Category: Ideas

At the start of this year, I threw out an invitation to readers to join in an online study group on Shakespeare. At the time, I had come to realise that my own understanding of the Bard had been wrong, which took me down the path that led to my most recent book, released in April.

The study groups had a small number of participants, but the experience was invaluable to me because I came to realise that what I had to communicate was larger than a specific Shakespeare work, it was a new approach to interpretation altogether. Since then, I’ve come to realise the larger intellectual ramifications of that. There’s a reason why hermeneutics (the art of interpretation) was massively raised in importance in the early 19th century. More on that in future posts.

As a result of all these realisations, I came up with the idea of running an online course aimed at exploring both the work of Shakespeare and communicating the approach to interpretation that I believe unlocks the true meaning of his plays. I’m delighted to say that I now have that course ready to go. I’ll be conducting it through Substack under the name “Think Shakespeare”. An overview of the concept can be found here.

The first course will begin on November 2. As an introduction to the material, I’ll be presenting a series of essays over the next eight weeks where I explain the larger theoretical and historical background and why I think studying Shakespeare is not just worth it to enhance our appreciation of his works but has wider implications for how we think about the world.

These introductory posts will be published at the Think Shakespeare Substack and I’ll be cross-posting them on this blog. Here is the first one entitled “Shakespeare as Storyteller”.

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If you look up Shakespeare’s biography in an officially recognised source, you will see him described as a “poet”, “playwright”, or “dramatist”. The first of these epithets relates to the Bard’s poetic abilities. The latter two relate to the plays that he wrote for the theatre. Most people would consider these titles uncontroversial, but, as Shakespeare warns us in Romeo and Juliet, names are powerful and dangerous things, capable even of destroying the love between a Montague and a Capulet. We must learn to look beyond the names to the deeper meanings.

A name you won’t find applied to Shakespeare in any official publication is that of “storyteller”. That would only be used in an informal setting, and even then, it is highly improbable that anybody would think of it because there is no official role of storyteller in our culture. Again, most people would see no problem here. But our supposition at Think Shakespeare is that the absence of the concept of a storyteller is part of a larger blindspot in Western culture, and it is that blindspot that is holding back our understanding of the Bard. 

The truth is, we still don’t understand Shakespeare’s works. That is not just my subjective opinion. Arguably the two greatest Shakespeare commentators, A.C. Bradley and Harold Bloom, both expressed dissatisfaction with their accounts. Bradley was a professor of poetry. Bloom was a literary critic. Their specialities matched them to Shakespeare’s usual titles of “poet” and “playwright”, but I would argue that, although both men made advances in our understanding, they were held back by their scholarly straitjackets. 

We are Capulets, and Shakespeare is a Montague. If we are going to genuinely connect with him, we must do as Juliet does and see beyond the names that have been assigned to him. But we have a dual task of re-evaluation because we must also re-learn the concept of “story”. As every philosopher has always known, it is the most ubiquitous concepts that are the hardest to see afresh. 

Our task is twofold. First, we need to be clear about what a story is. Then, we apply that understanding to Shakespeare. We’ll begin with stories.

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Let’s say I wake up one day and decide I want to be an artistic painter. What is the one material I need? Everybody would agree that I need paint. In fact, paint is the minimum requirement to become a painter. Yes, a paint brush, a palette, and an easel would be very useful. A beret would help you look the part. A surly attitude mixed with an aura of dismissive superiority would round out the archetype nicely. But, really, paint is the one necessary ingredient. No paint, no painter.

If we ask the question, ‘What is needed to become a storyteller?’ some people might rush to the conclusion that the answer is ‘a story’. But that’s not right. The question we asked was about the materials required to create the end product, not the product itself. A painting is the end product made by a painter. In order to make it, they need paint. A story is the end product produced by a storyteller, but what materials are needed to make a story?

