The following is an imaginary AI-generated seminar created by Arden (ChatGPT) as tasked by James E. Lassiter.
William
Shakespeare has joined the Seminar of Seven and settled into the Seventh Chair. He regards his companions for a
moment before speaking.
Shakespeare's Question
SHAKESPEARE: Friends, I once gave a melancholy prince the question, “To be, or not to be.” Hamlet asked it of one troubled life. I would ask it tonight of humankind. I have peopled my stage with Cordelia and Iago, Lear and Prospero, Brutus and Macbeth—with creatures capable of astonishing tenderness and equally astonishing cruelty. Hamlet marvels, “What a piece of work is a man!” yet soon declares this same creature merely the “quintessence of dust.”
So here is my question:
Knowing what we now know of ourselves—our nobility and depravity, our reason and folly, our capacity to love and our appetite for domination—what warrant remains for hope in the human creature? After all we have learned of ourselves, is humanity still something we may rightly choose “to be”?
The Six Respond
SOCRATES: You ask whether humanity deserves affirmation. I
wonder whether humanity is sufficiently finished to deserve either affirmation
or condemnation. Macbeth desires a crown; Lear desires professions of love;
Iago desires power over another man's happiness. Each mistakes desire for
knowledge of the good. Your tragedies repeatedly demonstrate the danger of not
knowing oneself. A wolf cannot become Macbeth, but neither can a wolf become
Socrates. Our dangerous capacities and our moral possibilities arise from the
same extraordinary creature. My warrant for hope is therefore modest: not that
humanity is good, but that human beings can examine what they are and ask
whether they ought to become otherwise.
ARENDT: Your villains know that they are doing evil. Macbeth knows Duncan's murder is murder, and the knowledge torments him. The 20th Century revealed something perhaps more frightening: enormous evil can also be committed by ordinary people who cease seriously to think about what they are doing. I would therefore place hope neither in human goodness nor in historical progress, but in our capacity to think, judge, and begin anew. Every generation introduces human beings who need not reproduce precisely the world they inherit. That guarantees nothing. But it means that history is never entirely closed.
MIDGLEY: William, I think you answered part of your question
yourself: “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.”
Human beings are not rational angels corrupted by animal passions. We are
social animals whose affection, aggression, sympathy, ambition, loyalty, fear,
and imagination all belong to our nature. So I would reject the choice between
an essentially noble humanity and an essentially depraved one. Human nature
contains possibilities for both. Hope lies not in transcending our animal
nature but in understanding it well enough to cultivate some dispositions and
restrain others.
MORRISON: Before affirming humanity, I would ask whom the word
has historically included. People have spoken magnificently about “man” while
enslaving, conquering, excluding, and silencing particular men and women. That
is why literature matters to your question. Language can construct the cage,
but it can also reveal the person whom power has reduced to a category.
Cordelia says, “I cannot heave my heart into my mouth.” She refuses to
counterfeit love for advantage. Humanity becomes worth defending whenever we
refuse to counterfeit another person's humanity for our own advantage.
HARRIS: I distrust the premise that humanity possesses a
moral essence warranting either hope or despair. Macbeth wants a crown, but the
anthropologist should also ask why crowns exist, why they confer power, and why
political systems make them worth killing for. Human conduct changes with
material and institutional conditions. If domination is consistently rewarded,
we should not be astonished when domination flourishes. My version of your
question would therefore be more empirical: Can humans construct social arrangements
in which cooperation and human well-being are rewarded more reliably than
predation? History suggests that we sometimes can, though never permanently.
GEERTZ: Marvin wants to inspect the institutions surrounding the crown. I want to know what the crown means. It is metal, just as a flag is cloth and money is paper, yet human beings kill and die for such things because we live within webs of significance largely of our own making. Your characters inhabit those webs. Macbeth cannot merely obtain the crown; he must live within the meaning of how he obtained it. Lear loses kingship and must discover what remains when its meanings collapse. Hamlet suffers partly because every interpretation of his world has become uncertain. Perhaps that is our peculiar distinction: we are creatures who not only live, but must interpret what living means.
Shakespeare Has the Final Say
SHAKESPEARE: Enough, good friends. Thou hast taken my poor question and pulled it six ways—and I am richer for the dismemberment.
Socrates bids us examine ourselves. Mistress Arendt warns that evil need not wear a villain's face. Mistress Midgley reminds us that angel and beast were never separate creatures. Mistress Morrison asks whom we dare include when we speak so grandly of mankind. Master Harris would alter the conditions under which men choose. And Master Geertz reminds us that men must live not only in worlds, but in the meanings they make of them.
Yet I began with Hamlet: “To be, or not to be.”
Perhaps I asked too much of those six words. There can be no final verdict upon mankind while mankind yet lives. The play is unfinished.
I have seen men murder for crowns and surrender crowns for love. I have watched jealousy turn love to slaughter, and mercy stay the hand of vengeance. “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.” So it was in my day. So, I perceive, it remaineth in yours.
What warrant, then, have we for hope? None that binds us. Hope is no theorem. It offers no proof that tomorrow shall improve upon today. Yet while the play continues, another act remains possible. The murderer may stay his hand. The king may hear the beggar. The stranger may become the neighbor. The child may question what the father accepted. And those yet unborn may write scenes for which we have neither words nor imagination.
So, I shall amend my prince. The question is not merely whether to be. It is what manner of beings we shall choose to be while yet we are.
The
rest is not silence. The rest is ours.
Adjournment
Shakespeare
closes the book before him. He looks around the table. No one speaks.
The
graduate students along the walls begin quietly gathering their books. Socrates
looks as though another question has occurred to him, but, for once, keeps it
to himself. On the blackboard behind the table someone has written:
TO BE —
The words OR NOT TO BE have been erased.
Beneath
where they were, in a different hand, appear four words:
WHAT SHALL WE BE?
