Introduction: A Sentimental Paradox

Abstract

I guess it is not totally unfair to suggest that the plot of The Tempest is folded somewhere within the following piece of dramatized casuistry:

What will the just man do, if he shall happen to have suffered shipwreck, and some one weaker than himself shall have seized the plank? Will he not thrust him from the plank, that he himself may get upon it, and supported by it may escape, especially since there is no witness in the middle of the sea? If he is wise, he must do so; for he must perish himself unless he shall thus act. But if he choose rather to die than inflict violence upon another, in this case he is just, but foolish, in not sparing his own life while he spares the life of another. (Quoted in Tuck, Philosophy 56)

The author of the discussion to which this fragment belongs is Carneades, the head of the sceptical Academy. The discussion, Richard Tuck explains, was recorded in a lost portion of Cicero’s De republica which was preserved and handed down to us by the Christian writer Lactantius. In the provisional logic of this analogy, the plank is the island, the just man is Prospero and the weaker man is Caliban. Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi supplies another suitable term of comparison, with a Hindu boy in the role of the just man, the plank turned into a raft, and the weaker man promoted to tiger.

To them virtue is whatever makes modest and tame; this is how they made the wolf into a dog and mankind himself into mankind’s favourite pet.

Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra