All the World’s a Stage
So says Jacques in
As You Like It and, in a remarkable
passage in his treatise on providence, the philosopher Plotinus. Now I spend a
fair bit of my downtime reading plays and thus I have had occasion to wonder
how far we might press this metaphor. What happens if we think about the world
through the analogy of theatre? Does that analogy at some point break down? Are
we all in a sort of play? If so is that good or bad? Should we decline our role
or, as Plotinus suggests, play it to the end because the play is worth it?
After all, the gods are the authors! Of course providence and theodicy is precisely
the arena to which this metaphor is apt. Above all, a play requires evil. The
one thing that will infallibly kill a play is a lack of conflict. Without
difference, strife and antagonism the peculiar splendor of drama cannot
manifest itself. If we are to think of the world as a play we then have to
posit negativity or strife as the principle of its development (as the modern
notion of evolution allows us to do!) for that is how plays progress. This of
course raises the question of the goodness of the world and its capacity to
redeem evil. This problem is encapsulated in the so called problem of evil: if
the playwright could have written the play without making the characters grow
through suffering should he not have? The first rule of storytelling is never
to fall in love with your characters for you will have to make them do or suffer
terrible things. The ancient gods stuck doggedly to this principle it seems
(they cared about humans but not overmuch) but we in the modern world have
inherited the Christian notion that God loves us all and would inflict no
needless hardship on his human children if he could at all help it. In fact,
the existence of apparently surd and needless suffering is often considered a
slam dunk argument against the existence of ANY divine power or powers. Indeed,
for those who truly committed to compassion and pity no suffering at all, not
so much as even a hangnail, has any rational justification if the universe
could be conceived without it.
I have read too
many plays to find this intuitively convincing though I get the logic of it. If
human and divine aims belong together in a direct and immediate way, as in the Christian
world they do, then a good God cannot will human suffering. If God exists, he must
then be too weak to prevent suffering as a certain Rabbi has famously argued.[1]
The Ancients too had worries about the justice of the world but they were
different. Their desire was not to have a world with no suffering but a world
with appropriate suffering: i.e. good people had to be rewarded and rash,
proud, grasping people punished. This is a revealing difference for when the
ancients thought of an ideal world they did not think of a painless one they thought
of a just one and the meeting out of justice absolutely involves pain for the
unjust. When one reads some people on the problem of evil one gets the
impression that for millennia people thought that the world was made of
cream puffs until the Lisbon earthquake suddenly demonstrated that suffering was
possible. I hardly need to point out that this was not the case. People in
antiquity lived hard scrabble lives and seemed to have no expectation that the sub-lunary
world could or should be much different. They did, however, expect or at least
hope that the sublime order and majesty of the heavens would have some
reflection on earth. This is why the early Christian claim that God himself WAS
on earth was kryptonite where the classical world was concerned. THAT was the
thing for which the nations scarcely dared hope but once it appeared the notion
proved unstoppable even by the harshest persecution or torture.
But with this new
insight comes a new problem. If God so loved the world that he sent his son,
why does this loving god allow us to suffer? If God is not only a remote and
just figure who reveals his justice in a terrible flash of lightning but also a
figure of love and compassion, then why does he let us experience pain? The question is
vexing even to state for it takes little effort to see that a cosmos without a
negative principle is a cosmos without the potential for growth. Growing cells
cause cancer as a great Canadian poet said. Yet if the world needs pain of some
sort how much? Here we simply run up on a limit rather like Sophia in the ancient Gnostic myth. The answer to this question can only be ‘less than the current
one’. Whatever level of suffering there is there will be a maximal point of
suffering that could in principle be reduced. The amount of suffering in the
world will always be ‘too much’. As someone once quipped to me the problem of
evil is no different whether we are speaking of the holocaust or a toothache.
At the same time there are nasty features of our world that it is easy to think
we could do without and which would be extremely challenging to work into a
comprehensive account of how evil is turned to the greater good. It is easy to
conclude that the world needs SOME pain yet that there are some pains that we
could do without though that may be a line that is impossible to draw.
I will take a different
approach to the question though using our dramatic metaphor. What are the
ethics of being a creator assuming (as most theologians once did) that they are
different than the ethics of a creature? What does Shakespeare owe Hamlet? I
think it makes sense to ask this question because a playwright can absolutely do
wrong by his characters though we consider such wrongs aesthetic not moral
ones. It would be absolutely wrong to make Macbeth or Hamlet do things that are
incongruous, arbitrary or ill-fitting to their character or situation. Well the first thing the
playwright owes his characters is a stage and a setting. The character needs conditions
that define his sphere of action and in a certain sense these must have a moment
of arbitrariness. Certain things (though not all) are pre-ordained for
Coriolanus simply because I have put him in ancient Rome and not modern New York.
