Phil in Shakespeare
In Shakespeare's early play HENRY VI PART 2 there's a strange philosophical episode.
The king and his friends are out hunting when they encounter some plebs rejoicing because
one of them, blind from birth, has recovered his sight. Or so he says. One courtier tests him, asking what colour his (the courtier's) gown is. 'As black as jet' says the man. 'What about his?' says the courtier, pointing at a cardinal's. 'As red as blood' says the man. The fraud is exposed by the courtier pointing out that although suddenly being able to discern colours is possible it is not possible in that same instant to know how to name them.
This seems to me a philosophers' party trick. Since Shakespeare was no philosopher he must have got it from somewhere. Does anyone recognise it or know of its origin?
The king and his friends are out hunting when they encounter some plebs rejoicing because
one of them, blind from birth, has recovered his sight. Or so he says. One courtier tests him, asking what colour his (the courtier's) gown is. 'As black as jet' says the man. 'What about his?' says the courtier, pointing at a cardinal's. 'As red as blood' says the man. The fraud is exposed by the courtier pointing out that although suddenly being able to discern colours is possible it is not possible in that same instant to know how to name them.
This seems to me a philosophers' party trick. Since Shakespeare was no philosopher he must have got it from somewhere. Does anyone recognise it or know of its origin?
Comments (39)
Simpcox, the alleged formerly blind man, comes on stage borne on a chair and is met by the nobles. He (Simpcox) claims St. Alban cured his blindness. He now sees but still can't walk. (He fell out of a plum tree.) He does too well on the vision test which the Duke of Gloucester administers, and is next tested on his lameness by the Duke. A beadle is summoned to whip Simpcox until he jumps over a stool. It takes no more than a stroke of the whip to bring Simpcox to his feet, and he runs away. Simpcox and his wife are ordered to be whipped for fraud. His wife pleads that they did it out of need.
In a more complete telling, does this scene still seem like a philosophical party trick? How does this scene between the King, Earl, Duke, Queen Margaret, and these two peasants fit into the play? (I haven't read the play, so can't say myself. But I would guess a philosopher's party trick wasn't just tossed in at that point.)
Also FYI, when I came across this in the play it struck me as identical to something I'd come across in university philosophy but I couldn't recall what. That's why I ask if it seems familiar to anyone else. Maybe something from one of Socrates' cross-exams?
As for the philosophical issue, I agree that what it touches on – how colour-words name for example (obviously not simply by ostensive definition) – seems more modern (e.g. Wittgenstein). That's what makes it interesting. I don't think Shakespeare came up with it, I think someone more philosophical gave it to him and he just made use of it.
That's an ad hominem if I ever saw one. Shakespeare was very philosophical. To be or not to be?
You could say, he probably got it from somewhere, because he borrowed a lot of ideas from other places...
I understand what you meant :wink:
I'm just quibbling with a couple of assumptions in that sentence--what makes someone a philosopher if not being philosophical? Even if you conclude not all philosophical thinkers are philosophers, why can't philosophical thinkers come up with original ideas? In other words, on what basis do you assume it's not his original idea?
It reminded me of recent cognition studies involving people who were born blind and then come to see. The question was: would they be able to recognize shapes they could only feel prior to obtaining sight. I recollect that they could not do this immediately, it took them days to adjust to what they were seeing.
It dates back to Molyneux's problem which John Locke mentions and agrees with in his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 1689.
Not sure how Shakespeare came up with the question, Henry VI P2 estimated at 1591, Molyneux born in 1656.
There are some sceptical arguments in Sextus Empiricus concerning perception of colour, of course, but even there I think it would take a post-Cartesian perspective to see them as showing that a wedge could open up between our capacity to name colours and our capacity to see colours. Those kinds of debate only really get going once empiricism enters the scene with Locke, Berkeley and Hume.
Sure, Shakespeare was not thinking of qualia. But was it accidental that the exchange was about the naming of colours, which later philosophers have found a challenging aspect of meaning-learning?
I'm not thinking of Shakespeare's personal interest: as I have said, I don't think he had a philosophical axe to grind. I think he was just making use of something to hand, for dramatic gain. Shakespeare is beside the point. The point is what Elizabethans were thinking.
Isn't there some crazy theory that Bacon actually wrote at least some of Shakespeare's works, incidently?
I'm not across all of Bacon's thought either, so maybe what I'm thinking of is in there. Nice if someone out there could say. My suspicion is that it is somehow scholastic. I'm interested in you saying the discussion mighth go back to the Greeks. Can you expand?
What is your point? That Shakespeare proved that a character was "supersmart"? So what? What is this scene's significance in the play?
There may have been some kind of philosophers parlour game at the time to show up a paradox about learning colour words which ran along the following lines. In order to learn the meaning of the word "black" say, we already have to be able to identify black things, but the meaning of the word "black" lies precisely in its identifying a specific colour, so if we can already identify that specific colour, we already know the meaning of the word "black" and so don't have to learn its meaning. On the other hand, if we cannot identify black things at all, we will never be able to identify what the word "black" is being used to pick out in the world, and so we will never be able to learn its meaning. Either way, we cannot learn the meaning of colour words. That would be a kind of variation on the paradox of learning that (as far as I am aware) get's its first airing in Plato's Meno.
Granted, that Gloucester perceives the glaring inconsistency in Simpcox's performance (identifying colors and pieces of clothing from sight, rather than touch, as would be the case if he had really been blind). One could further note that this scene would have perhaps fit better in Chaucer, at whose time this sort of chicanery was more common. So, the scene itself is a bit anachronistic. Not that there weren't fake miracles in Shakespeare time (fake news and fake miracles are still with us).
Are you, perhaps, looking for a paper topic? (fresh topics in Shakespeare are very hard to come by, after all these years). One would need to dispose of the question as to whether this scene might have served any other function in the play. (It could serve more than one function).
I haven't read this play, or anything else by Shakespeare in a long time (50 years, at least) and I probably won't circle back to read much more--time is getting short at my age, and libraries are full of interesting books.
Press on with diligence.
No, not looking for a paper topic, just interested
Oxford University Press drew attention last year for deciding that, in the New Oxford Shakespeare, the plays Henry VI, Parts 1, 2, and 3 would no longer be listed as having been written by Shakespeare alone. Instead the title pages will say: “By William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe.”
I've only skimmed it, but typing in "scholastic roots of the private language argument" turned up this link:
Origns of the Private Language Argument
It's mostly focused on tracing the ideas in Wittgenstein's arguments against private languages within post Cartesian (and even more specifically post-Frege) tradition, but p 70 talks about some early Christian cleric called Arnobius casting doubt on the idea that language makes sense outside of communal context. So it is definitely a theme in thought prior to Locke. But that's as far as I'll be going with this - although it's an interesting topic in the history of philosophy, so maybe you should start a different thread "Calling all experts on Scholastic philosophy...." there might be one or two skulking around this forum.:wink: