A Sense As Cold...
On a Certain Higher Stupidity Among Critics
February 9, 2026, by Arnold Klein
The University of Chicago famously did away with its varsity sports programs in the 1920s; by the time I got there, however, a few of these had been restored (I was a three-letter man in one of them). In the interim, though, the students perfected a different competitive sport, one modeled for them with great skill by the faculty, namely, condescension—in which, I must admit, my record in the classroom, on the Quads, and around the coffee shops, about matched mine on the piste: 49-50.
But that was only intramural. Outside the walls, in that great humbug, the world, one passed for a prodigy. One-upmanship belongs to that class of cruelties a philosopher has well-called “ordinary,” but the UC imparted a refinement of it that was distinctively its own. It consisted in the self-assurance that you knew everyone’s special intellectual business better than they themselves did; and what made the habitus hard to kick was that, more often than you might think, one did know it better—always did, when the business in question had anything to do with reading books, for twelve quarters of it left one pretty good at finding and following “the structure of the discourse” with an acuity, an assiduity, an accuracy, and always with an openness to the thinking and admiration for the thinker, that really did set one—I no longer say “above” everyone not so versed—but certainly apart from them: you often found yourself wondering what the devil people thought they were doing when they read anything serious.
Now, the competition described above was a collegiate affair; it was part of the undergraduate ethos to regard graduate students as not worth bothering with, and as to professors—well, they were absolutely out of one’s league. One of my central teachers was a stylist in the Santayana mold, whose prose combined beauty and rigor; another was actually a master mind; the best was 6’6’’; and in general, one was glad to look up to the faculty, and took in good part their condescensional finesse, when they cared to display it, which some of them did pretty regularly, at least at me. But, for all that, I waive the rare opportunity offered, posthumously, as it were, by some of his writings, to condescend to a UC professor, eminent, and justly eminent, for learning and brains, and celebrated by his students for his scrupulous and effective teaching; one, moreover, with whose very-UChicago conception of liberal education I more or less completely agree. (The “less” part will clarify itself as we go along.) For those writings exemplify (among others things) what happens when a certain kind of prepossessions—in this case, ethical ones—meets a certain kind of objects—in what follows, a few dramatic poems—and by “what happens” I mean what is ignored, what is distorted to fit, what is lost, what is fobbed off and what is foisted on: a whole schedule of the malpractices consequent upon subsuming the individual under the general without sufficiently “minding the gap,” as they say on the London subways, between those two uses of the same article. This mode of—felonious subsumption, if I may be allowed to add yet another crime to the intellectual statute books— is by no means, as Gilson puts it, an error of small minds; indeed, the very self-confidence that great intelligence has in its own real superiority is a great source of it. And this, too, these writings exemplify, for the liability to such over-estimations (and to the underestimations these necessarily entail) is quite wide-spread, and I hope to characterize it a little more closely later on, and perhaps impart my personal name for it. But first the prepossessions.
Our author’s position (or the part of it needed for what follows) is that human beings, who have bodies and souls, should, by way of giving each endowment its due, govern their instincts by reason, in the aspect of the virtues; that the selfish desire for glory, for example, when so governed, is changed into a worthy aspiration for nobility; that eros, though allowed to have a physical as well as a psychical reference, gains, in this way, wisdom for one of its proper objects; and that all these are not ideological prejudices relative to history or culture, but truths of human nature that apply everywhere and always.It is clear that this position is at odds with then-current, and I will add, still-current, American notions of freedom (as spontaneity), democracy (as egalitarian), relativism (cultural and/or historical) and sex (as at once casual and momentously important), and with ever-persisting romantic conceptions of love (as an acute exalted emotional state, valued for its own sake); clear, too, that an educational program inheres in it, in which the student’s own striving is directed, through the careful and rigorous reading of such materials as have proven themselves rewarding along these lines, toward real freedom, from, in the first instance, the cant of her time and place, and ultimately as wisdom and self-control. (This is more or less the “more” part of the “more or less” above.)
Now, if the truths in question be transtemporal and transcultural—human, that is—it is natural that our professor should find the works of that great humanist, Shakespeare, in agreement with them; and here the descent from the universal to the idiosyncratic begins, and is, well, bungled. I will take only a few parts of our professor’s survey of a few plays to illustrate this.
