People try
to convince themselves that what they want to believe is true.
The
success of that effort will depend on two things: the quality of the
psychological tools they have at their disposal and the truth of what it is
they would like to believe. The mechanism by which this self-persuasion is
undertaken is presented in Shakespeare’s Hamlet Act III, Scene1.
It should help to understand this perspective if I explain a
few things about Hamlet’s argument, line by line. When you read the whole
monolog at the end it will be easy to follow Hamlet’s effort at
self-persuasion, in its form here, as self-deception.
Start by understanding the cultural context that the subject
uses to organize his world. He is a college student, with a privileged
upbringing, from a prominent family, majoring in philosophy. He is home on
vacation from college abroad but he has been trained in the medieval scholastic
approach to philosophy. Analysis of a problem typically began, as in its
classical antecedents, with a true or false test. A proposition would be
presented starkly, then examined, reduced to its parts, elements confirmed or
rejected, the structure tested for logical coherence until an irrefutable
argument was attained. Scholastic philosophers, like the ones who trained
Prince Hamlet, would start with a question like: Is God Perfect or Imperfect?
That kind of thing. Hamlet posed his this way:
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
He is standing, as it were, outside his own life, like the philosophy dons at school, addressing his life’s great question with cool,
rational detachment. Except that in fact he is an emotional disaster, ready to snap.
He re-states his question, unpacking the simple binary proposition into more revealing parts. The first half of the question, what
it is that being alive entails, really is:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
The inverted syntax can be misleading but he is equating “To be” that is, existing, with the inevitable mental anguish that he is
experiencing and which, as a young, self-involved man, he believes is the inevitable condition that all people must live with. He
attributes this anguish not to his own character or choices, by the way, but to “outrageous fortune” – his troubles are just bad
luck. His mental anguish is quite real.
In case you don’t remember the story, his uncle just murdered his father and is sleeping with his mom. His dead dad came to
him in a dream and ordered him to kill his uncle for vengeance and justice. Hamlet’s not doing it. He is freaking out instead.
Freaking out, and thinking.
Because rather than “To be” there is always the possibility of “not to be,” of not continuing to live. He unpacks the “or not to be”
this way:
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
Now you know people usually read this as a contemplation of suicide. It could be. But you can’t tell from what he says here that
it is. Because he and his family are all warriors, they took power by force of arms, they hold power by force of arms, and in fact
as the play opens the kingdom is threatened by an army massing on the border. So for Prince Hamlet to think of taking arms,
against a sea of troubles or any other enemy, is no stretch.
He then contemplates this path of action – whether killing himself or killing his murdering, motherfuckin, thug uncle we don’t
know, but he is thinking about what non-existence, in the form of death through violence, would be like.
True to the form of his scholastic training there are two opposing possibilities he considers. First:
To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd.
That is, if death put an end to suffering who wouldn't want it? Sometimes actors blend the first two lines and it comes out “to
sleep no more” but that is not what the script means. “No more” stands alone as a thought. It means to exist no more.
Next he considers the opposing case:
To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause:
What if death is not the end, he asks What if there is an afterlife in which suffering goes on and is perhaps compounded. The
“coil” refers to the snake’s skin that he sheds or “shuffles off.” The mortal coil is a metaphor for the idea that the body is a
temporary form for us but is not us; holding out the possibility that the soul goes on to suffer.
Hamlet’s inference leads him to the insight:
there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
A bare bodkin is a bare blade, and fardels are heavy burdens. He is saying: no one in their right mind would want to live and go through all the inevitable crap and injustice and
irritation and unhappiness of life, if one simple act (of murder or suicide) could end the troubles forever. That is his logical, philosophy-student’s conclusion.
However as an observer we should not miss the fact that Hamlet is projecting his feelings, his inner torment, onto everyone. He is adopting the pose of a victim. He is identifying his
suffering as the inevitable nature of life. He is assuming that he is examining a world which has fixed properties (suffering) from a fixed and objective intellectual standpoint. Neither
is true. No such standpoint exists. He has a perspective. It is one he constructed.
But he employs this idea set, consciously or unconsciously, to free himself from having to take responsibility for causing his own anguish, by inaction, or remedying his anguish, by
action. Instead he strikes the philosopher’s pose, as if he stood outside the action of his own life.
The only rationale he has for continuing to live, the only one he can conceive of, is one of fear, the fear of what may lie beyond death. He cannot conceive of living with purpose
beyond one’s own interests or comforts. Not duty. Not moral obligation. Not even God’s will. Fear is the only driver for his choice to live and he generalizes it:
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
Aside from being a dynamite source of movie titles Shakespeare has provided an interesting double entendre on the word conscience. He used it both in the modern sense – an
inner moral compass – along with an archaic meaning of “self-consciousness.” So in that word Hamlet gets to conflate doing the right thing with doing the smart thing. How
convenient. Being chicken is the right and natural thing to do. And not just for him, in his situation, but for everyone, in all situations. Or so he has persuaded himself.
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
So he identifies “thought,” an excess of philosophical reflection, as the source of his inaction. It is not. Good thought is damn handy. His pop probably could not have run Denmark
without it. But bad philosophy provides an excuse for many unwholesome choices (for a few examples see the 20th century).
Its easy to tell that what is driving Hamlet mad is not that life itself is full of difficulties. It is not that he is “melancholy” which means depressed. It is not that he is crazy. It is not bad
luck and it is not that he is “equivocating.” It is that he feels like a pussy. And he wants desperately to think his way out of his difficulties and his difficulties, perhaps for the first time
in his young man’s life, are not amenable to solution by thinking.
He is on the spot. He needs to kick ass and take over. No one can do it but him.
The wonderful thing about this moment in the play is that is so precisely articulated and so universal. Facing the decisive moment, the moment of truth, as a rite of passage to
adulthood, and at every critical juncture of one’s life, is what defines us – hero or goat, each of us decides. We choose our path on the basis of our skill, courage and honesty.
The coda on this speech is an interruption of his train of thought, in which he conceals what he is thinking and feeling (“Soft you now” means “Be quiet.”) His inner ratiocination is
stilled by seeing this cute girl that he loves. (In this section the word “orisons” means prayers.)
- Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.
In
his last two lines, spoken to his beloved, in his imagination, he asks her to
bear witness to his failings. It might be the first
moment of sober maturity we
see in him.
Here
is the whole speech:
To be, or not to
be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler
in the mind to suffer
The slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms
against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end
them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a
sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and
the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir
to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be
wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance
to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep
of death what dreams may come
When we have
shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause:
there's the respect
That makes calamity
of so long life;
For who would bear
the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's
wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of
despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of
office and the spurns
That patient merit
of the unworthy takes,
When he himself
might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?
who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat
under a weary life,
But that the dread
of something after death,
The undiscover'd
country from whose bourn
No traveller
returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather
bear those ills we have
Than fly to others
that we know not of?
Thus conscience
does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native
hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er
with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of
great pith and moment
With this regard
their currents turn awry,
And lose the name
of action. - Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia!
Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins
remember'd.