“Presumption is our natural and original malady,” wrote Montaigne, who never ceased to be astonished by our epistemological arrogance. In typically Montaignean fashion, he implies both condemnation of and forgiveness for this mortal failing. Presumption is our “original” sin—eating from the tree of knowledge—but it is also “natural,” unavoidable. James Kuzner cites this sentence from the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” in his ambitious and provocative new book, Shakespeare as a Way of Life (87). Shakespeare, suggests Kuzner, offers us ways to mitigate Montaigne’s “malady”—to embrace its more salutary effects. Kuzner argues that Shakespeare’s works—or at least the five works discussed here—promote a cognitive disorientation. This disorientation can be helpful in its unsettling or loosening of strictures upon conventional thought regarding love, freedom, selfhood, ethics: these works imply that an overconfidence in one’s assumptions about such matters can be disastrous. Kuzner posits that reading Shakespeare can help us to practice a profound epistemological humility, an acceptance, for example, of our inability to come down securely on one side or the other of the mind-body problem; to know what love is and how much self-mastery it entails; to codify systems of law and ethics based in sovereignty and self-identity; to decide what exactly freedom might mean and what metaphors it relies upon; or to read with anything approaching full hermeneutic confidence. These five topics form the central arguments of the book’s five chapters, on Lucrece, Othello, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Timon of Athens. Kuzner’s critical methodology is similar in each case: the Shakespeare text is placed beside a comparison text (the central ones are Cicero, Descartes, Paul, and Montaigne) in order to provide cross-pollination. The method can feel schematic, but this sense is leavened both by the wide array of other tangential materials brought to bear on the interpretations and by some fine close readings. Chapter 1 places Lucrece beside Cicero’s works in order to open up the question of “whether the self is unified or split, monistic or dualistic” (26). Evincing different positions across his writing career, Cicero provides Kuzner with a model of a “flexible, potentially pragmatic skepticism” in these matters (31)—one that can be therapeutic. In Lucrece, “Shakespeare declines any final decision about whether minds and bodies are divided or unified” (46), a suspension of judgment that “allows us to imagine alterations that would improve [the poem’s] world and ours” (158).

中文翻译：

---

莎士比亚作为一种生活方式：怀疑的实践和弱者的政治詹姆斯·库兹纳

蒙田写道：“假设是我们天生的、原始的病态，”他从未停止对我们认识论上的傲慢感到惊讶。以典型的蒙田风格，他暗示了对这种致命失败的谴责和宽恕。推定是我们的“原罪”——从知识树上吃东西——但它也是“自然的”，不可避免的。詹姆斯·库兹纳 (James Kuzner) 在其雄心勃勃且极具挑衅性的新书《莎士比亚作为一种生活方式》(Shakespeare as a Way of Life) (87) 中引用了“为雷蒙德·塞邦德 (Raymond Sebond) 道歉”中的这句话。库兹纳建议，莎士比亚为我们提供了减轻蒙田“疾病”的方法——接受其更有益的影响。库兹纳认为，莎士比亚的作品——或者至少是这里讨论的五部作品——助长了认知迷失方向。这种迷失方向可能有助于消除或放松对关于爱情的传统思想的限制，自由、自我、伦理：这些作品暗示，对这些问题的假设过于自信可能是灾难性的。库兹纳认为，阅读莎士比亚可以帮助我们练习深刻的认识论谦逊，例如接受我们无法安全地解决身心问题的问题；了解爱是什么以及它需要多少自我控制；编纂基于主权和自我认同的法律和道德体系；决定自由究竟意味着什么以及它所依赖的隐喻；或者带着任何接近完全解释学自信的东西去阅读。这五个主题构成了本书五章的中心论点，分别是关于卢克雷丝、奥赛罗、冬天的故事、暴风雨和雅典的丁门。库兹纳的批判方法在每种情况下都是相似的：莎士比亚文本放在比较文本旁边（中心是西塞罗、笛卡尔、保罗和蒙田），以提供异花授粉。这种方法可以感觉是示意性的，但这种感觉是由大量其他与解释相关的切线材料和一些精细的仔细阅读所引发的。第一章将卢克雷丝放在西塞罗的作品旁边，以打开“自我是统一的还是分裂的，一元的还是二元的”的问题（26）。西塞罗在他的写作生涯中表现出不同的立场，为库兹纳提供了一个关于这些问题的“灵活的、潜在务实的怀疑论”的模型（31）——一种可以治疗的模型。在 Lucrece 中，“莎士比亚拒绝就思想和身体是分开还是统一的任何最终决定”（46），