In Troilus and Cressida, says our professor, Shakespeare “suggests…that wisdom, austere and externally unattractive, is the one thing permanently available to man that is noble and choiceworthy.” “Suggests” covers a good deal of ground, and the play is heavily freighted with actual stupidities; “but for a few choice viewers,” Ulysses, alone among the characters, “represents” something like practical wisdom, and his action in the play—principally his “instructing” Achilles in nobility and subjecting Troilus to the “terrible torture” of watching Cressida vamp—“accomplishes” the exposure of heroic and romantic illusions, and “this” will “ultimately restores peace.”
I will quarrel with “represents” as we go along; for the moment, observe how it universalizes the particular, and, to that extent, is a case of what Bentham calls “begging the question with a single word.” And I suspect what constitutes those “viewers” “few” and “choice” is their sharing with Ulysses the vocation of instructing and torturing the virile young for their own good. But, as to the play at hand, is any of this stuff about Ulysses actually, I do not say “true,” but right? Does the subsumption in question, of Ulysses under “unattractive sapience,” actually consist with the exact wording of the lines that actually create that specific speaker and situate him in this play?
In the course of what our professor calls his “earnest but sophomoric love talk” in the opening scene, the “love-moody” Troilus particulates Cressida:
Her eyes, her hair, her cheek, her gait, her voice;
O…
In so doing, he multiplies words (all those “hers”); and since he indicates that Pandarus has already said all this (“This thou tell’st me/As true thou tell’st me”) multiplies them not only by particulation, but by frank repetition.
He has done this earlier in the scene, in his second set of lines, polyptotonically, with strong, strength, skillful, skill, fierce, and fierceness, and in his following duet with Pandarus (I say “duet” because our prof says that P “is a character reminiscent of Viennese light opera”—one who bequeaths his audience his diseases, be it noted), in which Pandarus particulates a cake in terms of the operations needed to make it, in the course of which account he repeats grinding, bolting and leavening, ay, to, must and, of course tarry, with Troilus joining in at each point with his repeated have I not tarried and still have I tarried, the last term notable for calling attention to the delay that talking in this way effects.
So it is not “love-moodiness” in general, whatever that is, that Troilus generically instances, but a very specific set of locutions whose significance he does not knowingly intend, and which his interlocutor reproduces unawares, but which the playwright—who, after all, had something in mind in constructing and patterning the speeches in just this way, which only this way accomplishes—unerringly produced; and the question is, does the wise Ulysses join in this way of talking?
Of course he does: the play would fail its own particular unity if he did not.
Our professor understands the shrewd rhetorical strategy that informs Ulysses’ famous “speech on degree” (many professors do not), but the specific manner in which the speech continues the earlier “love talk” and cake-baking are left out of his account:
The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre
Observe degree, priority, and place,
Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,
Office, and custom, in all line of order...
...What plagues, and what portents, what mutiny,
What raging of the sea, shaking of the earth,
Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,
Divert and crack, rend and deracinate…
Repetition-cum-particulation de luxe, and I’m leaving some out. And here’s two formulations that are pretty much tropologically equivalent to “love-moodiness”:
Then everything include itself in power,
Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite...
...The general’s disdained
By him one step below, he by the next,
That next by him beneath; so every step...
As to delay, Ulysses himself calls his degree-speech “a tale of length,” and sums it up in eight words. Agamemnon then asks point-blank for his remedy, and Ulysses responds, not with the remedy (which, for all we ever find out, he may not even have), but with a detailed description of Achilles & Co’s shenanigans before being interrupted by the meaningless blaring of the tucket that precedes the arrival of Aeneas, who shows that the Trojans are no less particulative, repetitious and retardative than the Greeks—one of the many ways in which the two antagonists are shown to be the same, and their death-struggle, pointless:
...But peace, Aeneas;
Peace, Troyan; lay thy finger on thy lips...
Whereupon Agamemnon asks him “call you yourself Aeneas?” Which is one of the best jokes ever.
Now, Aeneas is brought on at just this point so that Ulysses never gets to get to the remedy of which his previous 200 or so lines are presumably a preamble: the Ajax-device is prompted by Aeneas’s (lengthily delivered) challenge. In other words, the promised remedy is never given, though all the rhetorical steps to it are, and at length—just as Pandarus’s cake is never eaten, and Troilus’s resolve to unarm, the explanation of which is the subject of his whole duet in I.i, is never acted on. So to particulation and the rest we can add null-effect: all the talking has been for nothing, Ulysses’ no less than Pandarus’s. And—lest we forget—the plot to use Ajax to incite Achilles proves “not worth a blackberry,” despite what our prof calls Ulysses’ “shrewd management” of it; indeed, it backfires completely: and if the Greeks do “draw together” in Act V, it is no thanks to it, or him: Ajax and Achilles get off their butts for fortuitous personal reasons alone; and although it may be generally true, as our prof reminds us, that the policies of able politicians can fail due to the “limitations of men,” the specific question here is, why make Ulysses’ come so deflatedly a cropper. And while we’re at it, though “peace” may be “ultimately” restored in some fictional sequel, this play ends with Troilus voicing his “hope of revenge.”
