, when going to the Blackfriar’s, usually send our children to sit up in the seats that, in the original Globe, were reserved for nobility.
The philosophical bent of the comments miss some pretty crucial parts of the play, perhaps because some of us are less familiar with the play but more familiar with Hobbes, communitarians, and the conservative complaints about both. For those unaware or forgetful, the way that these “individuals” come to escape their solipsistic claims to identity comes not from providing objective proof of their subjectivity but in the recognition of a familiar other.
The twin nobility and servants accept as fact the permanent subjectivity of their companion and explain unusual behavior as drunkenness, madness, or lies. These three behaviors modify the subjectivity taken for granted. The wife of one noble twin cannot tell her husband from his brother but interprets the sexual reluctance of the latter through her own interpretative forestructures–her insecurities about her body. Therefore, the fixation of identity on the two sets of twins essentializes forestructures that are then subject to revision in observing new behavior but never to more fundamental doubts.
Better yet, the constable in charge of figuring out this whole mess is helpless, meaning that, unlike most modern detectives (Gregory House or Sherlock Holmes), the capacity for an objective investigator is least able to assign proper identities. Of course, the cause for such failure is the incomplete data the investigator acquires, since he is as much subject to the interpretative forestructures as the two sets of twins, and the wife.
What resolves the mess is the discovery of the other not as OTHER but, forgive me, as BROTHER. The individuals in the play remain forever unable, because of their forestructures, to reach any reliable conclusions. Only when all parties come into physical contact in one place can all epistemological questions have answers. One servant twin has rope; another money. The difference distinguishes the otherwise indistinguishable (earlier in the play, one servant is sent to get rope; the other money; the two return not to their master but the master’s brother). Same idea for the twin nobles.
The resolution is really a disguise for the lack of resolution. When should we ever expect to collect all objects perceived into a single observable place to assess and put in order? The whole story is the result of a chance meeting. We must remember that one noble twin actually spent years hopelessly searching for his brother. When giving up the search, he accidentally finished it. If we are to learn anything from this play, the comedy is believing we can search alone in the world for answers. The natural product is error.
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