Wittgenstein on Shakespeare

>Shakespeare, one might say, displays the dance of human passions. For this reason he has to be objective, otherwise he would not so much display the dance of human passions--as perhaps talk about it. But he shows us them in a dance, not naturalistically. (I got this idea from Paul Engelmann.) MS 162b 61r: 1939-1940

>It is remarkable how hard we find it to believe something the truth of which we do not see for ourselves. If e.g. I hear expressions of admiration for Shakespeare made by the distinguished men of several centuries, I can never rid myself of a suspicion that praising him has been a matter of convention, even though I have to tell myself that this is not the case. I need the authority of a Milton to be really convinced. In his case I take it for granted that he was incorruptible.--But of course I don't mean to deny by this that an enormous amount of praise has been & still is lavished on Shakespeare without understanding & for specious reasons by a thousand professors of literature. MS 131 46: 15.8.1946

>Shakespeare's similes are, in the ordinary sense, bad. So if they are nevertheless good--& I don't know whether they are or not--they must be a law to themselves. Perhaps e.g. their ring makes them convincing & gives them truth. It might be the case that with S. the essential thing is his effortlessness, his arbitrariness, so that if you are to be able really to admire him, you just have to accept him as he is in the way you accept nature, a piece of scenery e.g. If I am right about this, that would mean that the style of his whole work, I mean, of his complete works†a is in this case what is essential, & provides the justification. That I do not understand him could then be explained by the fact that I cannot read him with ease. Not, that is, as one views a splendid piece of scenery. MS 131 163:31.8.1946

>Shakespeare & the dream. A dream is all wrong, absurd, composite, & yet completely right: in this strange concoction it makes an impression. Why? I don't know. And if Shakespeare is great, as he is said to be, then we must be able to say of him: Everything is wrong, things aren't like that--& is all the same completely right according to a law of its own. It could be put like this too: If Shakespeare is great, then he can be so only in the whole corpus of his plays, which create their own language & world. So he is completely unrealistic. (Like the dream.) MS 168 1r: January 1949

>I do not think that Shakespeare can be set alongside any other poet. Was he perhaps a creator of language rather than a poet? I could only stare in wonder at Shakespeare; never do anything with him. I am deeply suspicious of most of Shakespeare's admirers. I think the trouble is that, in western culture at least, he stands alone, & so, one can only place him by placing him wrongly. It is not as though S. portrayed human types well & were in that respect true to life. He is not true to life. But he has such a supple hand & such individual brush strokes. [[sic , ?]] that each one of his characters looks significant, worth looking at. "Beethoven's great heart"--no one could say "Shakespeare's great heart". 'The supple hand that created new natural forms of language' would seem to me nearer the mark. The poet cannot really say of himself "I sing as the bird sings"--but perhaps S. could have said it of himself. MS 173 35r: 12.4.1950 or later

>I do not think Shakespeare could have reflected on the 'lot of the poet'. Neither could he regard himself as a prophet or teacher of humanity. People regard him with amazement almost as a spectacle of nature. They do not have the feeling that this brings them into contact with a great human being. Rather with a phenomenon. I think that, in order to enjoy a poet, you have to like the culture to which he belongs as well. If you are indifferent to this or repelled by it, your admiration cools off.†bMS 173 75v: 1950

>The reason I cannot understand Shakespeare is that I want to find symmetry in all this asymmetry. It seems to me as though his pieces are, as it were, enormous sketches, not paintings; as though they were dashed off by someone who could permit himself anything, so to speak. And I understand how someone may admire this & call it supreme art, but I don't like it.--So I can understand someone who stands before those pieces speechless; but someone who admires him as one admires Beethoven, say, seems to me to misunderstand Shakespeare. MS 174 5r: 24.4.1950 or later


Do you agree?

Didn't read lol

Strange post.

first two points are right, the second two are wrong

but what else would you expect from a non-native speaker.

Maybe.

Witty was legit too autistic to enjoy plays about the subtleties of human emotion and the range of our experience. part of the beauty is necessarily not quantifiable and I imagine this would disturb people with aspergers quite a bit

>. I need the authority of a Milton to be really convinced.

What did he mean by this?

Is he referencing something Milton wrote about Shakespear or is he referencing Milton himself?

