Contained Immanence: Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens between Tragedy and Romance

Timon and Athens

Other than the rest of the cast of eponymous characters of Shakespearean tragedies who are kings, princes, or heroes, we get to know Timon for his worldly possessions first. This is followed by ceremonious praise for his character and his importance in the Athenian hierarchy. Timon’s role is especially highlighted in the first scene of the play, in which a painter, a jeweller, and a poet compete over who is best apt to please Timon in order to secure sales or patronage. My reading of this opening paragone does not aim at the allegorical potential of fortune to the moralistic and satirical aspects of the play with respect to the obvious volatility and opportunism of Athenian social relations. The commonness of the exhausted allegory of fortune is hinted at even in the play itself as the theme of ‘a thousand moral paintings’, wherefore it should perhaps not be used as the key to tropically unlocking the whole text: “If Timon of Athens itself is allegory [...] it cannot be of the same sort as the Poet’s” (Tambling 2000: 146). Rather, I will try to tease out some basic configurations such as the role of Timon within Athenian society and its relation to the temporalities of human self-actualization. Few of Shakespeare’s protagonists have been introduced so extensively before first entering the scene. This is partly the case because he is not a nobleman or regal authority whose role in society would be secured by genealogy, name, and status, but whose position has to be established by mobilising social topology. The poet offers the following summary of the poem with which he intends to flatter Timon and represent his exalted role in Athenian society:

POET: Sir, I have upon a high and pleasant hill Feigned Fortune to be throned. The base o’the’mount / Is ranked with all deserts, all kind of natures / That labour on the bosom of this sphere / To propagate their states. Amongst them all / Whose eyes are on his sovereign Lady foxed, / One doe I personate Lord Timon’s frame, / Whom fortune with her ivory hand wafts to her, / Whose present grace to present slaves and servants / Translates his rival. (1.1.65–73)

At a first glance, the concrete image of a mountain as the connection between heaven and earth, and as a geological foundation that is largely conceived of topologically in terms of its height as well as the poet’s explicit reference to “spheres”, seems to affirm a cosmological harmony and stability of order. This would place Timon in a similar position to his regal tragic predecessors. Interestingly, however, despite clearly structuring its “world picture” with images recalling the spherical order of cosmology, the tableau that the poet presents does not show Timon in a topologically exalted position. He could have easily utilised the isotopy of mountains to place Timon at a position above the base, but rather places him amongst the people at the foot of the mountain. His popularity and following is ascribed to “something external to his character“ (Walker 1977: 578) and despite seemingly entertaining a privileged relation to the goddess Fortuna, he is not independent of the worldly resources represented by the geological foundation on which they all stand and “labour”. The painter, whose actual painting is not much described in the text, but which is a life-like renaissance portrait, sees precisely this as the poem’s fault. It fails in flattery and in expressing the distinctions that are implied in cosmological orderliness and its modes of representation. In a painting he would more thoroughly separate Timon from the rest of the people and mark his exalted position: “‘Tis conceived to scope / This throne, this fortune and this hill, methinks, / with one man beckoned from the rest below” (1.1.74–76). The painter clearly is more interested in visualizing a hierarchy and the exalted role of Timon than the poet. Nonetheless, there is an increased dynamism to his proposal, that also invests the reaching of Fortuna with exceptional effort and merit: “Bowing his head against the steepy mount / To climb his happiness, would be well expressed / in our condition” (1.1.74–79). Though he is now spatially separated from the “rest below”, Timon is not looking down from above, but is still engaged in the process of climbing. The proposed painting therefore implies a notion of progress and change that despite implying hierarchy is at odds with a cosmological system of guaranteed reality. To advocate such a world-picture the mountain would serve not as a place to be climbed, not even by special individuals, but as representation of the different unbridgeable spheres, spheres that are transgressed – and the beauty of the system therefore being disrupted – by the activity of climbing. While he did not portray Timon in the process of climbing, the poet, however, had also already implied a notion of change in his initial projection of the situation. Next to the isotopies of high and low, other semantic fields can be identified to substantialize this suspicion. The notion of “present” introduces a temporal dimension that would have been unthinkable in lyrical celebration of, say, the timeless and immutable status of regal power. This notion of changeability is made even clearer after the painter’s suggestion to elevate Timon from the rest, showing him as a climber. The poet takes up his suggestion, but does not want Timon to climb alone but with the others who “follow his strides” (1.1.82) and “laboured after him to the mountain’s top” (1.1.88). This emphasizes what the painter had already suggested: the mountain is being climbed, rendering mutable the social order and its representations, where those at the bottom of the mountain may change their position in a vertical system. In fact, the whole representation hinges on processuality, change, and movement, rather than staticism, stability, and order. The social system therefore is immanent, insofar as it is prone to change, development, and human (self)actualization. In both accounts Timon is the motor that powers this self-actualization of Athenian society. Regardless of whether his fellow climbers are followers or “rivals” (Walker 1977: 578), the respective position one occupies on the mountain is no longer an expression of an immutable social position expressing a necessary structure, but becomes an index of achievement of human effort to change the world, as the repeated reference to “labour” makes abundantly clear. Hence, Timon is represented as a social force of change. By thus mobilising representational space, it is also implied that this trajectory is reversible and could be repeated by others. But it is also clear that some person needs to labour forth and be invested with transcendence, trust, and the blessing of Fortuna in order to invest such an instable system with secure meaning, wherefore the painter wanted to put Timon above the rest. In the beginning of the play Timon functions as the source that invests all professions with work and wealth and empowers others via generosity. This source, my reading will suggest, is an immanent one as it creates all wealth and value from scratch, assuming an uninhibited human capacity to produce and invent. On the other hand, this source can only operate by transcendence. Timon is assumed to secure the economic modes of operation from the outside by possessing actual riches that transcend and precede the human capacity to produce. From this intersection of immanence and transcendence derives the tragic conflict of Timon of Athens.