If, in a revisionist production of this play, I put Coriolanus in New York
surprising analogies might emerge that make the play shockingly relevant. At
the same time a world in which people fight with guns is not quite a world where
people fight with swords. I might also have to cut or even alter certain words
in the play. These might not alter the essence of the play (Prospero CAN be a
woman) but no essence can be instantiated without contingent or even arbitrary
conditions. It may not matter what the drinking age is but it has to be something. This is as much as to say that
Hamlet must inhabit some sort of world and he cannot exist as a realized
character simply in Shakespeare’s mind.
With any
playwright some of these conditions will be such as to produce dis-teleological
results. If I put Romeo and Juliet in medieval Verona and make them the
children of their respective parents, then their love will be forbidden. In
this sense Shakespeare clearly wills their suffering. He lays down the initial
conditions the play of which will produce conflict and suffering. He puts
characters in situations where their desires and values will clash with those
of the broader society and a crisis and denouement will ensue. Rather like God
is supposed to do, he wills an archetypal world in which certain things can and
cannot happen and in which growth of character or insight will occur from
crisis and struggle. The possibility of crisis (and resolution) is grounded in the fact that
finite values conflict and clash and must find harmony or balance through
struggle, even tragic struggle. These may never be clear to the persons in the
play who face these antimonies as tragic and external suffering. For the playwright and spectator though, who
come to know themselves and the world through time and process such conflicts,
such dis-teleological elements are absolutely essential. To put it bluntly, if
I want to create a strong, female character one very good way to do that is to
put her in an environment where strong women are not valued as they ought to
be. As a playwright though I am basically bound by the chains of causality and
influence that flow from the characters and situations I create. I will them as
the way to realize my archetypal conception of the realized drama.
Suppose though that
Shakespeare was SUCH a playwright that he gave birth not to fictions but to
real, live sentient beings. Would the morality of play writing then change?
Here, if anywhere, the analogy between the world and the stage MUST break down.
No dramatist can actually kill a person on stage or have a person literally
tortured as opposed to tortured in show. A playwright is bound by the ethical
and legal relationships he finds himself in as a human being who lives in society
with others. SOME playwrights may find this an unfortunate constraint and push
the envelope ethically in terms of what they expect actors to do. Still, they mostly bow to external limits and the ones who don't get sued. Now if we suppose a creator acting prior to
any such conditions or constraints who could generate sentient characters do
the same standards apply? Would there be a moral requirement of non-maleficence
such that out sentient Hamlet tor Lear could not be willfully exposed to risk
or harm? We don’t face this dilemma as creatures because, even though negative experiences
are necessary to our growth (as far as we can see), they come readily of
themselves. Suffering is fortuitous but still more or less inevitable so that
WE need violate no ethical guideline to bring it about. What, however if we
were designing a world for human agents to act in? As far as I can see we would face
the problem of building the possibility of evil in the world we intend for them
to inhabit because we are the ones
building the world. A finite agent is not a world builder and never faces
the issue of whether suffering should be a part of life. HIS only
responsibility is to deal with it when it inevitably happens or take all reasonable
precautions against it knowing that sometimes that will not be enough. A
creator then is in a morally distinct
situation. At this point I would suppose the following: what Shakespeare owes
Hamlet is the opportunity to become the fullest version of Hamlet he is capable
of being. This obligation is realized by creating a context in which the
various aspects of his character and abilities can express themselves. My
hunch, and perhaps it is only that, is that this obligation holds whatever is
required for the personal growth of Hamlet. It might well involve creating an
arena in which Hamlet may lose his father! The playwright may well
owe his character such suffering as is necessary to exercise his character and
nature. This makes me very glad I am not such a creator because it is too awesome
a responsibility for any finite mind to play providence.
[1]
This of course assumes that the divine nature is subject to the categories of
the discursive understanding. From that viewpoint, it would seem to be that case
that if it lay in the ‘potentia absoluta’ of God to create a world where the fall
was impossible he would be under the STRICTEST rational and moral necessity to
do so. God HAS to stop any evil that it lies in his power TO stop. I, however,
have never been too keen to bring the godhead down to the lowest levels of
human ratiocination. I do not know what sort of world a god would create and
whether it would contain evil or not. I do, however, know what sort of worlds
artists create and these are what I have described above; dramatic interactions
of light and dark that may be comic or tragic. This is all I have to go on as
to what a divine creator might do and do not think that God should be bound by
reasons human creators are not. For this reason I am an agnostic about the so called problem of evil. If there is a determinate calculus of the balance of goods and evils in the world that answers the question of whether or not God created it I have never seen it nor do I see how anyone could produce one. This is as much as to say that there is no strictly evidential force to the 'problem of evil' unless it is employed in a web of other arguments and evidence that lend it force. Moreover such webs, which must be evaluated holistically, are NOT an object of strict apodictic judgement but of phronesis or 'hermeneutical sense'. In short, arguments about the meaning of evil are inherently individuated and there is no resolving this basic pluralism by any 'formalization' or 'discursive demonstration'. To put it in Marcel's terms, evil is a mystery not a puzzle with a determinate solution.
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