Shakespeare’s 94-th Sonnet and Aristotle’s Excerpt About Great-minded: The Mystery of Similarity

Abstract

The philosophical moral ideal is being analysed through revealing the similarity of the idea and the fate of the two texts – the excerpt about the Great-minded from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and the 94-th Sonnet of Shakespeare. This ideal is seen as being opposed to so called sociological one and as defined by the moral subject’s sight which coincides with the optics of philosophy. The only possible content of such an ideal is the idea of subjectness, having oneself the source of the act and the whole world. And this idea is the kernel of the texts being examined which determines the likeness of their fates: the difficulties of the translation, rejection of the content being unacceptable for the everyday moral consciousness and language which leads to the mutilation of the translation and interpretation, irritating character, endless debates on the positive or negative character if the images, attempts to soften the most unacceptable statements, discredit by the suspicion in irony, search of the prototypes (coincident in Socrates), the critic’s desire to withdraw them from the collection of writings, the negative estimation of the authors.

The similarity of the fates is meaningfully determined by the fact that the ideal in the sonnet is the Aristotle’s aristocratic image of the great-minded. Shakespeare knew Nicomachean Ethics very well which is proved by both the direct reference to Aristotle and literal reproduction of his notions and ideas (such as ethics, virtue, act). The image of great-minded can be found in many of his works, for example in Coriolan. But it is in the 94-th Sonnet that great-minded has oneself as an absolute source, unmoved mover, moral subject, the lord but not a steward of own excellence.