This double perspective of movement and containment is already evoked in the very first lines of the play. When the painter and the poet first meet, the poet asks “how goes the world?” (1.1.3) introducing an expression that tropicalizes the literal mobility and mutability of the world. To this the painter responds: “it wears, as it grows” (1.1.4), which takes literally the poet’s request as to the situation of the painter as a question concerning the actual status of the world, their foremost object of representation. The painter continues with the processual vocabulary, even though he more pessimistically as to the actualizing nature of the world correlates (“as it”) processes of growth (“grows”) and decay (“wears”). While both assertions point to a principal changeability of the world – something that grows does not remain the same – this process is not considered a vital one, but one that despite being linear is passive, mechanical, and “well known”, rather than offering newness or significant events of “particular rarity” (1.1.4–5) and therefore plot (Tambling 2000: 157–158). Thereby, the play very early on refutes both the timeless stability of what Hans Blumenberg termed “guaranteed reality” as well as the entirely humanly manufactured reality as “result of an actualization” (1979: 32) and points towards an unproductive and wearisome middle ground between cosmology and circularity on the one hand, and history and linearity on the other.

Throughout the rest of the paper I will discuss the development of Timon’s position in Athenian society, proceeding from the assumption that initially his actions on an economic pane are radically immanent. This mirrors his often-discussed humanism that is also ascribed to the first of the two very symmetrical halves of the play. His brand of humanism, in my estimation does not so much reside in his philanthropy per se, but in his conviction of the ultimate human potential to cultivate oneself and the world “to be whatever he wills” (Pico della Mirandola 1948: 22). Such radical immanence does not only point towards the freedoms of “personal liberty” as espoused by Montaigne, (Green 2012: 3) but also to the human potential to collaboratively and rationally “actualize” the world, a process, Blumenberg maintains, that is unending, intersubjective, and open (1979: 40). As such, it will ultimately be perceived as a threat, as any stable society needs to base itself in transcendent facts that exceed the human capacity to generate and invent. This is especially the case in societies that operate to secure hierarchy rather than work collaboratively towards the creation of equilibrium, which I argue Timon stands for and for which he is ultimately punished. His full-scale invention of value and his attempts to equilibrate society are where his immanence becomes legible. In modernity attempts to foster social equilibrium – from performance standards over welfare statism to socialism – are still easily dismissed with reference to the social necessity of hierarchy and an anthropological necessity of depravation. There are of course limited resources on the planet, and endless circulation and growth may not seem desirable especially when it tends to draw on ending natural resources. The tendency to prevent economic empowerment and circulation with reference to transcendent facts, however, hardly ever stands in a direct necessary relation to limited basic resources. Timon explicitly responds to such limitations at various times throughout the play by pointing to plentiful resources like water, basic food, or blood as the only elements that truly transcend human action, enable human life from without, and whose absence would actually forestall human production and cultivation. The next sections of this paper will also provide textual evidence as to how Timon creates such a binary of human immanence and natural transcendence to counter the self-imposed limitations of human self-determination. Outside of the realm of nature, Timon seems to argue, society (as money) is a purely symbolic, contextual, and immanent phenomenon that could be manufactured through the construction and consensus of humans. Such an open dynamic towards human unboundedness has circulated in the minds of many humanist, Renaissance, and early modern thinkers. These Renaissance tendencies towards autonomy and emancipation are consistently referenced as important influences on modernity and the self-understanding of modern man. On closer scrutiny, however, this early modern dynamism of human self-making was eventually integrated into modern societies not by fully unfolding itself after the trials and transitions of early modernity, but by being controlled and contained. While this dynamic may still find occasional expression in individualism and identity politics, the collaborative human capacity to actually mould and make the world remains severely contained.

Humanism, Promises, and Immanence

After the painter and the poet have left the scene, various requests – in a ceremony that is clearly marked as recurrent practice in the society of the play – are posed to Timon. Among them is the request by an Athenian noble, whose daughter is in love with one of Timon’s servants. In his demand to break up the union, the nobleman clearly evokes the topological order of social status: “my estate deserves an heir more raised” (1.1.122). Though this status seems to hint at the impenetrable spheres of social life that resemble a cosmological order or the chain of being, the continuation of the scene makes clear that this status is not only one of blood and nobility, but one of profession and presumably income: his daughter is worth more “than one which holds a trencher” (1.1.123). The processual verb ‘raise’, also not only implies topologically conceived difference of status in its participle, but also the potential overcoming of low status through the act of raising and rising. Unlike in cases of marriage among nobles, the father is not worried about the purity of blood and nobility – a strong concern in the European counterreformation countries of the 16th and 17th centuries, most notably Spain. Clearly, his worries pertain to socio-economic status. Hierarchy is thereby already taken to the level of the economic, and more importantly, to the level of the transformable, while the tendency to seal off the topological layers between the status-groups clearly remains. The initial discrepancy that exists between his daughter and Timon’s servant is evoked in the reference to an “equal husband” made by Timon (1.1.144). It is, therefore, soon clear that this equality, and therefore the transgression of distinctions between high and low can be facilitated with the help of the mobilising power of money. Timon promises: “To build his fortune, I will strain a little / For ‘tis a bond in men. Give him thy daughter, / What you bestow, in him I’ll counterpoise / And make him weigh with her” (1.1.146–149). This clearly establishes an isotopic field of equilibrium: “weigh with”, “equal”, “counterpoise”, but it is an equilibrium created by the social transposition of a person to a higher social realm. This happens – presumably – with the help of money (“bestow”, “build his fortune”). Thereby, Timon is a prime contributor in the erosion of timeless social stability which clearly exceeds the realm of mere charity and favouritism, and is considered a human obligation by Timon (“bond in men”). Timon’s demiurgic power and his central status as facilitator of economic circulation and social mobility become even clearer when he colludes this arrangement simply by a promise “My hand to thee, mine honour on my promise” (1.1.152). He does not even have to have the money at his disposal in order to enable the transgression of social barriers, but his words suffice to effect the change.