It turns out that the reason we don’t have a generic “storyteller” role in our culture is because we conceptualise storytellers based on the medium in which they work, and there are multiple different mediums in which to tell a story. We call Shakespeare a “dramatist” or “playwright” because he wrote stories to be performed in a theatre. We call somebody who writes stories for the page an “author”. We call somebody who writes stories for opera a “librettist”. A person who writes stories for film is called a “screenwriter”.

Those who have read Plato will recognise the nature of the problem. Almost every Platonic dialogue begins with Socrates asking the other characters for a definition and them replying with overly specific examples. We can imagine Socrates asking “what is a story?” and being told it’s a novel, or a film, or a libretto. He would calmly point out that these are all accidental properties of stories. The rest of the dialogue would then reveal the essential properties.

There’s a very good reason why Plato never wrote such a dialogue, however, and that is because the philosopher railed against the poets and playwrights, calling them “imitators”. Book 10 of The Republic is a famous diatribe that has been so influential in Western thought that, for more than two millennia afterwards, no scholar worth their salt paid the slightest attention to the question of artistic stories.

That is why we still have no good definition of a story. It is also why modern academia persists with the error of studying the medium and not the essence. Thus, we have scholarly disciplines dedicated to literature, film studies, opera, poetry, and even theology. What we do not have is any discipline concerned with stories.

A quite incredible fact follows from this: we still do not know the essence of a story. The Cambridge Dictionary defines a story as “a description, either true or imagined, of a connected series of events”. That is misleading at best. The real reason we don’t call Shakespeare a “storyteller” is because we couldn’t define what the title would mean anyway. 

Fortunately, in defining the problem we have also laid out the path to the solution. The true essence of a story cannot lie in the properties of the medium in which a story is transmitted. The essential properties must be found in what is common to all kinds of stories, including theatre plays, novels, short stories, fairy tales, films, operas, tales, epics, sagas, legends, yarns, fables, or any of the other countless words we have that all mean the same thing.

As it turns out, the Cambridge Dictionary definition points in the direction of the correct answer. A story is “a description, either true or imagined, of a connected series of events”. What connects the events of a story?

The answer to this was given in the middle of the 20th century by a scholar who was studying a specific kind of story, the mythologist Joseph Campbell. Campbell coined the phrase “the hero’s journey” and outlined a structure that every story follows based on an extensive cross-cultural survey. What he came to realise was that what connects the events in a “myth” is that they all lead to the transformation of the hero.

Because Campbell was working in the field of mythology, and because he was strongly influenced by Jungian psychology, his perspective was too focused and narrow. Nevertheless, he had stumbled on the answer to our question: what is the essence of a story? All we must do is generalise his insight appropriately. 

What connects the events in a story? They all describe the transformation of the hero. That transformation is not limited to psychology, as Campbell believed. It refers to the hero’s entire identity. Therefore, the essence of a story is that it describes the transformation of the hero’s identity. 

Note that this definition is inherently abstract, and that is what has made it so difficult to discover. This is especially true because the concepts of “transformation” and “identity” are themselves complex and therefore what looks at first glance to be a straightforward definition hides a great deal more. We will explore that in future posts.

For now, let’s now apply our definition to Shakespeare and see what it can tell us.

We mentioned earlier that both Bradley and Bloom were dissatisfied with their understanding of the Bard. But we can be more specific about the nature of that dissatisfaction. What has been misunderstood in Shakespeare are his heroes. In particular, King Lear and Hamlet have caused special trouble. T.S. Eliot went so far as to say that Hamlet was a failed work of art because he couldn’t understand the behaviour of the hero. Lear’s behaviour has been excused on the basis that he is a senile old man losing his mind. Hamlet’s behaviour has been chalked up to “depression” or “melancholy”.

Consider how surprising this is. Shakespeare’s works are intimate character portraits, and yet, we haven’t understood those characters. It is easy to see why books of philosophy or theology, with their opaque abstractions and mangled prose, have been misunderstood. But how can we explain our failure to understand the human characters in the works of arguably the greatest dramatist in history?

