Ariel’s Levels of Consciousness
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published 09/10/2007
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SummaryWilliam Shakespeare’s extensive investigation into social life in his earlier plays allowed him to instead focus on the more complex topic of human consciousness, which he pursues through magical inhuman characters, in his final play The Tempest. In his book The Feeling of What Happens, Antonio Damasio expresses the different states of consciousness and selves from the autonomic proto-self, to the constantly changing core self, to the memory-based autobiographical self, and finally to the far-reaching extended consciousness. Shakespeare investigates consciousness through his magical character Ariel, who exhibits all the levels of consciousness to varying degrees. Ariel’s hyper active proto and extended consciousnesses allow him to control his shape and visibility and think of many creative ways to manipulate the other characters, but his core and autobiographical selves remain underdeveloped as they hinge on Prospero’s motivations for his actions.
Table of Contents
- William Shakespeare's extensive investigation into social life in his earlier plays allowed him to instead focus on the more complex topic of human consciousness, which he pursues through magical inhuman characters, in his final play The Tempest.
- Ariel's superhuman abilities extend from manipulating his body to make himself invisible to some people and visible to others, to transforming from an airy spirit to a nymph to a harpy
- Prospero demands that Ariel change his body's shape to that of a nymph and make it visible only to some people.
- Prospero commanded Ariel to create the illusion of a storm that wracked the king's ship and to leave the passengers in various groups scattered about the island.
- Despite Ariel's strong sense of his physical self and his well-developed extended consciousness, his core self remains weak. Damasio states that the core self 'provides the organism with a sense of self about one moment?
- Through his character Ariel, Shakespeare shows that, even though Damasio's levels of consciousness build on one another, one can exhibit varying quantities of each level of consciousness.
- In this way, Shakespeare shows that all power comes at a price, making one amazing in some areas and deficient in others.
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