Successful transactions like this one may have raised in Timon either the expectation that he is perceived to occupy an untouchable hierarchical position within the symbolic system of Athenian society and economy, or perhaps even raised his hopes that the system relies increasingly on promise, collaboration, and agreement. Throughout the course of the first act, the reader or spectator learns that Timon is so disinterested in the state of his actual material riches that he does not even bother to follow the advice of his nagging steward Flavius, who repeatedly demands of him to check his bank. This bank is an (in)famous casket in which all of Timon’s mobile resources are stored. Only in the second act do we learn that Timon had actually borrowed a lot of money from other Athenians which he used to throw feasts and make generous presents, often to the very same people from whom he borrowed, serving thus as the demon that fuels the expenditure, transactions, and transformations of their otherwise static and unproductive money.

Timon’s propensity to effect economic transactions and social transpositions without materially producing money, did not derive from a permanently transcendent status with which his persona was invested, nor – as will soon be clear – from any sort of social agreement on the immanent character of money. If anything, it stemmed from a bundle of social, economic, and symbolic processes that Georg Simmel in his Philosophy of Money has later termed the superadditum. This denotes a much more volatile position than Timon assumed, though it does in fact, temporarily at least, transform his persona from the demands of constantly proving his actual liquidity. Superadditum in English is paraphrased as “the unearned increment of wealth” or “the surplus value of wealth” (Simmel 2011: 233). It signifies that beyond a certain quantity money actually changes the quality of the owner. Most importantly, the superadditum leads to the possibility of conducting transactions without actually having to produce money, which is a material-symbolic equivalence of what one has at one’s disposal. Rather than paying indifferently – which is where the liberating and equalising aspect of money resides according to Simmel – with actual money one pays with one’s character, one’s personality. From the beginning of the second act, when a creditor of Timon’s requests back a sum he has borrowed and Timon cannot immediately pay it, the whole system eventually collapses, as soon as word gets around. Contrary to Timon’s assumptions, it turns out that the Athenian economy may have bought into the superadditum of performative expenditure, but it is clearly based on transcendence in the sense that the participants of this economy must believe in a material entity somewhere which backs its symbolic circulations, even if that material need not permanently manifest itself. Timon’s bank turns out to be empty – and probably has been for a while. Nonetheless, it has served as the transcendental signifier that created trust in the economic system and for a short while established Timon as its sovereign. He does not want to have a look at it, precisely because he wants no one else to have a glimpse. Not only because he fears that his funds may have run dry, not even only because debt in capitalism is hardly ever returned, but usually rolled over, especially for sovereigns, but also because he truly believes that the actual sum contained therein bears no importance to the successful production and circulation of goods among humans. This is why he does not, or not only, resemble a perfect subject of a capitalism based on circulation and trust, but also a force of economic immanence and human sovereignty. This perspective is ultimately irreconcilable with the modes of ownership in capitalism, which is possibly why Timon does not trust his peers enough as to carry out this process openly. Therefore, he is still implicated in, in fact, fuelling capitalist exchange, even though his ambitions may have been directed at absolute human immanence. Clearly, he is inventing money not for his own ends, but to achieve social equilibrium and a society of shared obligations and collaboration. Had the coffer been a magical device to endlessly generate actual money, it would not have worked any differently: monetary symbols would have been created there – as they are being created in Timon’s promises – and been infused to power a system of growth and increasing equilibrium.

His steward Flavius has already known that his coffer was empty, even though this was only shared with the audience: “He commands us to provide and give great gifts, / And all out of an empty coffer” (1.2.195–196). He comments on this relation between words and resources “His promises fly so beyond his state / That every word he speaks is all in debt – he owes / For every word” (1.2.200–202). While he is a loyal steward, Flavius also represents a mercantilist mode of thinking opposite to Timon’s, in that he transcendentally roots promises of reciprocity and collaboration in actual monetary states and limited currency. The transcendent nature of this kind of thinking is here even directly expressed in the notion of “beyond” that separates a promise and the actual currency, as if these were two completely different onto-epistemological systems. Timon’s tinkering with the system of money, however, is not only about a change of media from concrete money to more symbolic forms of money, as both would only point towards substances that need to materialize eventually. He uses money radically as a medium designed to express human bonds and discrepancies in individual preferences in value, and to foster the social circulation and social transformation of the plentiful resources into social objects. In Timon’s view, it ought to be used as the fuel that powers and fosters human exchange, but not become an impediment to exchange and production by its own supposed scarcity, especially if this scarcity has no correlative in a scarcity of resources, productive power, or felt value. Debts and bonds may be expressed in money, but they should not materialize in this form. The fact that money remains the most severe example of a medium turned into a goal, however, seals the containment of human productivity and of Timon’s understanding of community. Hence, money becomes what Marx – directly following his discussion of Timon – termed the “alienated ability of mankind” (Tucker 1978: 104).