That's bullshit, OP. His language is the most inventive, beautiful and awe-inspiring in the world. Hi is, by far, the greatest poet of all time. I have read almost all of the English poets, and of the poets of my native language (Portuguese), as well as Spanish poets. I have read the Italians (Leopardi, Dante), the French (I’m a Rimbaud fan), the Germans (Goethe, Heine, Schiller, Hölderin), the Greeks (Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Anacreon, Alcman, Pindar), the Latin (Virgil, Horace, Lucretius, Ovid), the Russians…hell, I have even read the Japanese (Ono no Komachi, Basho, Hitomaro, the folk songs of the kojiki and Man’yoshu), the Chinese (Li Bai and Du Fu) and the Indian (Kalidasa, Tagore, the ancient epics), always searching for the same metaphorical feast and imagistic orgy of Shakespeare’s work, but in vain: nobody has ever done the same with words. Nabokov is right when he says that “The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays” and Stephe Booth: “Shakespeare is our most underrated poet. It should not be necessary to say that, but it is. We generally acknowledge Shakespeare’s poetic superiority to other candidates for greatest poet in English, but doing that is comparable to saying that King Kong is bigger than other monkeys. The difference between Shakespeare’s abilities with language and those even of Milton, Chaucer, or Ben Jonson is immense.”. This guys is the greatest master of language of all human history.

Also: he managed to lead a calm and steady successful business like life. He saw his art as work, and tried to maintain a routine of productivity. He was able to prosper with his craft, and did not search for problems in politics and other stupid things. It seems that he lead a peaceful life, integrated with the community, even trying to be socially important. I like the marriage between and extreme artistic power and a normal private life.

There is no subtlety to Shakespeare.

That's partly why he's so jarring to people (like myself) who don't particularly understand the admiration he gets.

lol
>too autistic to enjoy the subtleties of human emotion
No one who has ever been labelled a mystic as often as W can be accused of that.

one of the things that really gets me is that he apparently gave zero fucks about whether his work was preserved for posterity. It was only through the efforts of his friends after he died that we even have any of his plays! What the hell?!?? He must have known who he was and what he was doing, but he didn't care...

His poetry and creative use of language.

He's the Jimi Hendrix of English, and Jimi is the Shakespeare of electric guitar. They both pushed the limits of the expressive power of their mediums, inspiring generations to come do do the same.

it was just an usual thing back in those days

please dont cheapen shakespeare like this

Wow.

Wittgenstein confirmed for an idiot.

I learn something new everyday.

He was a tolstoyfag, what can you expect.

>implying having one potentially incorrect opinion makes you a categorical idiot

Go fuck yourself you dichotomous shit-brain.

Stop trying to act so tough and have a little faith in yourself.

It is hard to tell if W is joking or pretending to be retarded sometimes. He has some moments of brightness in Investigations, though.

>implying the subjectivity of literary criticism evades potentiality of truth
>implying I lack faith in my own judgment

user—!

I have a ton of respect for Wittgenstein's work and character but the dude was legitimately some type of autistic. I don't see much point in referring to him attempting to read literature, he just didn't have the brain to understand it.

I really dislike most of Shakespeare's most famous sonnets.

HAHAHA! Too rich.

You realize you literally just did what you accused me of right?

I called you a dichotomous shit-brain, not a categorical idiot. You're probably actually a relatively intelligent person, doesn't mean I'm not going to shit on you for having a stupid thought user!

>There is no subtlety to Shakespeare.

wew.

That's a hell of a lot to unpack, Opie.

How 'bout you share some of your own thoughts first, so's we can has a real thread rather than a shit-flinging contest.

what Milton wrote about Shakespeare. He believes Milton because Milton is incorruptible and therefore not subject to sensationalism or praising Shakespeare because everyone else is.

Having a brain, which is comprehensively, shit, would imply that I'm an idiot, no?

"Dichotomous shit-brains" could as easily make up a category as idiots, no?

Anyway, I haven't read Wittgenstein yet, and I still intend to - regardless of his inability grasp Shakespeare.

N-N-No s-s-subtlety to Shakespeare?!

ARE YOU KIDDING!?