Ulysses says of Cressida:
There’s language in her eye, her cheek, her lip;
Nay, her foot speaks. Her wanton spirits look out
At every joint and motive of her body.
O...
The professor calls this speech “moralistic,” takes it, that is, in isolation from Troilus’s “sophomoric” love talk (which repeats, be it recalled, the light-operatic Pandarus’s), with which its particulative syntax plainly links it. The two adjectives in inverted commas belong to a subclass of question-beggars which, having discovered it, I hereby arrogate to myself the right to name: prerogative-adjective abuse.
I could go on, but this is not an essay on this great poem. Before leaving it, though, observe that our professor omits the whole feasting business, which is so crucial to the play: for unless all the warriors on both sides meet face-to-face at some point, as they do here, the joke about their not recognizing each other on the battlefield, armored up and de-humanized as they all eagerly are (“Wilt though not, beast, abide?”), couldn’t get played. I call it a joke, because I am in on it, not because it lacks high moral seriousness.
For high moral seriousness Troilus and Cressida does have; but if it is to be, what the professor seems to wish, a factor in moral paideia, it must be as it really exists, with all its inflections, weirdnesses, idiosyncrasies and plurivocalities, as these are expressed through all the resources of poetic drama, right down to those two post-particulative O’s that link the “love-moody” Troilus to the “dog-fox” Ulysses.
But before we get to how such an apprehension may be an even greater moral factor, a few more examples of how our prof’s insistence on seeing specific characters as “representative” of universal human liabilities simplifies and, well—given the apex-level of the things he’s dealing with—levels down the complexity of his chosen plays.
In The Merchant of Venice, he tells us, Shakespeare is “interested...in man’s attempt to become man and man alone,” a humanistic interest if there ever was one. “He was of the conviction that…when confronted with one another” directly, different principles “must necessarily quarrel.” OK; but on the way from this generality, our professor says that Antonio, whose Christian “sympathy cannot extend to a man who denies the fundamental principle of charity” (which would sort of make him unChristian), has “spit on Shylock.” But that isn’t quite so; Shylock does not say Antonio has spit on him. What he actually says is that Antonio has spit “upon my Jewish gabardine,” and that makes a very big difference.
Clothes determine persons in the play, and as they change, so do the persons. Portia and Nerissa “turn to men,” and Portia to a “doctor of Rome” by borrowing “garments” of Doctor Bellario; Launcelot goes from serving “the very devil incarnation” to serving one who has “the grace of God” by virtue of his changing liveries; Solario’s imaginary ship, “my wealthy Andrew” (which becomes a “her” in the next line), may “enrobe the roaring waters with my silks—
and, in a word, but even now worth this,
And now worth nothing?
I’ll stop there; but notice that the changes of identity involved with clothes in just these three instances pertain to gender, titles, profession, social status, hometown, economic standing, religion (“I am a Jew if I serve the Jew any longer”), and—“in a word”—words (“You call me misbeliever, cutthroat dog”…“and say there is much kindness in the Jew”). Oh, and let’s not forget Jessica, who, by dressing up as a boy, is “transformèd,” and becomes a Christian, a quarrel-free conversion she regards as a change of “manners,” which, whatever they may be, don’t seem much like our professor’s “principles.” No wonder, with all these markers of identity depending on outward show, that no one in the play knows who is what when they can’t see them, either because they’re actually blind, like Old Gobbo, who is in the play just to show that, or temporarily unseeing, as are Jessica and Lorenzo, at night—L: “Ho! who’s within?” J: “Who are you?”—until a torch is lit. Little candles really do throw their beams pretty far in this “naughty world,” where a few drowned silks instantly reduce your worth from “this” to “nothing.”
So whatever Shakespeare is “interested in” in this play acquires a very complex coloration, even from these few passages; indeed, a single right question—right because specific—to wit, “why the gabardine?”—lets us begin to see one of his interests very clearly, for in The Merchant, as in Troilus (“Have you any eyes, do you know what a man is?”), outward aspect, or “attribute,” is impermanent: there are no stable statuses. So one question, I do not say all, but a substantial subset of the plays of our poet (of whose life, thank God, so little is known that it relieves me of having to argue that by his name we are postulating an aesthetic physiognomy, not referring to an empirical person) is interested in, is what, if anything, is left of humans—of “man and man alone”—when all the changeful determinants are stripped off.
