Chapter 1: Overhearing Ourselves
November 26, 2024·29 comments·In Brief
Shakespeare wrote about human consciousness four centuries before we understood the brain. His contemporaries believed in animal spirits and humors. They had no language for the inner voice, no framework for how thought becomes action. Yet his characters developed psychologically in ways no dramatist before him had achieved. The paradox: he invented something true about being human without possessing the knowledge that should have been necessary to do so.
• Medieval and classical theater presented characters who unfolded according to fate or virtue, not who developed through internal change. Oedipus does not choose to fulfill the prophecy; fate pulls him forward. Everyman does not wrestle with conscience; he merely encounters allegorical figures representing moral concepts. These plays lacked a model for consciousness itself.
• Shakespeare's characters are different because they overhear themselves thinking. In soliloquies, Hamlet speaks his own inner voice aloud and listens to it. He tells stories about the man he is, then becomes someone different because he heard that story. The device is both internal and external at once.
• This form of self-overhearing required no new understanding of neurology or philosophy. Shakespeare worked within the same Galenic framework as every educated man of his era, believing in humors and animal spirits. He didn't need to understand the brain to fashion a working model of how consciousness operates through language.
• The mechanism reveals something deeper about what humans actually are. We revise ourselves through stories. Some people, like Hamlet, search for stories that will move them to action. Others, like Iago, tell themselves post hoc rationalizations of acts they've already committed. Both are storytelling, both are human.
• If story is the language of consciousness itself, then how we tell stories becomes a question about what we're becoming. The piece ends by suggesting this isn't a historical curiosity about Renaissance drama. It's a question about what happens when the platforms for storytelling change and the stories being told shift.
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