The situation is even more strange when we consider that most of Shakespeare’s plays are entirely about one or two heroes. The stories of Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth are exclusively about the titular character. Even when the hero is not on stage, the action revolves around them. The Bard’s works are not sprawling epics with a huge cast of characters and countless subplots. They are tightly woven narratives about a single individual. Yet we have failed to understand that individual.

Our failure to understand Shakespeare comes from our failure to understand stories because the true definition of a story is that it is about the transformation of the hero. We cannot understand the hero of a story unless we understand the transformation that they are going through. That has been the fatal flaw in Shakespeare interpretation. It has been made worse because the scholarly departments of poetry, literature, and mythology each have their own preoccupations that only distract from the true meaning. By interpreting Shakespeare as a teller of stories, we attack the problem at its source.

That is the approach we will be taking in this Substack. We will treat Shakespeare as a storyteller and thereby focus our attention on the core meaning of his works, not the mediums in which they are expressed. Shakespeare was originally performed in theatre. It wasn’t until the early 19th century that he began to be widely read. At that point, his works became “literature”. But nobody would say that a stage version of Hamlet means something different to the written version. The true meaning of the work lies in the story. If we want to find it, that is where we must look. That is what we will be doing in Think Shakespeare.

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Although these introductory essays are theoretical in nature, Think Shakespeare is not a Substack based around essays or blog posts. It is a practical course designed to teach the skills of interpretation required to understand the Bard’s works. It won’t tell you what to think about Shakespeare. It will teach you how to think about Shakespeare.

Courses will consist of a weekly guided overview, practical exercises, and an ongoing group chat. More details on how the courses will run can be found here.

The first ten-week course will commence on November 2, 2026. We will deep dive into Henry IV Part 1. For the rest of the first year, we will read Henry IV Part 2, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra.

Course material will be limited to subscribers only. Subscription options can be found here.

You may have noticed this: things change over time. Sometimes change is predictable because the “thing” goes through phases of change that are predefined in advance. Sometimes the change could have been predictable, but your mental model of the world doesn’t include the correct understanding. In that case, your observation of the facts is faulty because most of the time we don’t bother to separate observation from understanding. We “jump to conclusions”.

Long-term readers would know that I enjoy a spot of gardening. My garden has evolved over the years, mostly in response to me trying to figure out what I really want from it. In the early days, I had the great idea of growing lots of vegetables. Then I made a stunning realisation: I don’t actually eat a lot of vegetables.

My food preferences generally lie outside of the vegetable family. One of the places they do lie is in the fruit family. Thus, over the years, I have gradually added more and more fruiting trees and plants to the garden, and I now get tidy yields of apples, pears, citrus, almonds, olives, grapes, and berries.

Back in the early days, when I was still chasing the vegetable dream, I used to do a lot of composting. My skills improved over time, and I remember the proud day when I got my first compost heap above 80 degrees Celsius with the steam gently rippling off the top of the pile and the unique aroma that comes from astronomical numbers of bacteria having a giant party.

Then, something bad happened. The temperature of my compost heaps started to decline. I couldn’t figure out why. As far as I knew, I wasn’t doing anything different from the golden days, but I was struggling even to get a heap above 50 degrees.

Lower temperatures were one problem. A second problem was that my compost heaps were ending up much woodier than they used to be. It took me a while, but I eventually made the realisation that led to the answer. As the fruit trees in my garden had continued to grow, the amount of woody cuttings had also multiplied. I was shredding those cuttings and adding them to the compost heap. After some internet sleuthing, I realised the problem.

Compost heaps are bacteria driven, but bacteria cannot metabolise the lignin in wood. Since lignin makes up about 30% of the mass of wood, I had been adding a great deal of material to the compost heap that couldn’t be digested by bacteria. That’s why the temperature of the heap had declined. It was like I had organised a party but hadn’t purchased enough food and alcohol, so the guests went home early.