The second scene of the first act shows him as an ardent supporter of this logic as he refuses to accept the payback of a sum of money. A fellow Athenian, Ventidius, has inherited the riches of his father and offers to pay back a sum of debt that he owed to Timon (1.2.1–8) who settled a debt for him that kept Ventidius out of prison. Timon responds:

O, By no means, / Honest Ventidius, you mistake my love: I gave it freely ever, and there’s none / Can truly say he gives if he receives. / If your betters play at that game, we must not dare / To imitate them; faults that are rich are fair. (1.2.8–13)

This is not mere generosity, rather his disregard at having debts materialize points towards his concern with immanence. The authors of the Introduction to the latest Arden edition of Timon have focused their attention on Timon through the lens of psychoanalytic theories of envy. Envy, they argue, leads to the fact that Timon attacks community in both parts of the play, not only in the misanthropic part that consists of acts four and five. This perspective also informs their reading of this passage and they consider Timon’s generosity in this scene as emblematic of “an urge to undo reciprocity” (Dawson and Minton 2013: 52). If they consider reciprocity merely as the paying back of debts, this might be correct. This is indeed a form of reciprocity that Timon is not interested in. Reciprocity is not the simple return of something that has been given, certainly not for Timon. Neither, does he want to hold power over others, by keeping them indebted. His reciprocity clearly points towards modes of collaboration that fully exceed the limitations of ownership and modes of giving and receiving in bilateral transactions. In fact, fundamental reciprocity is the base for Timon’s entire system of money, friendship, and community. Rather than undermining community, such a mode of reciprocity in fact could forge communities much more successfully and prescribe them to each other more strongly in obligation and collaboration than the logic of debt and repayment. Rather than exchanging back and forth clearly demarcated properties, this reciprocity could also point towards a shared ownership in friendship and community and an idea of communal riches that are not individually possessed: “We are born to do benefits; and what better or properer can we call / our own than the riches of our friends? O what / a precious comfort ‘tis to have so many like / brothers commanding one another’s fortunes” (1.2.99–103). With this ill-fated conception of friendship, he conceives of fortunes and riches as unlimited phenomena that elude the traditional demarcations by possession and ownership. This commanding of fortunes does not naively equate friendship to fortune by tying it to the vagaries of fortuna (see Walker 1977), but rather points towards a collaborative effort controlling and commanding fortuna and thereby towards a sense of human immanence over the world and its actualization.

Timon’s eventually self-destructive belief in the “amicable nature of humankind” (Emig 2012: 140) and the potential of humans to create their society immanently without limitations by their self-made symbols, institutions, and hierarchies is where in my opinion the often referenced humanism of the play resides and not only in a narrowly conceived philanthropy and charity. My attempt to work out his human immanence cannot rest on an explicit agenda, such as the one that initiates his later misanthropism and that has been amply discussed by critics. It is therefore unsurprising, and not at all a paradox, that as a humanist, he may lack the “grandeur”, “magnificence”, and explicitness that he has as a hater of man (Farnham 1950: 47). His project of immanence was still largely a clandestine operation, while his misanthropism is his public reckoning with a society that has proved uncapable of openly and intersubjectively actualizing the world towards the principles of dignity and conviviality.

Contained Immanence

Timon’s demise starts with a senator calling in his debt. Beforehand, this senator is exposed as someone, who has heavily profited from Timon’s generosity. Though somewhat disdainful, his account of Timon’s role in the Athenian economy clearly points to Timon as transformative and generative force:

If I want gold, steal but a beggar’s dog / And give it Timon – why, the dog coins gold; / If I would sell my horse and by twenty moe / Better than he – why give my horse to Timon; / Ask nothing, give it him, it foals me straight / And able horses. (2.1.5–10)

Timon in this account seems like an unquenchable source and the generative verbs that the senator uses indeed point to Timon’s casket not only as an immanent emitter of promises that initiates social production, but literally as a transcendent source that actually transforms into gold and emanates animals. The distinction between these principles of generation will actually destroy Timon and disrupt Athenian society. The fact of the closed casket had always already undermined his agenda, as it did not help to overcome the fact that money transcended from a means to an end. The casket may have enabled the on-going circulation of money without it objectifying constantly, but it did not serve to limit the object status of money. While Timon used money immanently, the fact that he was never able to make it publicly already pointed to the fact that full social immanence as an intersubjective project was impossible. He was able to tinker with the symbolic aspects of the system of capitalism, but did not ultimately transform its rigid frames in favour of a collaborative and equitable mode of organizing society and production. By mobilising production and social mobility through the mere promise of money, he may have temporarily used money immanently to fuel a better and more equitable system of circulation, but he cannot overcome the fact that everybody else is invested in its transcendence.

The continuation of the scene makes that especially clear. Right after this account of Timon’s generative abilities, the senator asks back a little sum that he has borrowed him. Outside the satiric and moralistic dimension of this behaviour, this scene clearly also marks a more wide-ranging systemic error and shows the senator, like most others to be invested in the petty and rigid principles of individual ownership. Rather than being content with the plentiful returns that his little investment has gotten him from Timon in other currency, he impertinently asks for Timon’s promise to manifest itself in concrete money. Thereby, he undermines the workings of an entire system of economic transformation and wealth generation.

From this vantage point the whole system quickly collapses, as soon as Timon admits that he cannot pay the debt and even sends out servants to secure further credit. This triggers a series of other creditors to demand the repayment of further debts. Not only is Timon’s wealth ruined but the entire fiduciary system of the Athenian economy, which he backed, is threatened. Economy is returned from a system of promises, circulation, and transformations into one of comparing visible funds and riches and accumulation, as soon as Timon’s immanent investments are no longer covered by his closed casket and the projections it elicits. The human potential to assign value and transform the world is hampered with reference to well-worn constraints that supposedly lie outside the purview of human capacity. Timon on the other hand has tried to “make giving to his friends an example of the unprecedented, the rare, the wholly new” of which humanity is capable (Tambling 2000: 151).

He initially celebrates – “I account them blessings” (2.2.182) – what he believes to be a temporary lack of resources, because it gives him a chance to openly test his assumption and hopes regarding the immanence of Athenian society: “For by these I shall try my friends” (2.2.182–183). His scarcity gives him the opportunity to rely on his friends in what he still believes to be a system and network of dependence, circulation, promise, love, and friendship that exceeds concerns as to the temporal disposability of funds: “Mistake my fortunes: I am wealthy in my friends” (2.2.181). He still believes in the power of words and emotions to incite economic circulation: “If I would broach the vessels of my love / And try the argument of hearts by borrowing, / Men and men’s fortunes could I frankly use / As I can bid thee speak” (2.2.176–180). His trust in friendship is noteworthy as friendship also points to the human capacity to create relations voluntarily and outside of biological similarity. Significantly, Timon has no family, whereas he relies fully on these horizontal human relations that are also emblematic of humanism.

While he thus searches for new creditors, the respect for him clad in classicist rhetoric is upheld, but material assistance is unequivocally turned down, often with reference to systemic constraints that supposedly lie outside the realm of human willingness. One of his ‘friends’ even impertinently enlists the disappointed honour of being asked for help last as the reason for his unwillingness to help out (see 3.3). As soon as his expenditure ceases and turns into request, the system is radically called into doubt and nobody is willing to extend credit or take over debt. This basic configuration is only further confirmed when the potential creditors are quickly won back in their trust, as soon as Timon announces to hold another feast in act three: “I’ll once more feast the rascals [...] / invite them all, let in the tide [...] / my cook and I’ll provide” (3.5.7, 10, 11). The relation between expenditure and credibility still seems to work insofar, as everybody buys into the theatricality and starts to doubt the merit of having denied loans to Timon and even think that he “did but try us the other day” (3.7.3). He at first continues with his propensity for the theatrical by using “covered dishes” (3.7.47) to create anticipation. Unlike his locked coffer, however, it is clear that the covers will have to be taken off the dishes in order to proceed with the meal. His guests soon see that Timon has only warm water in them and that they are there to be scolded by a disillusioned Timon. Timon, rather than extending the con-game to get new credit, lets this theatricality collapse to articulate his misanthropist bitterness.

By this ostensibly meagre meal he does, however, also provide a glance at the only facts that do indeed lie outside the immanent realm of human productivity, creativity, and symbolicity. Clearly the availability of food and basic resources would be one of the instances where human immanence is actually transcended by the requirements of sustenance and the availability of edibles. Therefore, while the scarcity of this dish is clearly a disappointment to his potential creditors, its composition also makes clear that two of the materials whose absence would indeed transcend and limit the human capacities to produce and thereby materially limit an economic system are plentifully at his disposal: water as the source of all nourishment and energy (wood? fire? sun?) to warm the water. By serving warm water to his guests, he points to the ultimate sources of life on the planet, whose availability cannot be humanly manufactured and actually do root wealth in transcendent nature. He proves that he – in fact, they – dispose of the resources that geologically and metaphorically root the possibility of all life and plenitude. At the same time, of course, it is highly inappropriate for a feast and lets his theatricality collapse. On the level of plot the meal demonstrates that he currently is unable to provide for anything other than warm water, because his line of credit is cut, but it also points to the fact that the most basic resources of life and living are always available to him. Another of these resources is blood, with which Timon proposes to replace his debts. This is not mere polemics, but makes clear that there is no ‘reality’ that lies between the immanent symbolicity of human promises and the transcendent facts of bodily life and scarcity of resources. If one assumed money to have such a position, one has severely misunderstood its function from Timon’s perspective. Therefore, nothing that he could hold has any more ‘substance’ than his promises, except his blood. He thus replaces the supposed ontological dualism earlier proposed by Flavius between “state” and “words” by a more radical one between human immanence and natural transcendence.

He has made clear that the basic elements of life are at his disposal. A re-routing of money through anything else and a transcendentalization of value that is not ultimately reducible to the scarcity of these necessities falls into the realm of human immanence and becomes a matter of communication, production, and motivation, as well as a question of impeded circulation and transformation. The only objects that Timon accepts as insurmountable impediments to social flows of value and production are water, blood, roots, and energy. These are the only ‘dues’ that lie outside the realm of immanence, production, and social organizations, and are the only things he can offer – and the only things that make sense of being offered – when being asked for something more solid than words. This conviction is, unsurprisingly, considered “madness”.

Therefore, Timon of Athens is not only an allegory of a historically specific system of debt (see Bailey 2011). This aspect of the play is important and certainly productive, but it seems to be especially developed in the city comedy scenes of acts two and three which are largely ascribed to Middleton. From the perspective of Shakespearean tragedy, I would rather propose that Timon’s tragic error was to carry to its end the aspirations of humanism and to toy with and speculate on the possibility of an absolute immanence of wealth. Timon’s failed attempt therefore does not mark a transition phenomenon of early modernity or a probing of a modernity based on humanism that was not yet there and still needed to work itself out to become manifest in modern democracy. Instead, his attempt marks a specific strand of modernity towards immanence whose uninhibited trajectory may have been discernible in the early modern modes of seemingly progressive human self-authorization, but that has never fully realised itself. It has been argued that “the evil that works against Timon [...] is thoroughly petty” (Farnham 1950: 46). This pettiness, however, clearly embodies the un-heroic dimensions of containing humanity.

The tragic conflict of Timon, between human immanence and the forces that seek to contain it, together with the fact that Shakespeare largely refrained from tragedy afterwards suggests that he might have considered this a desirable trajectory of human society and creativity and its containment – or at least the degree of it – mournful. Tragedy, resting as it does on the disruption of an existing – if contestable – order can only either contain immanence or render its effects disastrous, but it cannot show its productive accommodation according to new paradigms (Mahler 1992: 76). Timon like any tragedy does not offer such accommodation, but it also deviates from and probably re-evaluates the perspective of the other major tragedies. Unlike them, Timon does not offer immanence in the guise of usurpation as the moment of tragic disruption. Instead the play sets out from a stable world based on human immanence – if shortly and unknowingly – that is then tragically contained. Immanence to become fully effective as a mode of controlling human destiny, ultimately of course relies on intersubjectivity and collaboration. Definitions of tragedy may vary, but it is certainly not the genre of productive intersubjectivity. This generic propensity of tragedy may also be a reason, why Shakespeare turned to the romances afterwards. Their greater spatio-temporal scope, their (im)probabilities, their affinity to narrative, and their generic emphasis on reconciliation allowed for more wide ranging representations of human immanence and self-actualization to the logical point where it transcends social plausibility, psychological necessity, and even death. Considering this turn towards romance to be escapist does not diminish its seriousness (Muir 1979: 148), but it does acknowledge the fact that the space for human immanence to unfold will neither be social reality, nor the (unitary) spatio-temporal dimensions of traditional drama.

Antihumanism, Gold, and Transcendence

After Timon has offended his former friends with his serving of warm water, and plots to kill him have been voiced by some of the senators, he flees the city and swears off human society altogether: “henceforth hated be / Of Timon man and all humanity!” (3.7.112). These final words to the Athenians – and perhaps the most famous of all of his words – suggest that he not only escapes the confines of his immediate circle of previous friends of whom he is disappointed, but that he has transformed his entire view of humanity. Appropriately, he will now go by the name of ‘Misanthropos’. Escaping Athens and his creditors he is determined to live fully outside the society of men (see 4.1.). As he wanders through the woods, he mourns humankind’s straying from its path to dignity and perfection. This shortfall is rooted in humanity’s tendency to create and maintain rigid hierarchies. To illustrate this, Timon enlists an allegory of two brothers being born of the same womb, but having different fortunes. Despite being carved of the same flesh the more fortunate one puts himself into a superior position from which he scorns the other (4.3.3–7). The allegory of the brothers suggests that rather than seeking to actualize the world according to human needs, humanity not only does not counteract unmerited distinctions, but even socially produces them from biological sameness. This allegory is followed by a metaphor of oxen on two pastures, in which the quality of the pastures decides which is lean and which is fat (4.3.12–14). The logic of the rigid positionality of the pastures and the prevention of equilibrium by erecting fences, also negatively evokes Pico della Mirandola’s humanist conception of man as precisely independent of fixed position (1948: 225). Both tropes mourn the contingency of fortune which almost insurmountably seals one’s position, without active human(e) intervention or merit seeking to transform this transcendent social topology. These tendencies of humanity conflict with Timon’s earlier attempts to empower and equilibrate, because they ignore the human ability to endlessly transform nature and society. Timon makes clear, that if humanity does not live up to these expectations, it has no exalted position in the animal world, and no legitimacy to exist, as Timon’s comparisons with the animal kingdom and his explicit rejections of mankind seem to suggest. Misanthropy is therefore not only the functional equivalent of philanthropy but of Timon’s immanent humanism.

While he has previously seen friendship and language as the prime capacities of humanity, Timon now sets those capacities as the signature of the ultimate baseness of humankind. They attest to the wrongness of a human society that has emancipated itself from nature only to imprison itself in its own rigid and oppressive frames. Humanity does not follow its progressive path towards human self-actualization and improvement, because it short-circuits human immanence by producing moments of transcendence, necessary to manifest and maintain hierarchy. The self-proclaimed cynic Apemantus, who seeks out Timon in the woods, is therefore right when he claims that Timon has never known the “middle of humanity” (4.3.300), but only “the extremity of both ends” (4.3.301). This does not merely signify that he has only gotten to know the most extreme spheres of human action or privilege, but that he has only two conceptions of humanity, one as near godlike, benevolent, creative, defined by friendship and creativity, and now one that sees humanity as flawed, base, and deserving of destruction. This resembles a crucial section in Pico della Mirandola’s On the Dignity of Man, but also makes clear how Timon’s immanence is different from other modes of humanism. Pico distinguishes the options of man as “Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower realms of life” or “Thou shalt have the power out of thy soul’s judgement, to be reborn into the higher spheres” (1948: 225). For Timon there are only the vectors that lead to these options, but no middle ground, whereby he turns into an obligation what was only a potential for Pico: that “the category of the ‘human’ is not the middle part of a triadic symmetry” (Höfele and Laqué 2011: 8). For Pico, this elision of the middle is not an imperative to rise but invests humankind with an indeterminacy that makes it distinct from animals “that bring with them from their mother’s womb all they will ever possess” (1948: 225). While Pico celebrates this indeterminacy of man more generally, including all the options at stake for “our chameleon” (1948: 225), Timon only embraces one pole of Pico’s topological options and the trajectory that leads there. His immanence aspires towards intersubjectively fostering dignity and equilibrium, and thereby elides the potentially conflictual trajectory of radical individualism that may also be said to have originated in humanism. Reverting downward the direction of human cultivation or only settling for a middle ground is always already tantamount to a full-scale descent into brutism, as Timon makes clear throughout the last two acts. Once on the downward spiral Timon would therefore prefer to amplify humanity’s fall that would eventually eradicate it or return it to a life fully determined by the confines of nature. Humanity, defined as a species undetermined by nature, but not intersubjectively using the self-cultivating and dignifying options this indeterminacy provides is detestable and forms the object of Timon’s misanthropism. Therefore, every aspect that separates humanity from the animal world now becomes a cause of detestation rather than celebration. He now equals the previously celebrated capacity to symbolize with lying and flattery and the human capacity to intersubjectivity and to foster friendship – i.e. create relations outside of the biological – is now equalled with deception and unnaturalness. Previously he has channelled immanence – and restrained its anarchic potential – through the bonds of human affection and loyalty. As a misanthropist, he now “demands a dissolution of every limit and bond [...] so as to release the anarchic human desire for power” (Pierce 2012: 85, 84).

