Author: Simon Sheridan

I recently had one of those juxtapositions of experience which led to an epiphany, albeit an epiphany that I have been working towards for some time. Long-term readers would know that a large part of my writing and thinking over the last many years has been on the subject of “stories”. In fact, my first non-fiction book was called “The Plague Story” and featured my analysis of the covid hysteria as coalescing around a narrative about viral outbreaks that had been created by Hollywood. For the last half dozen years, I have been thinking actively about stories and discovering all kinds of new insights along the way.

My most recent book was on the stories of Shakespeare and included a chapter on Macbeth. I have probably read Macbeth more times than any other work of the Bard’s. Nevertheless, while I was having drinks at the pub with some friends recently, the subject of Macbeth came up, and, after about thirty minutes of intense discussion, I came to realise a new perspective on the story that I had missed. Despite all of my thinking about that particular story, I still had more to learn.

The juxtaposition came the very next day when I stumbled across a short clip of the famous conductor Leonard Bernstein talking about Beethoven. I won’t explain what Bernstein said, except to say that it was, in my humble opinion, bullshit. It reminded me of another video I once saw of Bernstein where he was trying to explain music theory in terms of Chomskyan linguistic theory. This idea was also, in my humble opinion, bullshit.

Bernstein’s tenuous ideas about music reminded me of a quote attributed to John Lennon which reads, “Writing about music is like talking about f**king”. A more polite version of the same idea goes “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. The underlying meaning is the same: there is nothing to be learned by writing or thinking about music. Leonard Bernstein’s vacuous ramblings about Beethoven are prima facie evidence for that. But the Macbeth revelation that I had experienced in the pub showed that the same was not true for stories. It seems that writing and thinking about stories is different from writing and thinking about music.

This led me to the following hypothesis: of all the art forms, only stories require thinking. To say it more precisely, thinking can enhance our understanding of art forms involving stories. For all other art forms, thinking detracts from our understanding and appreciation. John Lennon’s assertion that it is worthless to think about music applies equally to painting, sculpture, dance, architecture, etc., but it doesn’t apply to stories. The question is: why?

Let’s go back to basics. A work of art is always experienced in the first instance. While we are experiencing it, we are not thinking about it. Thinking comes later. Thus, the kind of thinking that we are talking about is reflective in nature. This is different from mathematical or logical thinking, which is not applied to experience. The kind of thinking we do about art has much more in common with the scientific method in that it begins with observation and experience and then afterwards tries to make sense of it.

Listening to Beethoven or John Lennon is an experience. The question is, can thinking enhance our understanding and appreciation of that experience? You can test this idea for yourself. Have you ever heard a piece of music, thought about it for a while, and then gone back to listen to it again, and felt as though you appreciated it more? Lennon’s point was that this doesn’t happen. Therefore, all writing and thinking about music is worthless.

Here we must be careful to distinguish between a related way we attune ourselves to music. When you hear a piece that you really like, you want to listen to it again. The next time you listen, you remember something of what you heard the first time. After repeated listens, you come to know which parts are your favourite, and you look forward to them. If we agree that this amounts to an enhancement of appreciation of the artwork, we can also agree that it comes not from thinking but from memory. It’s the same kind of memory that we may use to determine what sort of food we like to eat or what climate we enjoy. It is not an exploratory kind of thinking like science.

There is another kind of thinking about music we can do which is exploratory in nature. It’s the kind that Leonard Bernstein was doing in his interview about Beethoven. He referred to the technical aspects of Beethoven’s work, specifically the use of melody and harmony. This is the most common kind of thinking that is done about works of art. It relates to the technical aspects of the art form. Thus, we can think about Van Gogh’s brush technique, the use of the chorus in Greek tragedy, or Michelangelo’s methods for choosing the right marble.

However, this kind of thinking is still not what we are looking for because it does not enhance our understanding of the artwork itself. Thinking about the technical aspects of art may enhance our understanding and appreciation of the artist, but not the artwork. The same is even more true for the more abstract kind of thinking embodied in Bernstein’s conjecture about how the “music faculty” is related to the linguistic. Even if that were true, a knowledge of it in no way enhances our understanding and appreciation of Beethoven’s 9th symphony.