It turns out that the lignins in wood can only be digested by fungi. Fungi steer clear of compost heaps when they are hot, and it takes them a long time to digest the lignin even when they do eventually show up. That’s why my compost ended up woody. There would already have been fungi in the heap eating the lignin, but fungi are slow eaters. They’re like the guests at the end of the party who hang around endlessly instead of going home.

These realisations resolved my composting conundrum but now left me with the question of what to do with the woody waste from all my fruit trees, which was now the majority of waste from my garden. That led to the next revelation because it turns out that the bacteria-fungi distinction also relates to the way plants get their nutrition.

It’s only really in the last fifty years or so that we have come to realise that plants (and humans) are in a symbiotic relationship with countless microorganisms. Arguably the most important function of those relationships is digestive. Microorganisms break down certain types of food and make it available to the host entity. In doing so, they help provide nutrition to plants and animals.

It turns out that different plants and animals prefer different types of microorganisms. Vegetable plants rely on bacteria to help with nutrition, while fruit trees interact primarily with fungi. Thus, the reason why compost is beneficial for vegetable plants is because it is full of bacteria. If you add it to the soil, some of those bacteria quickly set up a symbiotic relationship with the growing plant. Meanwhile, trees rely much more on fungi in the soil.

The upshot of all this is that the natural way to make vegetable plants happy is to create a bacteria-rich environment for them in the soil, and the natural way to make trees happy is to do the same with fungi. How do you build up each group? Simple. You just have to feed them what they like to eat. Fungi like to eat lignins. Therefore, leaving wood waste on the soil encourages fungi. This is quite obvious if you think about it because where in nature does woody waste tend to fall except beneath the trees from which it came?

Thus, the minor and seemingly unrelated problem of the falling temperature of my compost heap ended up revealing a whole host of things I never knew about nutrition in general. It’s a nice example of how we come to learn the higher-level abstractions that really govern an activity.

For a beginner gardener, the commandment “thou shalt make compost” is a good one and has no real downsides. Eventually, however, you learn that what you are really doing by composting is feeding plants. Then you can go one step further and realise that you’re feeding the things that feed the plants (microorganisms). At an even more abstract level, that’s all gardening really is. You feed the things you want in the garden (including yourself) and you try not to feed the things you don’t want (“pests” and “weeds”).

I think there’s one other general lesson that my composting story reveals, though, which is that you shouldn’t ignore seemingly small problems. I could have continued to make compost heaps that only reached the mid-50s temperature-wise. The woody result I ended up with would still have been beneficial to the plants in my garden. But the irony was that, at the same time I was making woody compost, I was also buying in mulch to put around my fruit trees. I was feeding lignin to bacteria that didn’t want it and not feeding it to the fungi around the trees that did. In hindsight, the mistake is obvious.

Thus, an understanding of the higher-level principles ended up improving several different areas of my gardening practice. Nowadays, I use the woody waste from the garden as mulch around the fruit trees, which saves me money. Meanwhile, I put non-woody garden waste into a worm farm and use the castings and tea to fertilise the relatively small amount of vegetables I grow. It’s a much more elegant system. I don’t even make hot compost anymore, meaning I have one less physically-demanding chore to worry about. The lesson learned from resolving a seemingly small and isolated problem ended up having an outsized benefit.

In the last week or so there has been a veritable media frenzy here in Australia about an incident involving members of a football team, some professional strippers, and an undisclosed amount of Columbian marching powder. Apparently, the team decided to celebrate an important win by ordering strippers and blow to be delivered to their hotel room, which, I presume, is about as easy these days as ordering Uber Eats. Not only did the media get in on the story, both the prime minster and governor general of the country saw fit to comment.

Nothing could seem more remote from this incident than a treatise on political economy written two and a half thousand years ago in India. But stick with me and I’ll explain how the two are intimately related.