His escape from Athenian society is, therefore, an escape from every realm of humanity, including a denial of all objects that have experienced the interference of human activity. Hence, he refrains from enjoying any quality of objects that exceed the demand for physical sustenance and extend into the realm of human pleasure, and by extension possible commerce. He urges nature to bring forth roots, but to “Dry up thy marrows, vines and plough-torn leas. / Whereof ungrateful man with liquorish draughts / And morsel unctuous greases his pure mind, / That from it all consideration slips” (4.3.191–195). The corruption of the poor mind in this section not only pertains to the intoxicating capacities of wine, but towards the corrupting nature of any humanly manufactured produce and the processes of profit-seeking that follow from it. Agricultural produce despite its entirely human cultivation is kept scarce due to no reason outside the social, as Timon’s reference to abundant “roots” and “hundred springs” (4.3.412–413) suggests. Cultivation is a mechanism of control and mastery over nature, but one, it has been argued, that clearly serves to “fulfil human potential, as well as to suppress it” (Scott 2013: 2). It is this self-imposed suppression of human potential in cultivation – both of nature and of human relations – that leads to separation rather than integration in human societies, and in Timon’s view can only bring out the worst in humanity. To eradicate the negative results of limited cultivation that follow from this human mastery of nature he urges the earth and the sun as the only truly transcendent elements of this mode of production to interfere with and impede human cultivation to throw humanity back towards mere survival on raw materials. This further attests to his extreme views on humanity: either it fully realizes its god-like potential or it should live beastly confined to nature.

The same is reiterated by Timon from a slightly different perspective when he is highlighting what he now believes to be the negative trajectory of all forms of social organisation that aspire to exceed the biological sustenance of humans provided by nature:

Your greatest want is you want much of meat. / Why should you want? Behold the earth has roots, / Within this mile break forth a hundred springs, / The oaks bear mast, / the briars scarlet hips, / The bounteous housewife Nature on each bush / Lays her full mess before you. / Want? Why want? (4.3.411–416)

He points towards the capacities of uncultivated nature to sufficiently provide nourishment and identifies want and ambition as inappropriate desires. This is not some proto-ecological discourse to live in purity and harmony with nature, but this rendering absurd of human want must be seen in a context in which human want is not an unlimited productive force, but one that will always contain itself in individual ownership and hierarchy. It also suggests that nature is not scarce and does not transcendentally contain humanity, but that humanity contains itself. ‘Want’ for Timon might have been a positive human force as long as it does not aim at creating distinctions and wanting what others have, but when it is aimed at collaboratively actualizing the world. As these capacities are constantly contained, ‘want’ is an entirely negative force directed at objects, whose scarcity is socially produced. Consequently, he seeks to dissuade humans from any transformation of and emancipation from nature, if they are unwilling to carry this transformation out towards its end: human immanence in both the social and material realm. Timon wants humanity to either live fully dependent on the transcendent facts of nature or to realize fully the human potential to make the world. What lies between – which are of course all actual manifestations of human society – are immanently contained societies in which the negative undersides of human potential will inevitably unfold turning emancipation into want, symbolization into deception, and transformation into exploitation.

As soon as he is finished with his slandering of humanity at the beginning of act four and seeks for roots in the earth, Timon, however, happens upon a huge amount of gold buried in the ground (4.3.20). Now that he is an outcast, he possesses such immense riches as had previously only been projected onto him and which could have served to prevent his downfall. Nonetheless he does not mourn the bad timing that he has not found the gold earlier to prevent his downfall, but damns the mockery that it is given to him at all, at the moment at which he wants to disband fully with humanity. Apemantus is, therefore, wrong when he later accuses Timon of having only become a cynic because he is out of money. While this was certainly the condition for his disillusionment, the final two acts make clear that he has no desire to return to his exalted position – which given the riches in the new casket he could have – but that he is truly disillusioned with humanity’s trajectory.

At first, the gold that he now possesses does not do him any services in the woods as he cannot translate it into something edible. Criticism has also readily seen this socially removed gold as an emblem of the constructedness of money (Bailey 2012: 398). Seen in the context of the whole play, however, the appearance of the gold, I argue, does not teach Timon something about the constructedness of money. He has always been aware of – in fact overestimated – its socially immanent status, as I have shown in the previous section. Rather, it ironically attests to what Timon has long insisted on: that the materiality of money in terms of its ‘usability’ does not exceed its symbolic (non)manifestation. Outside the social realm gold is as useless as promises, within the social both serve as intrinsically worthless – though this is less true for gold than for other currencies – functional placeholders for future reciprocity, wherefore they should be of equal status.