The same goes for all of the philosophical, sociological, psychological, economic, political, or other thinking that gets applied to art. Whatever the validity of these in and of themselves, they make no difference to our appreciation of art. In fact, they may actively harm that appreciation if we find ourselves no longer even experiencing the artwork anymore but only thinking about it.

Thus, I agree with John Lennon. Listening to music is an experience, and that experience cannot be enhanced via thinking. I argue that the same is true of poetry, dancing, painting, sculpture, etc. As far as I can tell, the only kinds of art which require thinking are those which feature stories. This includes literature, film, theatre, and opera. But I would go one step further. Not only does thinking and discussing a story enhance our appreciation of it, for the truly great storytellers like Shakespeare, it is the only way to understand the deeper meanings.

The reason for this relates to the nature of stories themselves. A story is about the transformation of the hero and their world. The transformation includes potentially all aspects of what it is to be human. Therefore, to understand a story, we must understand what it is to be human. The problem is, we don’t really know what it is to be human. The behaviour of other people and even ourselves is a constant source of confusion and misunderstanding. How do we resolve that confusion? By thinking and talking about it.

Well, the exact same thing holds for a fictional story. It holds all the more for the greatest of stories because the truly great storytellers push the boundaries of our understanding. They force us to think. The kind of thinking they force us into is about what it means to be human.

Now, in relation to an understanding of story-as-art, there is a subtle but crucial point to understand. The thinking we do about a story enhances and deepens our understanding of the artwork itself. You read Macbeth and then reflect on what it means. This thinking feeds back into the next reading, where you notice things you missed the first time. New problems arise which lead to more thinking. Each of these iterations reveals to us more about the story itself. That’s what I mean when I say that thinking enhances our understanding. That is the big difference between thinking about stories and thinking about any other art form.

If we agree that thinking about stories is necessary to reveal the deeper meanings contained therein, it is nevertheless true that the kind of thinking done about stories by the intellectual classes of society has almost entirely fallen into the same traps mentioned above. It has concerned itself with either the technical aspects of the art form or with extrapolating to larger socio-cultural issues. Therefore, most of the intellectual thinking that has been done has not enhanced an understanding of the artwork itself. This was the realisation I came to when researching my recent book on Shakespeare.

Intellectuals have only ever been interested in stories as a quarry for various ideological agendas. They haven’t been concerned with stories in themselves. Therefore, their thinking about stories has been almost as worthless as thinking about music. The irony is that the average person who doesn’t think too hard about stories at all has a better understanding than the intellectual because the average person sees in a story what is really the core of it, namely, human being and transformation. To use a popular modern concept, the average person empathises with the hero of a story.

Nevertheless, it is true that the intellectual approach is not entirely without merit. The problem occurs when the intellect imposes itself on a story rather than following from an empathetic appreciation. The kind of thinking that is required to enhance our understanding of stories is empathy in the widest sense. We need not just feel with the hero for the story but think with them too. What problems do they face? What challenges? What opportunities excite them? The intellectual approach must begin as a kind of intellectual empathy.

Thinking about stories is synonymous with thinking about human nature. It must be holistic and integral in nature rather than the fractured approach of modern scholarship. It must also be iterative because only by repetition can we work our way from partial and incomplete understanding towards holistic and integral. First and foremost, though, it must stay focused on the story itself, and that means on the journey of transformation that the characters go through.

Quite by accident, I have been building my way towards a methodology of story interpretation over the last many years. In recent months, I have been trying to think of a name to give and the title Existential Hermeneutics popped into my head. Hermeneutics is the study of the interpretation of texts and existential is a reference to the existentialist movement in philosophy, which foregrounds human nature and experience. Thus, Existential Hermeneutics is a way to think about stories that begins with the human and only extrapolates from there to larger questions.

The next question I have been asking is how best to present these ideas. Earlier this year, I ran a couple of online study groups on King Lear and Hamlet, and I really enjoyed those. In addition, I have also participated in a couple of study groups run by others, which were also very rewarding. I found real-time discussion to be more lively and energising than the asynchronous nature of blog posts. Of course, it’s also the case that we now live in a world where blog posts are prime candidates for the industrial-scale IP theft ushered in by LLMs. Any new ideas placed in blog posts are only going to be stolen by big tech.

For these reasons and more, what I would like to do is to try another online study group to introduce the core ideas of Existential Hermeneutics, the study of how to think about stories. The basic concepts are as follows:-

• Story as transformation
• Transformation as a qualitative structure of time
• A basic model of identity
• Archetypes as stereotypical identity
• Archetypal identity change over time
• Identity of microcosm (hero) and macrocosm (world).

If all that sounds very abstract, fear not. I want to take a practical approach to the study group, introducing the concepts through exercises rather than theoretical reasoning. To facilitate that, we’ll engage with the concepts through the study of a story, but this time I’ll use something much simpler than Shakespeare, probably a Grimm fairy tale.

With that said, I would like to extend an invitation to all readers to participate in the inaugural short course on Existential Hermeneutics. It will run for six weeks. Each week there will be a short exercise to carry out and a brief theoretical overview for context. We’ll hold the discussion via a group text-based chat on Discord. I’d also very much like to try and organise one or more videoconference sessions to discuss the ideas in real-time, but these will be completely optional. Because I’m still learning how best to structure the material, there will be no payment required.

So, if you’d like to enhance your thinking about stories, you can register your interest here. I’ll follow up by email to organise the logistics.

One of the paradoxes of modern Western civilisation is that we are simultaneously the richest and most powerful civilisation ever to have existed while also being in a perpetual state of anxiety and discontent. This seeming paradox is resolved once we understand our strange orientation to time.

Let’s begin with the three dimensions of time: past, present, and future. The modern West has a radical preference for the future, which is usually captured in the concept of “progress”. Importantly, even our so-called “conservatives” worship at the altar of progress because industrial capitalism is also oriented to the future. The pollution, inequity, and poverty that industrial capitalism introduced to 19th-century Britain were justified by the argument that it would all pay off in the long run. In some sense, it did. That’s a big part of the reason why we got used to believing that things would always be better in the future.

Let’s forget about politics for a second and ask the question: how do we attune ourselves to the past, present, and future in everyday life? There are two important ways that are relevant for this discussion.

The first is what happens when we lose something in the present. It disappears from the here and now and exists only in the past. The most important example of this is the death of a loved one. Lesser examples include the loss of a job, a home, a romantic relationship or a friendship. In all these cases, we feel grief. Grief is the loss (in the present) of what we love and care about.

The second way we attune ourselves to time relates to the future. This is necessarily much more light-hearted because the future hasn’t happened yet and any idea we have about it is just that: an idea. Ideas may come and go like clouds drifting across the sky. They have far less weight.

There is an important edge case to mention here because, especially in the modern world, we are always chasing the future and we sometimes put significant time and energy towards ideas that never come to fruition. In that case, we may feel grief when the idea fails, but this grief is still predicated on having lived the ideal for a time. It’s because it became part of our lives in the present that we grieve its loss.

Let’s now consider how these two orientations to time play out in the modern West. On the one hand, both progressivism and capitalism are perpetually liquidating the status quo in service to the future. This involves the loss of the present in terms of institutions of society, technological change, and even our understanding of the world. When we lose something in the present and thereby relegate it to the past, this should trigger a grieving process.  But that’s only true if we had actually loved whatever it is that has gone away. Sometimes, it’s not obvious that we did love it and we have to come to terms with our real feelings.

The reason why we call it a “grieving process” is because it takes time to understand what we loved and why we loved it and then to reorient ourselves to its loss. Modern society prevents the grieving process in two main ways. First of all, there are entire industries whose purpose is to produce propaganda to convince us that what has been lost was not worthy of love in the first place and therefore should not be grieved. In its most absurd manifestation, this dynamic promotes the idea that the West itself is fundamentally evil and should be replaced. If you’ve been taught to hate something, it follows that you won’t grieve for its loss.

The second way we prevent the grieving process from occurring is the frantic pace of modern life which marches ever onwards towards the glorious future. This also takes the form of the endless propaganda that promulgates new ideas about this or that technological breakthrough. While we focus on dreams of the future, we are not concerned with the present or the past.

Still, it may well be that these problems are not unique to the modern West. The grieving process is fragile and uncertain. It is also very much dependent on the individual. Shakespeare knew that because it’s one of the main themes he explores in the story of Hamlet. The young prince is grieving while everybody has already got on with life. There can be no question of a lack of time because there has been a one-month mourning period for the dead king. Nevertheless, even Hamlet’s own mother has failed to grieve. Shakespeare strongly hints that this is not due to a lack of love but a simple desire to avoid the pain. True grief is painful, and there is a natural tendency to avoid it.

So, perhaps the modern world is not fundamentally different to earlier times except in the sense that we have so much more to grieve because the frenetic pace of change is constantly sacrificing the present to the future, and thereby constantly relegating to the past things which we care about.

That’s the thing about grief: you can try to ignore it, but it sits at the back door like a hungry puppy dog scratching to come inside. That hungry puppy is the ever-present discontent that accompanies modern life.

Life has once again intervened, this time not in a good way. As a result, I’ll need to take a few weeks away from the blog. I aim to be back in early August. See you then.

It became clear to me while working on my most recent book on Shakespeare that the Bard had already anticipated all of the core themes of what is now called existentialism – the philosophical movement that places, in Sartre’s pithy phrase, existence before essence. The German philosopher Heidegger is one of the core exponents of existentialism and one of his primary concepts was that of Dasein.

For those not familiar with Heidegger’s thought, a good first approximation of the meaning of Dasein is just “human being”. For a variety of reasons, Heidegger wanted to avoid the use of the word “human”. One of those is that he was arguing against “humanism” which he saw as being grounded in the metaphysical tradition that began with the Romans, continued through medieval Christianity, and ended up in modern science.

Heidegger’s notion of Dasein posited both qualities of humanity that had gone unnoticed and also contained a more positive vision for a new kind of life that we could embrace in the modern world. When I say that Shakespeare had already introduced that positive vision, I mean that his works imply the unique qualities of Dasein. In this post, I’ll demonstrate what I mean by applying just two of Heidegger’s most easily understandable ideas to the character of Macbeth.

The first concept we need is “thrownness” (Geworfenheit). Self-evidently, we are thrown into the world at birth. We get no choice in the matter. We are born and we must learn to deal with the situation. That is true in the biological sense that our bodies must adapt and acclimatise. It is also true in the social and familial senses. Our thrownness includes an entire set of socio-cultural relations and practices that we also do not choose but which we must learn to live with. Childhood and adolescence are the phases of life where we must get up to speed with the world around us and learn to fit in.

Of course, even young children are not completely powerless in the world. This raises the second concept of projection (Entwurf). We are thrown into a situation, but we are able to project goals, desires, and plans onto the world. Young children quickly learn that crying is a way to get what they want because when they cry, their parents will attend to them. That is a form of projection in Heidegger’s sense.

There’s an interesting philosophical problem here as relates to whether projection is a uniquely human trait. Doesn’t a pride of lions have a goal in mind when it hunts wildebeest? Doesn’t a spider project its web before spinning it? We might want to say that this kind of animal behaviour is carried out by instinct. In that case, what is missing is consciousness.

Whether consciousness is required for projection, it is nevertheless true that consciousness is a crucial part of existentialist ideas. The kind of projection the existentialists have in mind is active in the sense that it is deliberate as opposed to the passive or reactionary nature of instinctual behaviour. At least in his earlier philosophy, Heidegger foregrounded the notion of self-creation through projection. Sartre and others did the same.

One of the reasons why Shakespeare can be seen as a direct precursor to existentialism is because all of his greatest heroes are uniquely conscious of their situation (their throwness) and are trying to create for themselves a new identity (projection). However, even within the Shakespearean canon, Macbeth stands out as an exponent of self-creation because he tries to create for himself an identity that is forbidden to him. He wants to become king. More importantly, what Shakespeare shows us is the manner in which Macbeth firstly projects that identity and then wrestles with the issues raised by his own desire. That is why Macbeth is the consummate existentialist hero and an exponent of what Heidegger would later call Dasein.

Existentialism says that we are thrown into the world at birth and we must learn to adapt to the physical, biological, and socio-cultural milieu in which we find ourselves. This adaptation is a necessary part of growing up. However, it can lead to a form of living that the existentialists called inauthentic. Inauthenticity is the passive acceptance of our thrownness. We learn to fit into the world by shrinking ourselves down, curbing our desires so that we become unthreatening. By contrast, the authentic form of life is to take full possession of our projective capacities and create our own identity.

It can’t be a coincidence that arguably the two most important historical figures that inspired both existentialism and modern Western culture more generally were Socrates and Jesus. Both of them lived authentic lives which brought them into opposition with their societies to such an extent that those societies had them put to death. Thus, although it might sound nice to want to live “authentically”, in fact, it invariably brings us into conflict with friends, family, and the wider culture. In the most extreme examples, this conflict involves the potential of death. The most authentic form of being occurs when we are willing to place our lives on the line. That is why the subject of death takes an elevated position in existentialist thinking.

That is another reason why Shakespeare can be seen as an existentialist because he makes all of his greatest heroes put their lives on the line by pursuing a course of action that brings them into conflict with society. Macbeth stands out here also because his desire brings him into conflict with his own king and therefore the entire set of socio-political relations that forms the world into which he was thrown at birth. Let’s begin our exploration by understanding the world into which Macbeth is thrown.

Remember, thrownness is about the world we are thrust into at birth, which we have no choice about, and which we must spend the early part of our life learning how to navigate. Macbeth is born into the aristocracy of feudal Scotland. The social role of an aristocratic male of that era entailed military training as well as learning how to govern one’s estate. Macbeth has the title of thane which he would have inherited from his father. He is expected to do his duty to carry on the tradition of his family.

The role of thane had a key place in the larger system of social and political relations known as feudalism. A thane owned land and had to manage that land in order to contribute to his society economically. A thane needed military training so that he could perform when called upon by his king. Since Macbeth is cousin to King Duncan in the story, it is clear that he is a direct retainer of the king and must have sworn personal allegiance to him, probably at a young age. Macbeth is duty-bound to follow the instructions of his king.

Our throwness does not remain fixed throughout our life. It changes and evolves over time. In Shakespeare’s play, Macbeth’s throwness at the beginning of the story includes the fact that he is an experienced warrior probably in his 30s or 40s. King Duncan’s kingdom is under attack from a combination of Norwegian invaders and traitorous thanes. A crucial battle is underway and the enemy is winning. At the last moment, Macbeth and his best friend Banquo snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

What does this show? It shows that Macbeth is a faithful, loyal, and powerful servant to his king. His military prowess has been the difference been victory and defeat. He is also a good friend to Banquo and a good husband to his wife, having earned the spoils of war and increased the size of his estate. By the classical standards of the ancient and medieval worlds, Macbeth is a paragon of virtue.

What Shakespeare gives us in the opening scenes of the play is a model of the ideal warrior. But the story of Macbeth is not a medieval myth where the good guys defeat the bad guys or where the hero dies a glorious death. The Bard gives Macbeth a completely different challenge, one that is perfectly in keeping with later existentialist ideas. Macbeth is going to attempt to live an authentic life by creating his own identity.

To understand this, we must bear in mind that authority in the feudal system was absolute. The king’s command was the equivalent of the word of God. Macbeth may be the greatest warrior in the kingdom, but he did not choose the war. Rather, he was following orders from Duncan. Similarly, his receipt of the spoils of war comes not because he takes them but because Duncan bestows them on him. In fact, what Duncan is bestowing on Macbeth is more responsibility and therefore more subservience.

Now, we may say that all of this is exactly how it should be. Macbeth has proven his valour and his loyalty. A just society should reward such men and promote them to the highest offices. Existentialism is not concerned with those kinds of questions. It proceeds from the starting point of the individual, not the public good.

It is natural for us to embrace the thrownness of our existence. Our parents, our friends, and our society all want us to fit in. Most people also have a strong desire to fit in. This is especially true of the adolescent period of life, where being excluded from social groupings can be a major blow to self-esteem. Not only do we try and fit in, we usually try our best to excel.

That is what Shakespeare shows us with Macbeth. To be born a thane is no great achievement. It is just an accident of birth. Macbeth’s excellence as a warrior is something he must have attained through training and dedication. He has excelled in life, but his excellence has been entirely in service to his society. Therefore, Macbeth has only ever done what he was told to do. There is no ambiguity about that. It is exactly his role as a retainer to the king.

Let’s recall the existentialist ideas around projection and authenticity. Projection is about the goals that we pursue in life. Every society has a set of default social scripts that constitute a kind of projection because they set goals for us. We should grow up, get married, find a job, get a house, etc. To the extent that we adopt and embrace these goals, society will reward us in just the same way that King Duncan rewards Macbeth following the battle.

Providing rewards for performing well on command is how we train dogs or other animals. It promotes mindlessness. That is why, viewed existentially, Macbeth has been living unauthentically because he has always been following someone else’s orders and being rewarded for performing well on command. The projections that Macbeth has been following are only those given to him by society.

If Macbeth is going to live authentically, he needs to start to set his own agenda and to create his own identity. That is where the classic scene from early in the play comes into the picture. The three witches plant a different idea, a new projection, into Macbeth’s mind: the idea of becoming king. In order to achieve that, however, he will need to go against his society for the first time in his life.

Let’s set aside here all the debates about who is responsible for this idea. An argument can be made that Macbeth has simply swapped one set of ideas that were not his for a different set. You can say that the witches and Lady Macbeth have now taken over his projection. However, that misses the crucial point. What is required is for Macbeth to take responsibility for himself and, for a brief time in the story, that is exactly what he does.

Responsibility is a core concept in existentialism. If you are going to create yourself, then it is self evident that you must take responsibility because there can be nobody else to blame. The reason why people prefer to live inauthentically is precisely because they avoid responsibility. That’s what the Nuremberg defence is. I was just doing my job. I was just following orders. Society gives us readymade excuses by which we can justify our actions, allowing us to place the blame elsewhere.

Thus, if Macbeth is going to live authentically, he will need to take complete responsibility for his actions. One of the ways that Shakespeare shows us that is by giving Macbeth no ulterior motives for either his behaviour or for his desire. To understand that, we can contrast Macbeth with two other characters from Shakespeare’s oeuvre: Richard II and Henry IV.

Richard II is a bad king who treats Henry Bolingbroke unjustly. Bolingbroke uses this as an excuse to lead a rebellion. After the success of the rebellion, he takes the throne for himself. Did Bolingbroke always want to be king? Did he just use Richard II’s injustices as an excuse to take power? That is what Shakespeare implies in Henry IV. If that’s true, we say that Bolingbroke acted inauthentically. He lacked the courage to admit to himself what he really wanted.

Such excuses are entirely absent in the story of Macbeth. Duncan is a good and just king who handsomely rewards his servant for his valour in battle. Macbeth fully acknowledges that he has no personal grounds against the king, and there are no larger social, political, or moral reasons why Duncan should be deposed. Because there are no ulterior motives in play, Macbeth has no choice but to confront the truth of his own desire. He simply wants to be king. There is nothing more to it.

As a result, Macbeth’s desire has a childlike quality to it. Children simply want what they want. They feel no need to make excuses why. It is mostly during adolescence that we are taught the social scripts that we are to follow, and these amount to a series of ulterior motives. Why do I need to be educated? So you can get a job. Why do I need a job? So you can earn money. Why do I need money? So you can buy food and shelter. To a very large extent, learning to be an adult is learning to follow this chain of ulterior motives. In civilisation, this chain becomes so large that we get lost in it and we justify all of our actions according to ulterior motives. We never do anything Just Because™.

Authenticity in the existentialist sense is predicated on rediscovering the simplicity of wanting something Just Because™. Shakespeare shows us this by giving Macbeth no ulterior motives at all. He simply wants to be king. There is no further explanation. Because of that, Macbeth cannot make any excuses either to himself or to his society. There is not a single reason he can use to convince others why he should be king.

That brings us to yet another core existentialist concept: conscience. Macbeth cannot justify his desires or actions to anybody else, but he does engage in a magnificent battle with his own conscience both before committing the fateful deed and then immediately after. That is what makes him authentic in the existentialist sense.

Children want something Just Because™ and have no moral qualms about getting it. The same is not true of adults. Adults must take responsibility for the consequences of their actions. That is why it is far more difficult to live authentically as an adult. Not only will society punish us, we are also answerable to our own conscience for the consequences of our actions. What the existentialists noted, however, was that most people never activate their conscience. They live entirely according to the rewards and punishments of society. That is why, in Kierkegaard’s phrase, it is a blessing to despair. The battle against one’s own conscience is greater than any fought on a the field of war.

From an existentialist point of view, Macbeth’s downfall in the second half of the play is precisely that he stops listening to his conscience. Instead, he places his fate entirely in the hands of the three witches and their magic. Macbeth fails the existentialist test by returning to inauthenticity. He starts the play blindly following his king and ends it blindly following the three old hags.

What distinguishes Macbeth, however, is that he makes the attempt to live authentically by honestly confronting his own desire and weighing it against his conscience. He fails the test, but not in the way that most people imagine. To become king (of yourself) implies that there is no higher authority you can turn to for atonement. That is why existential responsibility is an enormous burden and why even the great warrior Macbeth scampers back to the witches to try and escape it.

Schadenfreude (n.): the feeling that Australians get listening to Northern Europeans moan because the temperature got above 30 degrees for a few days

We all need to have a few vices in life. One of mine is the pleasure I get every few years or so when there’s a European “heatwave”. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I get to sit back in the mild temperatures of a southern Australian winter and watch the British or Germans take to social media to complain about the heat.

That would be fun enough, but it gets even better when the Americans chime in with the inevitable, “Why don’t you just install air conditioners?” Apparently, air conditioning is an article of faith in the US. Everybody has the right to life, liberty, and a split system in every room of the house. To be deprived of temperature control is the equivalent of a human rights violation. Thomas Jefferson hand built the first ever air conditioner for his home, Monticello, didn’t you know?

In fairness, air conditioning tech was largely developed in the USA, so Americans do have reason for patriotism there. Perhaps that has something to do with why Europeans have come to despise it. For them, air conditioners are apparently the primary cause of global warming. Installing one is akin to murdering your firstborn child.

The issue of European summers has some personal relevance for me. I am genetically endowed with northern European skin. My dermatologist reliably informs me that I have the whitest skin it is possible to have without being an actual albino. That’s not good when you live in Australia. Not only are most parts of the country naturally sunny, but there are far stronger levels of UV than northern Europe.

As a result, it takes my skin only about 15 minutes of exposure to the Australian summer sun before it burns. Sunscreen can alleviate that problem, but it doesn’t prevent sunstroke. My only option is to remain covered when I go outside during the hottest time of the year. Spending a day in the summer sun requires military-grade precision planning: the right clothes, the right hat, water, deodorant, etc. That’s been my life experience with summers ever since I was a kid.

As a young adult, I happened to spend a couple of summers in Northern Europe. What a pleasure it was to realise that I could go outside for several hours without sunscreen and still not get burnt. That was true even when the temperature got into the mid-30s. Moreover, the weaker European sun meant that even the same ambient temperature never felt as hot as it would here in Australia. Suddenly, my genetic endowment was a blessing and not a curse.

All of this explains why I have some personal interest in European “heatwaves”. But this year was a little different because, at the same time as the heatwave and the associated online whining about it, I happened to be reading a short poem by Wordsworth, and I had a mini-epiphany that is relevant to debates around the environment, climate, air conditioners, and all the rest.

Readers will probably know that Wordsworth was the preeminent “nature poet” of the 19th century and one of the central figures in the Romantic movement in art more generally. In many of his poems, Wordsworth explicitly contrasts “nature” against what we might call “civilisation”.

Now, this little word “nature” is fundamental to the entire Western philosophical and intellectual tradition going back to the pre-Socratic philosophers. The ancient Greek word was φύσις or physis (pronounced “foo-sis”). It doesn’t seem to have been a widely used word at all, but it was adopted by the philosophers as a way to account for the fundamental properties of reality. For example, Thales said that water is the fundamental principle of matter.

It might seem obvious that Thales was using water as a metaphor, but no less an intellect than Aristotle took him literally and believed that he really was saying that water was somehow the fundamental principle of life. Since we can’t ask Thales what he really meant, it’s impossible to confirm either way. The same ambiguity holds for Wordsworth. Did he mean we really should “talk to the birds” in order to know what to do, or was he using that as a metaphor for following our instinct?

