Fragment 213, Word count: 249.

Tags: Subjectivity, ideation, emotion, drama, futurity, existence, Shakespeare, The Tempest.

“We are such stuff as dreams are made on …”

In commentary about this line from Shakespeare’s The Tempest emphasis is placed on human existence as a flawed and inferior mode compared to permanent and predictably stable existence. The commentary claims that “such stuff as dreams are made on” is inseparable from ephemerality, the brevity and uncertainty of an individual’s life, the impossibility of distinguishing what is real from misunderstandings or fantasy, and the continuous instability, incompleteness, and tempestuous emotional turmoil. However, this whole tendency of commentary on subjective human existence misses the most important point, which is that this little spiritual existence of the human individual is the only living and creative existence there is. It is the only mode of existence that is spontaneously creative and creatively sensitive and responsive to its surroundings. The presumed permanent forms of existence such as rocks and stars are just dead and drifting, entropic, inertial, pre-determined, and utterly uncaring. Whatever the past or future of such existence might be doesn’t matter at all to itself, and only matters to the extent that it enters the dramatic life of a caring individual’s spiritual existence in the ephemeral dreamy mode. No matter how ephemeral, the felt dramas of any spiritual life, the ideation of and strivings for a personally arranged and nurturing future, have their own thunderous reality. It is only this existence that lights up the whole of whatever there is, that lights up existence as such; the only presence that makes the whole thing, any of it, of any interest.

Copyright © 2025 Sandy MacDonald.