In his book, Kautilya asks the question, put very poetically in the English translation, “Should a woman be allowed to profit from her beauty?” In other words, should prostitution and similar activities be legal? Kautilya answers in the affirmative, but it’s his reasons for doing so that are relevant to our time.

As a quick bit of background context, Kautilya is the ultimate political pragmatist. Very much like Machiavelli two millennia later, he has no concern whatsoever whether a thing be true, righteous, or beautiful. He is concerned with one thing only: power. No surprise, then, that his main justification for the legalisation of prostitution is that it will allow the activity to be taxed, increasing state revenue. That is easy to understand. His other reasons are more subtle, and more interesting.

The first of those is that the regulation of an industry creates jobs – not jobs in the private sector, but government jobs. If you want to increase the power of the state, having more people on the payroll is an important way to do so. Lots of people on the state payroll means lots of latent support for the government. But it’s the kind of employee Kautilya was talking about that is important because what he had in mind were bureaucrats.

Here we must note another crucial piece of context. Northern India at the time Kautilya was writing (around 450 B.C.) had possibly the most sophisticated state bureaucracy in the world. At the very least, it was a strong rival for China. For that reason, Kautilya sees the growth of the bureaucracy as synonymous with increasing the power of the state. When you legalise prostitution, you create jobs for bureaucrats who have to regulate the industry. It is those bureaucrats who form the backbone of political support for the government.

The second reason why Kautilya recommends legalisation is that a prostitution industry under state control can be used for both espionage and blackmail. Ladies of the night may overhear valuable information about nefarious activities. Meanwhile, respectable citizens who value their reputation can be politically neutralised via honey traps. In both respects, the state gets more levers of power over private citizens. All of this implies the equivalent of modern intelligence agencies who belong to the state-controlled bureaucracy, which is exactly what existed at the time in India.

What has all this got to do with the modern West? Well, this is a topic I’ve covered in past posts, but I think it’s worth reiterating because it is not well understood that the kind of bureaucracy we now take for granted is a very recent arrival in Western society. It really only began to form in the middle of the 19th century, and its political domination only started at the end of WW2. Perhaps more importantly, its power has been accelerating in recent decades.

What is new for us is not new for India and China. Both nations already had complex bureaucracies at the time when Kautilya was writing. By contrast, the Western tradition has always been predicated on the Greek and Roman examples, neither of which had bureaucracy in any form we would recognise. It is true that the late Roman Empire from Diocletian onwards started to dabble with bureaucracy. But the centre of power had already shifted to the east by that time and the western empire collapsed shortly thereafter.

The Greek and Roman models were predicated on an independent citizenry and patronage networks based around military service. That was the way it worked in the ancient world and it was the same model that was adopted during the Middle Ages. Even proto-democracy in Britain and its colonial offshoots still operated mostly via patronage networks. It was taken for granted that whoever won office would reward their supporters with government jobs and contracts. Thus, even the democratic and capitalist revolutions had almost nothing to do with bureaucracy, which was a concept that was foreign to Western culture.

The foreignness of bureaucracy is demonstrated by the fact that the idea only came into the West via contact with China at the time of the Enlightenment. Thinkers such as Voltaire loved the idea. It’s no coincidence that those same thinkers were against democracy and capitalism. What they wanted was a political system almost identical to the one that Kautilya lived in, i.e., a king leading a large bureaucracy. Naturally, it would be the intellectuals who would work in the bureaucracy. The reason Kautilya is relevant to our time is because his vision for society is very similar to our modern “elites”. Just like him, their first and foremost concern is increasing state power, i.e. the power of the bureaucracy.

And this brings us back to the issue of the legalisation of prostitution. Kautilya recommended this measure as a way to increase taxation, expand the size of the bureaucracy, and keep powerful private citizens and groups in check. Here in the state of Victoria, the legalisation of both prostitution and other adult entertainment was carried out in 1994 via the Sex Work Act, which implemented licensing and registration requirements, all of which created jobs within the bureaucracy. In addition, money which used to flow entirely within the private sector could now be taxed thereby increasing government revenue. All of this is exactly what Kautilya would have recommended.

But it’s the other measure of control that most directly relates to the furore that erupted this week over the football players. With the legalisation of the adult industry, it is now the easiest thing in the world to call up some strippers and have them come over to your hotel room on a Sunday evening. It’s exactly the kind of trap you would expect foolish, overpaid young men with too much time on their hands to fall into.

All of this is a form of social control exactly as Kautilya envisaged two and a half millennia ago. Australian football enjoys enormous grassroots popularity, which gives it a great deal of power, both economic and political. That makes it a political threat. Incidents like the one that happened this week show the footballers who’s boss. It works, too. The executives at the Australian football league trip over themselves to demonstrate their fealty to the latest thing. It doesn’t matter how absurd the latest thing is. On the contrary, the greater the absurdity, the more fealty is displayed. That is how you kiss the ring of power in our modern bureaucrat-controlled society. Kautilya would approve.

This week I happened to stumble across a video, which is apparently a few years old, of Jeff Bezos talking about there being a trillion humans living on various colonies somewhere out in space. The claim Bezos made was that this would somehow give rise to a 1,000 Mozarts, as if the production of genius was some fixed statistical proportion of the total population and all you had to do to get more geniuses was to increase the number of people.

There have been many attempts to try and theoretically deduce how to produce human excellence. However, by now, we also have a great deal of empirical evidence that could be used to try and arrive at the answer inductively. I haven’t thought about this issue anywhere near enough to provide any answers. But, as a fun exercise, I decided to do a very quick bit of research. I took a list of geniuses and looked up the places where they grew up as children and then where they flourished as adults. Rather than do any kind of qualitative analysis, I decided to choose the single metric of population. Here is a table of the results with the populations of the various cities at the time the genius lived there:-

	Childhood and Adolescence	Adulthood
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Pericles, Sophocles etc.	Athens: 150,000 (30k citizens)	Athens: 150,000 (30k citizens)
Bacon	Rural England	Paris: 150,000
Aquinas	Rural Italy, Naples 40,000	Paris: 150,000
Michelangelo	Florence: 50,000	Rome: 55,000
Raphael	Urbino and Florence	Rome: 55,000
Da Vinci	Rural Italy	Florence: 55,000
Galileo	Florence: 75,000	Venice: 110,000
Shakespeare	Stratford: 2,000	London: 150,000
Newton	Rural England	Cambridge: 6,000
Descartes	Rural France	Amsterdam: 100,000
Goethe	Frankfurt: 36,000	Weimar: 9,000
Mozart	Salzburg: 16,000	Vienna: 200,000
Beethoven	Bonn: 10,000	Vienna: 250,000
Einstein	Munich: 250,000	Zurich: 150,000

Fun fact: when Newton moved to London later in life, it had a population of half a million. Newton spent three decades there and made no further advances on his work. Same thing happened when Einstein moved to the US.

Other notable numbers: Berlin had a population of 200,000 when Hegel and other luminaries were there. Königsberg had a population of 50,000 when Kant was there. Freiburg had a population of 110,000 when Heidegger was there. Leipzig had a population of about 40,000 when Wagner and Nietzsche were there.

It is strange how these numbers seems to coalesce. The pattern for genius seems to be that you are born in a smaller region where you cut your teeth and then move to the dominant city of the time to flourish. But the dominant city’s population is always in the region of 100,000, give or take. It’s also notable that almost all the cities in the list were undergoing rapid economic expansion at the time the genius was there, which I suppose provides the resources to nurture greatness. However, it’s clear that economic resources are not enough. Otherwise, the modern world would be swimming in geniuses. Of course, our dominant cities have populations in the millions.

In short, if Jeff Bezos wants a thousand Mozarts, simply increasing the population is not going to be enough.

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.