Apparently, Shakespeare's subtlety is so abstruse you've missed it completely, user.

I disagree with your claim regarding my insult (it was a cavalier internet insult and don't mean much!). THAT being said, you should definitely still check out Wittgenstein. He's a fascinating thinker. I'd suggest to skip the Tractatus and go straight to Culture & Value, On Certainty, and Philosophical Investigations, in that order. While a bit spergy on some subjects, he's amazingly on point with others.

I think you need to brush-up on your thesaurus-usage abilities, user.

(Big words =/= credible arguments)

I like it a lot and think he's correct. Thanks for the cool text

>(Big words =/= credible arguments)

I categorically disavow such an assertion

Clandestine and abstruse are not big words, and certainly not on Veeky Forums. Also those were off the top of my head, so sorry.

A thesaurus is a bit pedestrian - don't you think?

I merely changed clandestine because it implied some wicked motive in Shakespeare's subtle prose - and, of course, there is none.

Abstruse fits nicely and has a pleasant ring to it.

Honestly, I'm just teasing you a bit, user. I know insults mean little on this, or any, internet board.

I would expect him to be "a bit spergy," with his being Russell's protegee. Still, I like Russell in most respects - though we differ on the point of religion.

I'll take your recommendations, because, why not?

u funy user

no i dont think

the tintinnabulation of abstruseness in relation to shakespearean subtlety is irrelevant

resistance is futile

I am locutus

but rly, the discreteness of shakespearean metaphor is entirely subjective and why one would argue that it's obvious or profoundly deep is silly on a place like Veeky Forums because 'my opinion is right and yours is wrong go suck a wiener' it just all seems to laughable to me esp. when youre clearly putting some effort into it *whilst* insulting rather than making an actual argument regarding the subtlety of shakespearean metaphor and thematix

tanx bru

n dont forget he an russell had a signific falling out. russell went from pronouncing witty as the most perfect example of genius he'd known to renouncing him as a kook

Yeah, but he was one of those rare autists who nearly come full circle to normalcy by sheer intellectual brute force, like an AI on the verge of achieving sentience.

Yeah its why he was the hero we needed to end the analytic tradition

I don't agree with him, but I appreciate the amount of calm thought that he was able to put into the idea of disliking something that's supposed to be incredible and well loved. He doesn't write himself off as simply wrong or right, be uses this conundrum as a chance to explore the difficulty in attempting to be confident in holding an opinion that most if not all the people you respect believe it to be wrong. It's articulated very well here.

Thanks for that OP, I enjoyed that, but for reasons different than what you expected I assume.

Allow me to clarify my statement.

I somewhat agree with Wittgenstein here. Shakespeare is so unique and stands on his own that he cannot be placed alongside humans. He brings forth a world so alien to our own and such a world exists in the unity of all his plays that to say he is 'subtle' doesn't quite make sense.

Shakespeare subtle? Perhaps to Shakespeare... But I don't quite know myself.

It seems the admiration he gets is one of a freak of nature not one of recognisable humanity.

I don't know...

Go on...

Jesus, I want to vomit. Defecate elsewhere.

Not an argument, brainlet.

This is acceptable.

You didn't present anything to argue with. You don't even commit to talking about his texts.

That doesn't clarify anything, really.

Are you saying he's unsubtle because he's ostentatious? "He brings forth a world so alien to our own", "Shakespeare is so unique and stands on his own that he cannot be placed alongside humans": these statements don't really mean anything.

Are you saying he's unsubtle because of his alleged unsurpassed ostentation?

Can you clarify your usage of ostentation?

Well, it seems to me you're saying his writing is both full of bombast and incredibly outlandish, if you're saying anything at all, hence "ostentatious."

...

Wait is this bait

>end the analytic tradition
but he didn't

It really is quite a compliment - that you're so convinced I'm trying so hard. You may not mean to be, but you're really quite nice.

>like an AI on the verge of achieving sentience
extremely underrated

That is Wittgenstein's only point with which I can find common ground.

In some sense, he is almost an encounter with the Sublime. To read Shakespeare is almost to witness nature-naturing, and that is the mark of his genius.

In that sense, Shakespeare is not subtle.

However, this is a product of his proximity to the Infinite, rather than a mark of his craft.