Nonetheless, Timon is clearly aware that if infused into the realm of man – given the wrongness of humanity – the gold does have the potential to affect social relations: “Thus much of this will make / Black white, foul fair, wrong right, / Base noble, old young, coward valiant (4.3.28–30). While it can uplift people, it especially has a destructive potential, to “knit and break religions” (4.3.35). Therefore, still engaged in his cynic’s mind-set he decides that he will put “This yellow slave” (4.3.34) towards “doing thy right nature” (4.3.44), which in his logic is the destruction of mankind. Immediately after he has formulated this resolution potential subjects of investment come his way, offering channels for the gold to unfold this negative potential. His first interlocutor is the general Alcibiades, who has himself flown from Athens to avoid a punishment for speaking up against the Senators in a case of law (3.6) and who has now risen an army to invade the city. Despite their shared destiny, frustration, and ambition, Timon acts very hostile towards Alcibiades and accuses him of flattery and urges him to go away. After he has learned of his plans, he nonetheless offers him the gold to fund his campaign. While it is useless for Timon as it cannot be translated into edibles – “Keep it I cannot eat it” (4.3.100) – it clearly becomes highly desirable once reintroduced into the society of men in order to create social relations. In this case it serves explicitly to alleviate discontent among Alcibiades’ disintegrating following: “The want thereof doth daily make revolt / in my penurious band” (4.3.91–92). Timon not only funds Alcibiades conquest – “Go on, here’s gold, go on. / be as a planetary plague when Jove / Will o’er some high-viced city hang his poison” (4.3.107–109) – but urges him not to show mercy to anyone, including women, children, and the elderly. As Timon does not trust fully in Alcibiades cruelty, he also invests into an additional mode of destruction. Among Alcibiades’s band are also a couple of whores, whom Timon equally funds in order to go to Athens and have intercourse for free, with the intention of creating disorder and spreading diseases throughout the city (4.4.150–164). By paying the whores in order to have intercourse with Athenian men, he resorts partly to his old role as provider of feasts and pleasures, only that he now seeks destruction rather than distraction.

With these investments the fourth act of the play not only explicitly discusses the relation of gold to sociality. It also clearly performs the fact that money in the form of limited currency has less creative effects than its fully symbolic version in words and promises: it is literally used for funding destruction only. When he used promises and credit, Timon was an entirely positive force of social equilibrium, production, and uplift. As soon as he actually possesses the gold, Timon becomes an entirely negative force and immediately invests his resources in conflict, destruction, and violence. Disappointed and convinced of the fact of the badness of human character, he aims to catalyse human self-destruction by funding these various disruptive forces. Seen from this perspective, his misanthropy – which is usually not seen as a practice of investment and expenditure – becomes the structural equivalent of philanthropy after all, because it becomes a practice of funding human destruction. His misanthropy and philanthropy are therefore not expressions of the same psychological mechanism, (Tambling 2000: 150) but are practices that express which “extremes of humanity” he is currently funding. While one aims at destruction and the other at uplift, philanthropy and misanthropy are both expressions of Timon’s desire to steer away humanity from the middle ground of contained immanence, of a world that “wears as it grows”.

The last act of the play makes clear that even this legacy of the destruction of humanity will eventually fail. Alcibiades’ campaign is also ultimately contained through promises, lies, and deceptions on the side of the senators, but also of course through mercy on the side of Alcibiades. At the very end of the play Alcibiades seems shortly to hint at entanglement and cooperation as the future principles of Athenian society: “Prescribe to other, as each other’s leech” (5.5.88–89). It is, however, clear that this stability is negatively based on the perpetual threat of human violence and hierarchy that will only secure the well-worn ways of Athenian society rather than initiate change. From this perspective, the play offers little incentive to “praise the society for its constructive efforts to purge its evil elements and to come to better terms with its past failings” (Fly 1973: 245). Rather, the principles that have abandoned Timon have endured, though perhaps temporarily clad in a milder dress. The gold with which he sought to fund the destruction of Athenian society, has actually served to uphold it, which demonstrates gold’s affinity for forging social relations, while also containing the human potential to cultivate new forms of sociality. Compared to other tragedies, then, a more wide-ranging restitution of order is offered at the end of this tragedy. This restitution, however, while not problematic or particularly unstable, as for example in King Lear, is entirely negative. Here the eponymous hero does not die despite of the restitution – as Lear and Cordelia – but because of the very principles that have been restituted. In these previous tragedies human immanence in the guise of usurpation marked the moment of disruption of an order that was then contained, though at tragic costs. With its specific plot and affect structure, which posits the containing of immanence as the permanent problem rather than the temporary solution to a tragic conflict, Timon of Athens occupies a special place in the series of Shakespearean tragedies. This mode of contained immanence led not only to the tragedy of Timon, but also marks – and perhaps led to – the end of Shakespeare’s engagement with tragedy. The conclusion of and the conclusions drawn from Timon preceded and perhaps conditioned Shakespeare’s turn towards the proto-novelistic worlds of the romances, which clearly if implausibly figure the ameliorating outcomes of their dramatic conflicts as results of human self-actualization through insight and learning (The Winter’s Tale), the human control of the forces of nature (The Tempest), and even the human overcoming of death (Pericles). Timon of Athens was the catalyst in an increase and re-evaluation of human immanence, which eventually extended towards the full human manipulation of nature and towards the limits of dramatic conflict and irredeemably shifted Shakespearean drama from the conventions of tragedy towards the more loosely conscripted worlds and open temporalities of romance.