To Thine Own Self Be—Wait, What?: Shakespeare, AI, and the Ethical Refusal of Certainty
By J. Owen Matson, Ph.D.
In an age where AI can produce prose that mimics insight without undergoing the inconvenience of thought, the humanities are increasingly called upon to justify themselves—not in terms of meaning, but in terms of measurable utility. Wilfred M. McClay, writing recently in The New Criterion, offers what he likely believes is a spirited defense of the humanities. But his tone is less spirited than sepulchral. He writes with the solemnity of someone officiating at a funeral he has been anticipating for years, and the humanities he mourns are those of a long-lost golden age: unified, civilizing, untroubled by politics, and entirely unaware of their own ideological commitments.
This is, of course, a fiction. And like most fictions, it tells us less about the past than about the needs of the present. McClay’s argument depends on the premise that the humanities were once pristine—untainted by theory, identity, or dissent—and have since been ruined by their proximity to contemporary concerns. But the humanities have never stood outside politics. They have always been shaped by it and turned back upon it. Their value lies not in moral certitude but in interpretive friction—in the invitation to ask how meaning is made, who decides what counts as knowledge, and why certain voices are authorized while others are erased.
The real crisis is not internal. It lies in the rise of a managerial epistemology that renders certain kinds of value illegible before they’re even considered. That isn’t to say leaders in that system lack intelligence—only that intelligence isn’t the same as reflexivity. One can be brilliant within an epistemic structure that privileges what can be measured and scaled, while treating ambiguity, irony, or historical complexity as inefficiencies. It is a culture built to prioritize only those thoughts that fit within its metrics—leaving other forms of knowing unacknowledged, however vital they may be.
The humanities don’t exist to prop up civilizational order. They teach us to dwell within complexity, to resist premature closure. McClay wants the humanities to restore moral authority; perhaps their deeper value lies in helping us understand the collapse of such authority—and ask whom it once served. Even perceiving the limits of an epistemology—what it excludes or suppresses—is a capacity forged by the very disciplines now asked to justify their worth in terms they never accepted. That’s the trick: the tools to understand what is happening to the humanities are still, inconveniently, located within them.
And yet even this can be co-opted. Dominant systems mimic reflexivity—a few caveats, a nod to complexity—and appear open to critique while remaining unchanged. Like AI generating the tone of authority without understanding, corporate discourse produces the aura of critical thought while preserving its logics. The humanities teach us not just to interpret content but to question the conditions of meaning itself: who frames it, who benefits, what gets erased. This kind of knowledge does not lend itself to commodification, not because it lacks value, but because its value lies in revealing how such economies are structured.
This is where McClay’s defense falters most profoundly. It calls for a restoration of meaning without accounting for the conditions under which meaning is produced. It seeks reassurance in timeless wisdom without asking how such “timelessness” is constructed, circulated, and enforced. And it risks imagining the humanities as antidote to our moment, when their deeper function may be diagnostic—to show us what this moment is, how it speaks, and whom it silences.
To make that point more concretely, we might turn—fittingly enough—to Shakespeare. For it is in his work, more than in any contemporary editorial, that we find the tools to understand why the humanities matter not in spite of ambiguity, but because of it. Take Polonius, that meddling advisor in Hamlet, whose most famous line has adorned countless commencement speeches and Instagram bios: “This above all: to thine own self be true.” It is a phrase that sounds like moral clarity. But it behaves otherwise. Spoken by a sycophantic courtier who cannot stop eavesdropping long enough to take his own advice, the line enacts the very instability it pretends to overcome.
What follows is not a traditional defense of the humanities. It does not call for a return to the canon, nor does it seek refuge in cultural preservation. Instead, it proposes that the core value of the humanities lies in their capacity to reveal the instability of meaning at precisely the moments we are most tempted to demand certainty. In a time when language can be automated to produce syntactic polish and tonal coherence at scale, the ability to interpret—to dwell in ambiguity without mistaking it for failure—becomes not just relevant but urgent. Artificial intelligence is increasingly adept at mimicking the outward features of authority: fluency, structure, even gravitas. But what it cannot replicate is the felt tension between language and meaning—the irony, the contradiction, the slipperiness that gives thought its ethical depth. Shakespeare understood this better than anyone.
He gives us not answers but misrecognitions, not lessons but performances of failure. And no character embodies this more precisely than Polonius. In Hamlet, he delivers his most-quoted line: “This above all: to thine own self be true.” It is repeated by motivational speakers, inscribed on graduation cards, and invoked by those seeking clarity in uncertain times. But the line, when read in context, does not deliver clarity. It delivers theater. Spoken by a character known less for insight than for inflated self-regard, the line performs the gestures of wisdom while exposing their hollowness.
The irony, of course, is that the line sounds like moral certainty. But it functions otherwise. It enacts the very instability it appears to deny. What is this “self” to which one must be true? A bundle of social obligations? A set of desires? An echo of paternal command? And what does it mean to be “true”—loyal, honest, consistent? Shakespeare, as ever, offers the form of authority hollowed out from within: a phrase that declares without anchoring, advises without specifying, insists without securing.
Which is precisely why Shakespeare matters in a world of AI. For all its surface coherence, AI-generated language tends toward what Polonius represents: the performance of reason without its burdens. It is polished, fluent, grammatically unimpeachable—and yet epistemically vacant. What Shakespeare teaches us, through figures like Polonius, is how to read beneath the sheen of fluency, how to dwell in ambiguity without mistaking it for failure, and how to recognize that meaning emerges not from clarity, but from interpretive labor.
The danger, then, is not simply that AI will replace the humanities. It is that our defenses of the humanities will become as shallow as the threat. If we imagine Shakespeare as a repository of stable values or eternal truths, we abandon what he most powerfully offers: a sustained meditation on the slipperiness of language, the contradictions of selfhood, and the impossibility of final answers. Shakespeare doesn’t offer clarity as comfort; rather, he opens a space where uncertainty becomes a condition for reflection, not a problem to be solved.
In a time when language technologies offer the illusion of certainty at scale, the humanities matter because they draw attention to the texture of language—its hesitations, its contradictions, its entanglements with power. This is not nostalgia. It is a commitment to a mode of reading that engages the conditions of meaning, that attends to what language does as much as to what it says, and that stays with the uncertainty AI so often smooths away.