Pic related is figuratively you

Not an argument.

>Shakespeare's similes are, in the ordinary sense, bad. So if they are nevertheless good--& I don't know whether they are or not--they must be a law to themselves. Perhaps e.g. their ring makes them convincing & gives them truth. It might be the case that with S. the essential thing is his effortlessness, his arbitrariness, so that if you are to be able really to admire him, you just have to accept him as he is in the way you accept nature, a piece of scenery e.g. If I am right about this, that would mean that the style of his whole work, I mean, of his complete works†a is in this case what is essential, & provides the justification. That I do not understand him could then be explained by the fact that I cannot read him with ease.

Ie good ol' Witt is saying here that he's too autistic to appreciate Shakespeare's beauty and that he has deduced the fault lies with him and not S.

But yeah, I basically agree, especially with the first paragraph.

It's funny but in Moby Dick the whale is not a metaphor, more of a direct personification of Ahab's talks about revenge. Ahab directly says the whale is the eidolon of his misery on the image of the world.
A metaphor would be more like how the kids in Lord of the Flies are a metaphor for society.

That runs the assumption that Ahab himself is not a metaphor

Symbolism is often layered - i.e., things can have more than one meaning.

For example, the children in Lord of the Flies can be looked at in a number of ways.

They can be metaphors for society, as you noted, for the nature of man, for innocence and the loss of it, as a symbolic critique on the idealistic portrayal of man-in-a-state-of-nature, and, therefore, a critique on Eden, they could be a statement intended to destroy a perceived arbitrary division between Primitive Man and Civilized Man, and so on.

In fact, a good writer (and certainly a good poet) rarely has one specific meaning to convey with a symbol. Symbols are often more powerful if they are left a bit ambiguous.

The more two-dimensional the object the more symbolism can be layered upon it, and even the acts in which the symbols are engaged can be metaphor. The possibilities are quite nearly endless.

How about you never have music related opinions again.

that's nice, user

he probably didn't know

one of the signs of the all time greats is a carelessness toward the preservation of their own works (Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus never wrote a word). I imagine for Socrates, the work was an end in itself, not its preservation or the fame of posterity.

you type like a gay tumblr kid

>one of the things that really gets me is that he apparently gave zero fucks about whether his work was preserved for posterity.

That is the apparent view for many people, yet it has been pointed out that in the very introduction of the first folio, Heminges and Condell state that:

>”It had bene a thing, we confesse, worthie to have bene wished, that the author himselfe had lived to have set forth, and overseen his owne writings; but since it hath bin ordain'd otherwise, and he by death departed from that right,”

Which clearly suggest that Shakespeare himself might have been interested in collecting and publishing his complete works in the time of his death.

>His language is the most inventive, beautiful and awe-inspiring in the world. Hi is, by far, the greatest poet of all time. I have read almost all of the English poets, and of the poets of my native language (Portuguese), as well as Spanish poets. I have read the Italians (Leopardi, Dante), the French (I’m a Rimbaud fan), the Germans (Goethe, Heine, Schiller, Hölderin), the Greeks (Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Sappho, Anacreon, Alcman, Pindar), the Latin (Virgil, Horace, Lucretius, Ovid), the Russians…hell, I have even read the Japanese (Ono no Komachi, Basho, Hitomaro, the folk songs of the kojiki and Man’yoshu), the Chinese (Li Bai and Du Fu) and the Indian (Kalidasa, Tagore, the ancient epics), always searching for the same metaphorical feast and imagistic orgy of Shakespeare’s work, but in vain: nobody has ever done the same with words. Nabokov is right when he says that “The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays” and Stephe Booth: “Shakespeare is our most underrated poet. It should not be necessary to say that, but it is. We generally acknowledge Shakespeare’s poetic superiority to other candidates for greatest poet in English, but doing that is comparable to saying that King Kong is bigger than other monkeys. The difference between Shakespeare’s abilities with language and those even of Milton, Chaucer, or Ben Jonson is immense.”. This guys is the greatest master of language of all human history.

Ha! Funny to see that the old post I made years ago has become a copy-pasta.

