The Island, an Essay in a Tempest

The Island, an Essay in a Tempest

Dramatis Personae

Emerson, Horkheimer, Adorno, Roth, Prospero, Ariel. The Writer

(On a ship at sea; a tempestuous storm. Enter Roth and The Writer.)

Roth: Horkheimer and Adorno see progress? (Enlightenment?) as a kind of trap; discuss their thoughts in relation to another thinker  who also saw progress as a trap.

(A brilliant strike of lighting. Enter Horkheimer/Adorno)

Horkheimer/Adorno: Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. (Thunder) Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.

(Enter Ariel floating above the ship.)

Ariel: Where the bee sucks, there suck I; In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry. (He waves his hand and the storm worsens.)

Horkheimer/Adorno: (Astonished seeing Ariel. Faces.) Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge.

(Enter Emerson.)

Horkheimer/Adorno: Technology is the essence of this knowledge. It aims to produce neither concepts nor images, nor the joy of understanding, but method, exploitation of the labor of others, capital.

(The storm worsens.)

Emerson: At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage.

Horkheimer/Adorno: What human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings. Nothing else counts. Ruthless toward itself, the Enlightenment has eradicated the last remnant of its own self-awareness.

Emerson: The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit.

(The storm becomes violent.)

The Writer: We are about to die at sea. I need real help finding a balance between this ship and nature!

Horkheimer/Adorno: Nature, stripped of qualities, becomes the chaotic stuff of mere classification, and the all-powerful self becomes a mere having, an abstract identity.

Emerson: The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye.

The Writer: We are ALL about to die at sea.

Horkheimer/Adorno: The consequence of the restriction of thought to organization and administration, rehearsed by the those in charge from artful Odysseus to artless chairmen of the board, is the stupidity which afflicts the great as soon as they have to perform tasks other than the manipulation of the small.

Emerson: It will not need, when the mind is prepared for study, to search for objects. The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common. To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to our own door.

Horkheimer/Adorno: The regression of the masses today lies in their inability to hear with their own  ears what has not already been heard, to touch with their hands what has not previously been grasped; it is the new form of blindness.

Emerson: To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables. These wonders are brought to our own door… the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law.

The Writer: Gentlemen, we truly are ALL about to die at sea.

(Prospero appears. The ship vanishes. We are on a rocky island.)

PROSPERO: Be connected;


No more amazement; tell your piteous heart

There's no harm done.

Horkheimer/Adorno: The urge to rescue the past as something living, instead of using it as the material of progress, has been satisfied only in art.

Roth: (Re-appearing) Art rescues the past. This is important for Horkheimer and Adorno because the past contains alternatives to the status quo… The seeds of alternatives to the status quo.

PROSPERO: My charms I'll break, their senses I'll restore,

And they shall be themselves.

I have be-dimm'd

The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,

And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault

Set roaring war.But this rough magic

I here abjure; and, when I have requir'd

Some heavenly music-which even now I do-

To work mine end upon their senses that

This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,

Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,


And deeper than did ever plummet sound

I'll drown my book.

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Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

Shakespeare, The Tempest

Emerson, Nature

At Walden Pond

The present writer intentionally responds to prompts in forms that he hopes are unexpected.

(Lights slowly rise. An image of Walden Pond shrouded in early morning mist is projected across the back of an empty stage) 

Voice: How is the cultivation of self-reliance (in Emerson) a continuation of the Enlightenment tradition? Compare Emerson with at least one other thinker from the course.

(Enter Left Ken Ilgunas. He stares at the image of Walden pond in wonder and then sits, back to the audience facing the pond.)

Kant: (Off stage loudly) The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude!

(Enter Right Emmanuel Kant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau in animated discussion. Ilgunas stands to meet them.)

Kant: Have the courage to use your own understanding! Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another.

(Ilgunas and Thoreau recognize each other and sit down facing the pond.)

Emerson: But Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

 Kant: Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why such a large proportion of men gladly remain immature for life.

Emerson: Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.

Kant: There will always be a few who think for themselves, a public can only achieve enlightenment slowly. A revolution may well put an end to autocratic despotism, as in this Massachusetts, but it will never produce a true reform in ways of thinking. Instead, new prejudices, like the ones they replaced, will serve as a leash to control the great unthinking mass. If I have a book to have understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all to think for myself.

Emerson: A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

Kant: Yes, it is difficult for each separate individual to work his way out of the immaturity which has become almost second nature to him.  

Emerson: Yet, there is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. But I have not found that much was gained by manipular attempts to realize the world of thought.

Kant: In that we disagree, I believe that a philosopher should study Thought rather than Reality.

Emerson: I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me. I can very confidently announce one or another law, which throws itself into relief and form, but I am too young yet by some ages to compile a code.

(Lights dim on Emerson and Kant. Spotlight on Thoreau and Ilgunas who rise and walk Front Right in the spotlight.)

Emerson: ( As Ilgunas and Thoreau speak, Emerson softly repeats these lines over and over) We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal ONE. And this deep power in which we exist and whose beatitude is all accessible to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.

Ilgunas: I’ve read your books. Thank you, they opened a path for me that would have been harder to find without them.

Thoreau: How so?

Ilgunas: I was pushing carts at Home Depot to pay off college debt, and living a life of quiet

Thoreau: desperation? Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Ilgunas: I decided to free myself of debt by moving to the Alaskan woods and living by your principles of Economy.

Thoreau: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
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The Skin of our Teeth, Wilder

The Walden on Wheels, Ilgunas, 2013