Well, in a naughty world—a world of naught, as Auden rightly construes it—you’d expect the answer to be, well, naught; that is, nothing. But that answer, too, needs some inflecting.
The question in question is raised in its epistemological aspect in The Winter’s Tale, as what is certain. No one agrees on anything in this play, and when they do, it is only for the playwright’s purpose of proving them wrong, mistaken, or deceived. I don’t want to go through the innumerable instances of certainty being ascribed—to eyes, ears, noses, hands, the oracle (the two envoys who hear its voice are “ear-deafened” by it, and it’s a priest, not a god, who hands them the envelope)—only to be retracted (“bare eyes” by “the pin and web,” etc.); I want to go a different way, which touches more on our bungling prof’s procedures.
Now, The Winter’s Tale leaves the question of Hermione quite uncertain; but, either way, if she is guilty of adultery with Polixenes or not, there is a whiff of incest in the air. If she is actually guilty, and Polixenes is Perdita’s father, then Perdita and her intended Florizel are half-siblings. If Hermione is actually guiltless, then Leontes is Perdita’s father, and his suddenly leching vocally after the girl when he first sees her is simply incestuous. Our professor buys the “ear-deafened,” the-envelope-please-and-the-winner-is line—he finds Hermione “an unusually attractive, frank, intelligent, and open woman” (my itals, his “unusually”)—and explains the lech as “a gentle and ironic presentation of the perpetual Oedipus question.” But those strangely inapposite prerogative adjectives aside, the specific question is, why the lech in the first place? Why make incest an issue either way Hermione’s business is settled, only to squelch one possibility of its coming to fruition (but not the will to it) after two lines? The lech has nothing to do with the action or the characterization of Leontes. So why is it in this play?
Well, consider how little the bear who eats Antigonus is concerned that the human whose shoulder-bone he has just torn off is, as the man himself is at pains to proclaim with his dying breath, “a nobleman.” And consider how indifferently nature propagates “bastard” flowers, and “betters” herself in so doing, according to Polixenes anyway, who is, however, so attached to pedigree as to disown his son, “a scepter’s heir,” if he marries “a sheep-hook” (doubly fatuous, if Perdita is his—though blue-bloods have never been averse to a little inbreeding). Humans care about status and blood lines; nature does not. All “great creating nature” seems to care about is, well, creating greatly; and as far as that goes, humans may as well be as promiscuous as squashes, who are notoriously given to heterozygosis.
Now, epistemologically speaking, natural, on-going fecundity is the one thing in The Winter’s Tale constant enough to be verily known. Accordingly, the one thing everyone agrees on is the beauty of a fifteen-year-old girl’s fruiting body; and that is the only value our subset of plays finally arrives at. (Other plays that pose the question are Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens, and Coriolanus.) If, as Santayana says, “nature can never be man’s ideal,” then Shakespeare is no idealist. Nor is it likely that a poet whose ultimate value turns out to be one of the few things humans have in common with our frenemies the fungi (who, indeed, rank us, sporulation-wise) is the “inventor” of “the human” that a different, not-nearly-so deservedly eminent, Professor Bloom proclaims him to be. Our own professor defines nihilism as “a chaos of the instincts or passions...The soul becomes a repertory company that changes plays regularly—sometimes a tragedy, sometimes a comedy, one day love, another day politics...now cosmopolitanism, and again rooted loyalty...” and I would not, by these lights, so designate Shakespeare. Buu-ut...now “worth this,” then “now worth nothing,” then again “worth this”? Now girl, now boy, then girl? Now bosom-buddies, now enemies, now machetenim? Now nobleman, now dinner, now fertilizer? Well, if I don’t call that nihilistic, exactly, it’s because I want to call it nihiline, a word I just read somewhere, if I haven’t just made it up, and want to use, rightly or wrongly, for the pleasure of it. Nihiline.
Well, that was fun, but the point of this excursion has been that this prof’s treatment of some particular dramatic poems exemplified the catastrophe that befalls generalizers when they come down, with a thud, on the singular, in our case, when the generalizer begins from what he takes to be, and may even really be, the permanently moral, and subsumes under its categories the particularities of particular plays, without bothering to ask for the particular reasons those particular plays have for those particularities—why those two “O”s, that gabardine, that split second of Oedipal disinhibition. His philosophical bêtes noires are relativists, specifically historicists; but the same catastrophe afflicts this school of generalizers too, who, from their broad characterization of a temporally- and/or locally-defined context of some notional sort or other, venture upon the intrinsically unique; for whether it be in time or in eternity that either set their traps, the general will catch, in isolation from all the actually relevant others, only those particulars as are, or are imagined to be, or may not even be, or may not even remotely be, amenable to the terms of their chosen generalizations. And the same fallacy is called on by each school to justify the procedure: that the individual in question “represents” whatever generality they have it in mind to belabor.
Now, this gross misconduct is especially flagrant when the fish being fried are particular works of art, each of which is intrinsically integral, and unified on principles uniquely its own, and represents nothing but itself. But I said that our particular professor’s procedure exemplifies a wider intellectual liability, whose ill consequences are, let us say, a good deal more momentous. To characterize his method a little more closely, it seems to be something like deduction: it starts with abstract truths and deduces from them the categories and concepts under which all particulars are presumptively considered subsumable. And, as far as reasoning goes, his conclusions may well follow from his premises and be, to that extent, what logicians call “valid.” But, as we said, at a certain point there is a hiatus in the series—the point at which we cease dealing in general properties and propositions and come to what Cardinal Newman calls “concrete matter.” Ratiocination here requires more than intellection alone to save it from becoming unreal; it requires what his Eminence calls “the illative sense;” and whatever “illative” means here, it is the sense part that is relevant to the hiatus in question.
“Sense” is hard to define, and in art-cases, particularly so; the possession of it manifests itself in particular judgements of individual things, which must be as infinitely various as the things themselves; but one word Newman uses that is practically an alternative designation for it is tact—not the knowledge of, but the fingertip-feeling for, when, where and if general conclusions, however well-grounded in logic or experience, are to be applied, modified, inflected, or just plain dropped; and this touch our professor’s treatment of his subjects completely lacks: indeed, he could not have chosen a wronger poet for his ministrations than he did. To complete the quote which has given me my title, he comes to Shakespeare with a sense as cold
As is a dead man’s nose.
Now, Newman tells us that a person who possesses this sense in one field may lack it in all others, and it would seem that recognizing one’s own limitations in this regard requires a sense of the very same kind, which likewise might be lacking. When it is, and great intelligence fails to mind the gap between its deductions and individual cases, you get that peculiar combination of brain power and unreality I mentioned at the outset, that I have taken to calling the higher stupidity. You find it in literary critics, whose profound apprehension of Aristotle’s four-causal Poetics leads them to foist “plots” onto lyric poems; in Assistant Secretaries of State who are sure they know, and can control, what will happen in a country after they invade it and depose its regime; in economists who think that, economic rationality being eternally what it is, young people have children as a hedge against the high fees they anticipate paying for elder care sixty-five years hence—
But I won’t call the role of all the University of Chicago departments chargeable under this rubric. It would seem that the fundamental problem in all such cases is one of direction: instead of descending to particulars, such brainiacs might try staying by them long enough to make sure their hot-air gasbags are fully full before wafting off into the intense inane. But the particular-up direction may be bungled, too. In the case of art works, the problem is that any collocation of particulars must preserve the integrity of each individual, whole and entire—an integrity that makes them each, in the first and last analysis, to begin and end with, actually incomparable. What constitutes tact in such an operation is a feel for which works, when placed side-by-side, may so mutually inflect each other’s actual incomparability as to increase and refine our acquaintance with it just as in itself it actually is. Whether the subset of Shakespeare plays I floated above, starting as it did from some peculiarities of Troilus and Cressida, displays such tact or not, it at least remained cognizant of its own heuristic character.
But, of course, there is nothing in starting with particulars that requires going anywhere but to other particulars. The refusal of generality—of collocality, even—may strike moral absolutists and cultural relativists as irresponsible, but even my nihiline grouping is not without its moral significance, for nihilism, too, is a moral attitude, and it is well, especially paideia-istically speaking, to see it so nuance-laden-ly worked out. (We have come full-on to the “less” part of the “more or less” we started with.) But more: appreciating the thing before us, just as in itself it really is, is a taking on of responsibility for one’s relation to it, not a dodging of it. Another word for this act is attention, which, a philosopher tells us, is itself a moral act, indeed, the moral act, from which any action that is truly regardful must begin. And the open spirit that welcomes all such plural uniquenesses just as they are, and preserves them from being reprobated, faulted, dismissed, blended, pureed, liquified or, worse yet, impressed into the service of a generalized dogmatics of any ilk, was still truly abroad at UC when I was a student there, at least in the departments I hung around in.
About the Author:
Arnold Klein's work appears regularly in The Revenant Quarterly.