Hehehehehe

thank you for noticing me

I think Shakespeare can write beauty when he chooses but for him that's not the point of his plays. In "The Tempest" because civilization has failed Caliban he turns to the lowest forms of civilized behavior, representing debauchery Stefano and Trinculo.

I think Wittgenstein is oblivious to a certain genius of Shakespeare just as people are unable to recognize different sides of a stranger's face. His prose is good not great however prose is not what Shakespeare is mainly known for. He is known for his plays.

>making tl;DR posts on a literature board

Hendrix is good but legit kys user

Afaik writing wasn't a thing in Buddha's region (i.e. everything was still orally passed on)

Yeah, that sums up Veeky Forums pretty well.

nice post

>Ha! Funny to see that the old post I made years ago has become a copy-pasta.

Hey, comfyshakespeareguy, what do you girlfriend thinks about your autism? Genuine question, pls answer it.

Well, I don’t know how did you knew that I have a girlfriend, and don’t know why do you imagine that I have some form of autism. But yes, I have a girlfriend, and if that makes you feel better, yes, I have some mental issues (although now they are mostly dormant and muzzled).

I never had any difficulty or problem that fits the autistic spectrum. The problems that I actually faced were related with anxiety disorders and phobia, but I managed to control them with regular consultations with a psychiatrist and with a very rigorous routine of cognitive behavioral therapy training. To overcome phobia and anxiety was one of the hardest things that I have ever faced in my life.

To anyone suffering with such problems, I recommend one book that actually saved my life (it was far more effective than treatment and medication):

>Freedom from Fear, from Howard Liebgold

As for my relations with my girlfriend, we are together for more than 3 years, and love each other very much. We fight sometimes, naturally, but one of the complains my girlfriend had with me (that smells like some kind of light autism from my part) was that I used to take art (films, music, literature) much too seriously, like a great competition, where there were winners and losers, and several different degrees of merit, in such a way that the ones occupying the higher places could feel superior to the ones below.

She used to get offended when I criticized some artists that she enjoyed, because she felt I was somehow aggressive with my aesthetic views. I used to get extremely frustrated when mediocre artists were recognized and hailed by the public, because recognition of artistic talent was, for me, one of the greatest honors one could achieve. I also had tachycardia, cold sweating, bowel irritation, headaches and dizziness when I sat down to write because of the immense pressure I put upon my shoulders. Sometimes, when the writing crop of the day was bad, I got sour for the rest of the day, as if only writing was important in my life. That also used to make my girlfriend sad, because she felt isolated from myself, and also felt that I was losing the opportunity of enjoying the world, the great world, the other world that lived and breath outside the smaller countries of my fiction.

I have changed a lot since then, however. I no longer takes thing that seriously, and today I really believe that beauty is actually very common, and that one can find traces of its pollen even in bad books, rap songs, stupid TV commercials and audience-bait movies. I learned not to take myself and others that seriously, and, although I still write every day, I don’t expect much from it. I don’t expect recognition or support or external validation. I just try to keep getting better and better with my art, but a bad writing session no longer pollutes the rest of my day.

It did, they've just basically been LARPing since then

why do you even care?

>Shakespeare was a playwright. His characters say things that appeal to me, and they say it well, but that’s not Shakespeare talking. Hamlet’s gloomy ramblings were cribbed by Magpie of Avon from Girolamo Cardano’s De Consolatione, which has since come to be known as “Hamlet’s Book.” So I don’t know who Shakespeare was, and I can’t tell from his works. (...) This is something that doesn’t matter to most readers, who just want to escape to someplace outside their world and yet at the same time want that other world to be in a significant way like their own, that is, where things happen that they can understand. Shakespeare didn’t write anything that even the dullest imagination can’t understand. It’s all soap operas and romantic comedies, just the kind of thing that people enjoy today.

>liking extraverted rococo humanist art of any medium

Being difficult to understand doesn't make something automatically good, and bring easy to understand doesn't make something automatically bad.

He was a storyteller who had an absolutely wonderful, timeless gift for language, and many of his stories are exciting, funny, sad, etc. Shakespeare is perhaps not very "deep", but his raw talent for writing should be more than enough to justify his fame.

Cozy story/10

keep telling yourself that kid

I'm 36 buddy. I pay taxes and I could probably beat your dad up. So who you callin' kid, kiddo?