Whatever the real answer, it is clear that many people have taken Wordsworth literally. In fact, the modern environmentalist movement has been significantly influenced by Romantic art and especially the nature poets. Thus, our current debates about air conditioners are being conducted on intellectual premises that have been around for several hundred years and rest on a dichotomy of nature good/civilisation bad.

There’s a whole series of posts that could be written about the philosophical and scientific developments that led us to this point. For example, it cannot be a coincidence that the worship of nature began at the exact same time that modern physics was born. The word “physics” comes from the Greek word for “nature”. But ancient Greek physics was holistic and integral. By contrast, modern physics is reductionist and analytical.

Modern ideas about nature follows from this schism which has only gotten more pronounced with the continued advance of science and technology. Another way to think about it is that environmentalism and nature worship are irrational in direct opposition to the extreme rationality of modern science.

That is the broad philosophical background to the modern concept of nature. But what occurred to me when reading Wordsworth last week was something more mundane. Wordsworth famously lived in the Lake District of England. It’s a beautiful area. However, just like the rest of England, it is not what we would nowadays call a “wilderness” because it is the product of a very long period of human cultivation. Arguably, there is no wilderness at all in Britain or most of Western Europe.

Thus, for Wordsworth and the other European romantics, nature does not denote wilderness. It refers to a cultivated environment. By definition, a cultivated environment is human-friendly since it is humans who have been doing the cultivating. Therefore, a “return to nature” was not really about abandoning civilisation in general. Rather, it was a return to the pleasant and beautiful cultivated lands of the past.

Why was such a return necessary? Well, it is again no coincidence that nature poetry arose at exactly the same time that industrial capitalism first appeared on the scene. Men like Wordsworth had no direct experience of working in factories or anything like that. They were gentlemen of leisure. But they didn’t like what they saw, and who can blame them? The Lake District is self-evidently more beautiful than the slums of industrial Manchester back in the day.

The point is that the back-to-nature movement in Europe was always really a back-to-feudalism, at least in relation to the literal understanding of nature as the cultivated environment of the past. It arose in direct opposition to industrial capitalism, although, to make matters confusing, Romanticism was also in opposition to the old aristocracy which had formed the political basis of feudalism.

All of this made sense in the context of western Europe. But, at exactly the same time, a very different understanding was driving events in the USA, Canada, Australia, and similar places. The settlers in these regions were confronted with land that they believed to be uncultivated. Their mission was to cultivate it. At least in the United States, that is what mostly happened. For reasons of geography and climate, the mission was not carried out to the same extent in Australia and Canada.

It was only after this long period of cultivation was coming to an end that the concept of “wilderness” started to take hold of the popular imagination. With almost all land now turned to human purposes, leaving some areas untouched by human intervention was seen as desirable. Thus, there arose a subtle but important difference between “nature” and “wilderness”.

One of the defining features of wilderness is that it is a place that is inimical or at least indifferent to human life. To this day, Australia is famous for being a dangerous place filled with deadly creatures, but that is just because we still have huge areas of wilderness. The same is true in Canada and some parts of the US.

Therefore, it’s important to distinguish between the Romantic ideal of the return to nature, which was always primarily a European goal, and the preservation of wilderness which arose in the USA. One of the differences is in the poetry and art. The Romantic poets could write stanzas about listening to the wisdom of the birds, but, as far as I know, nobody has written a poem about the wisdom of bears, red-bellied black snakes, or box jellyfish.

The distinction between nature and wilderness has become largely confused in our time and it’s a good idea to learn how to spot the difference. The main nature or environmental movement (if it can still be called that) follows in the footsteps of Wordsworth and the romantics. It is mostly about ensuring that our lived (cultivated) environment is one that is conducive to human happiness. Often mixed in with it is a fringe movement that actually worships wilderness. Since wilderness is inimical to human happiness, this movement is really anti-human. It is an offshoot of modern nihilism.

The great air conditioner debate of 2026 fits mostly into the former category. Americans insist that aircon is conducive to human happiness. Europeans appear to be still toying with the Romantic idea that a return to feudal “nature” is possible and desirable (especially the Germans). To install air conditioners would be to admit that the “solution” to the problem is technology.

I don’t expect either side to convince the other and, in any case, I’m happy with the status quo. If Europeans installed air conditioners, then we wouldn’t get the pleasure of listening to them whine about the heat, and where would be the fun in that?