ABSTRACT
The ‘loss of knowledge’ model is good as far as it goes; but it is argued in this chapter that we need to add in a ‘loss of certainty’ construal of the tragedy, where certainty is thought of along the lines of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. Othello, it is maintained, treats Desdemona’s fidelity as what Wittgenstein calls a ‘hinge’ certainty, something that is so fundamental to the language-game that loss of it results—so Wittgenstein suggests—in chaos and madness. Just this is what indeed ensues when Othello is brought to abandon his belief in Desdemona’s fidelity. There is a connection between this point with the way that animals, and animal imagery, feature in both Othello and On Certainty: Othello treats Desdemona’s fidelity as a hinge certainty; but hinge certainties are (Wittgenstein thinks) animal instincts. Shakespeare gives this a terrible twist when he depicts Othello descending to the level of a brute: one might say that Othello turns animal in the wrong sense (violent, irrational) because he picked the wrong sort of thing to treat as an animal certainty in the right sense (natural, basic).
