Cosmopolitan Man and the Political Community: An Interpretation of Othello

Abstract

In the world of today the existence of a common humanity has been established, negatively at least, by a common fear of a common extinction. Only rational beings fear thermonuclear annihilation; only rational beings can create such means of annihilation. An unprecedented danger supplies a new kind of evidence for the oldest thesis in political philosophy: man is by nature a rational and political animal. The roots of man's humanity, as of his inhumanity, are in the political community, and in the political community's capacity for making war or peace. As the growth from the roots reaches what were once the heavens, the problem of reconciling the origins with the ends attains an acute proportion. Can the new awareness of the commonness of our common humanity cause the fashioning of institutions and men equal to the problem that that very humanity has created? Can the particularity that characterizes individual races, nations, creeds—the particularity that has, from the known origins of political life until the present, provided the substance of political life both in its misery and in its glory—can that particularity transform itself into universality, as the finest and ultimate fruit of human reason? Or may the consummation of rationality, as it is given us to know it, be found in its own self-extinction?In pondering these ever new questions we turn again to the oldest wisdom of our kind. We have too long neglected the understanding of Shakespeare, perhaps because the brilliance of his art has blinded us to his political genius. Shakespeare lived through a decisive period in the emergence of modern society and thought; and he presented in living tableaux the human problems created by the new world opening before him. That he does not offer solutions nor formulas does not justify ignoring him. Before political scientists can proceed to the suggestion of policies, they must perceive the problems in the fullness of their complexity. In Shakespeare's works is to be found as complete a range of human types as any man is likely to meet in his lifetime, and they are viewed with an eye that penetrates more deeply than that of any common observer. The art of the poet brings to consciousness psychological depths that have not been fathomed by any other method.