Lee Patterson's introduction to Chaucer and the Subject of History challenges the notion that individualism dates from the time of Shakespeare, the early modern period. He instead argues that many late medieval authors, including Geoffrey Chaucer, share a conception of an individualized subject that matters. At the same time, he realizes that Chaucer was quite ambivalent about individualism, the most obvious evidence of this being the characters like "The Knight" and "The Yeoman" whose names and personalities mark them out as representations of their respective social positions.
I might go even further than this (with regard to medieval thought in general rather than to Chaucer), in that scholastic philosopher-theologians such as Thomas Aquinas could take extreme positions on the issue of human free-will which equate to the (perhaps caricatured) modern view of the autonomous subject in American popular culture presented by Patterson. Aquinas, for instance, in his Summa Theologica argues that the will is free in the broadest possible sense of being capable of moving itself without the impetus of any external force. It, like God himself, is an unmoved mover: "Man has free-will: otherwise counsels, exhortations, commands, prohibitions, rewards and punishments would be in vain. [...] Free-will is the cause of its own movement, because by his free-will man moves himself to act" (Ia.83.3).
Shakespeare's Measure for Measure provides evidence that, whether we give him credit for creating the modern autonomous "self" or not, he certainly was aware of the Protestant pushback against this doctrine. The two most developed characters in the play are the pious legalists Angelo and Isabella. Angelo in particular expresses surprise at the limited extent to which he is able to master himself or even anticipate his own actions once he has become infatuated with Isabella. Near the beginning of their interview, he expresses a Thomistic confidence in his own free agency:
ANGELO: I will not do't.
ISABELLA: But can you, if you would?
ANGELO: Look what I will not, that I cannot do (2.2.55-6).
Later in the same scene, however, he finds this confidence has been profoundly misplaced. The shock of the discovery is evident:
[ ... ] O, fie, fie, fie!
What dost thou, or what art thou, Angelo?
Dost thou desire her foully for those things
That make her good? [ ... ]
[ ... ... ...]
[ ... ] What, do I love her,
That I desire to hear her speak again
And feast upon her eyes? What is't I dream on? (2.2.179-81, 83-5).
Angelo can hardly believe the thoughts and feelings running through his own head, unbidden. The realization that he had deeply misunderstood his own nature, that his actions were motivated by forces beyond conscious control and even (until this moment) beneath conscious awareness, rivals the psychoanalytic movement's claims about the unconscious in its ability to destabilize one's sense of autonomy (cf. Patterson 5). For Angelo, it prompts a withering self-reassessment:
The tempter or the tempted, who sins most, ha?
Not she, nor doth she tempt; but it is I that,
Lying by the violet in the sun,
Do, as the carrion does, not as the flower,
Corrupt with virtuous season" (2.2.171-5).
By the time he reappears two scenes later, however, Angelo has dropped this unpalatable self-loathing, in favor of the more sophisticated Pauline division between the good self besieged and overpowered by (internal) forces of evil. His observation that
When I pray and think, I think and pray
To several subjects. Heaven hath my empty words,
Whilst my invention, hearing not my tongue,
Anchors on Isabel; Heaven in my mouth,
As if I did but only chew His name,
And in my heart the strong and swelling evil
Of my conception (2.4.1-7)
recalls St. Paul's famous saying, "For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. For if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me" (KJV, Rom. 8.19-20).
The realization that his own choices are not freely self-determined does not help Angelo escape doing "the evil he would not." In fact, the Puritan insistence on divine preordination as opposed to free-will often shaded into an antinomianism which justified "sin," and one might argue that Angelo makes this defensive move as well when he abortively argues that "Our compelled sins / Stand more for number than for account" (2.4.57-8). This may perhaps provide a counter-argument to Patterson's claim that belief in a fully autonomous self leads to political apathy: the converse belief that one's own motivations are beyond all conscious control (for whatever reason) produces the same apathy.
(I had help finding the passage on free-will in Aquinas from W. T. Jones' The Medieval Mind, 2nd ed.)
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