Hamlet in the Metaxy

For both William Desmond and Eric Voegelin, Plato’s concept of the metaxu or metaxy is of paramount importance. Described by Plato in the Symposium and other works, metaxy means “between.” Voegelin describes this idea as our “experience of being itself, the experience of a tension between the poles of time and eternity” (Voegelin, 2002, 328). For Desmond, “[b]eing is given as the happening of the between,” a happening that is marked by “excess in the beginning,” “excess in the middle,” and “excess at the end” (Desmond, 1995, 180). Our experience is therefore a dynamic process. Voegelin again: “The tension of being itself, its genesis, exegesis, and interpretation, its ordering effect, its disintegration, and so on, are in fact experienced as a process. But this process occurs in the metaxy” (Voegelin, 2002, 329).  Existence is thus generated, exceeds us, and yet is given to us. We arrive, like so many of Shakespeare’s characters, in media res, yet this is our experience of the dynamic process (and even this process must be exceeded by what Desmond calls the “overdetermined origin” and for Voegelin by the “First Reality” of the transcendent ground of being). But it is the process, as we dynamically live it, that will demand from each of us an active response to whatever situation we find ourselves in. This is what generates, so to speak, the bifurcation points that the exigencies of life constantly present us with: we must decide and act, yet because this process occurs in the metaxy, we, like Hamlet, often find ourselves in highly equivocal circumstances. In this discussion I want to look at the ambiguities of the world (Denmark) of Hamlet as well as Hamlet’s responses to them. I will then demonstrate, from a perspective that keeps in mind the in between, that a metaxological approach to the play may yield an understanding of it that diverges somewhat from the perhaps more usual interpretation of it “simply” as a tale about retribution as Hamlet debates with himself how to avenge his father’s murder.

In Hamlet Shakespeare presents us with a protagonist who is clearly faced with a situation that demands that he make a choice. We are all familiar with this type of problem ourselves, and the scale of them, from the merely trivial to the potentially mortal, that can be consequent upon our decisions. This is why, in the equivocities of our metaxic condition, deciding is so difficult. Faced with dilemmas, we need time to think, and a question that the play might be seen to ask is, “What is the effect, and indeed affect, of thinking when there is time for this?” Clearly, there are situations where decisions must be made without the time for reflective thinking; but this is not the case for Hamlet: the whole play is about his “opportunities” for thinking — and what he does with them.

Thinking will not be a straightforward affair, neither in our practise of it, nor in itself. As Desmond suggests, Descartes’ cogito ergo sum privileges thinking over being: “Descartes will derive the ‘I am’ from the ‘I think’” (Desmond, 1995, 22). If Desmond is correct, then this will eventually, especially via Hegel, lead to the acknowledgement that “thinking is first heteroarchic before any possibility at all of its being auto-generating” because “[b]y heteroarchic I (Desmond) mean that its origin (arche) is in an other (heteros)” (ibid. 174).

This is highly important. If the “I am” is given (its due) precedence over the “I think,” then “being” will retain its priority over thinking, which will also keep in view the acknowledgement that “being” per se must originate in something “other” than itself if the consequences of its alleged “indigence” are to be avoided. Consequences such as the “circular” reasoning of Aristotle’s thought thinking itself, so beloved of Hegel, but which quite clearly leads to an “impossible” univocalist perspective: a view that would deny, ultimately, any pluralism in its quest for a false absolute; false because that univocalist (human) perspective cannot finally “account” for itself, because it cannot be its own origin (all being, on this view, has come to be from a source beyond or transcendent to itself). Circular thought necessarily reaches a condition of aporia which, finally, fails to explain anything. Thus, we cannot escape this infinite regress without the logical need of an (absolute) other or heteros.

Perhaps Hamlet would have no quarrel with any of this, and perhaps he would wish to let be (and will) after all he complains “there’s nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so” (Hamlet 2006, p. 466, Appendix 1, lines 11 – 12, all future references are to this edition). But this may be mere churlishness on Hamlet’s part, a consequence it may be of his sense, much manifested, of the equivocities of “being.” Hamlet has speculated on this ambivalence specifically, asking his fundamental question of the ground of being, “To be or not to be…” (3.1.55). But what is Hamlet’s notion of “being?” Hamlet’s comment, quoted above, would seem indicative of his state of mind: we might suggest that surely some things must be either good or bad in themselves independently of our thinking. Otherwise, the world would be a meaningless dream, utterly nihilistic without even a modicum of indigent value and thus not, in any way, meonic.

It is difficult to rationally conceptualise this “absolute” indigence, which is of a kind immeasurably beyond mere impoverishment, and poor beyond even need. And yet this is a condition that Hamlet comes perilously close to and perhaps finally falls victim to. Nonetheless, Fortinbras’s comments at the end that Hamlet was “likely…to have proved most royal” (5.2.381-2) are intriguingly ambiguous as well. The word “likely,” although it does not mean certainty, does suggest a sense of potential that has been lost. Even the play’s final (unmetrical) line “Go bid the soldiers shoot” could suggest that the “old” battles that “Become the field” (surely an ironic “becomingness,” intended by Shakespeare, which is not at all “comely”) will soon be raging again – just as soon as the shooting starts! If indeed Shakespeare does present this ironically, and as, in fact, as ugly as any stage (or field) strewn with corpses, we might ask if Hamlet (and the reader or audience) has missed something. I would say yes, from a metaxological perspective, and that there are many clues in the play as to what, precisely, Hamlet has “missed” (and us with him, perhaps), which leads us back to a question already implied above: Is the universe of Hamlet (which, of course, is our universe too) merely indigent, or does it possess a richness, certainly as potentiality that, tragically, Hamlet and most (not all) of the other characters in the play have missed or overlooked?

I would observe that Hamlet has answered his question of whether it is better “To be or not to be” twice, his “Let be” (5.2.201-2) and his slightly later “Let it be” (5.2.322). And yet we must ask what the nature of the “being” or Hamlet’s concept of being is or has become. We will return below to these enigmatic statements of Hamlet’s.

From his original self-questioning of being to his curiously fatalistic “acceptance,” acquiescence, or absorption into it is a long journey for Hamlet and the audience. Most members of the audience will see the play as “about” revenge, and clearly it is, but what is desirable about a revenge that consigns to death Hamlet himself, his mother, Ophelia, who apparently loves him, his uncle (some might say justifiably), Laertes (formerly Hamlet’s friend), Polonious, and so on. I have absolutely no objection to any of this from a dramatic point of view (Shakespeare had to consider the expectations of his paying audience, after all); but from what we might construe as an ethical or moral perspective it could seem somewhat unsatisfactory.

Hamlet is most put upon in the play; his situation could hardly be worse and there is no need to rehearse the details (which I assume are familiar to most readers): it is a human conundrum that Shakespeare presents; intensified by the closeness (mother, father, uncle etc.) of those whose actions have occasioned it. In fact, the situation that Hamlet finds on his return to Denmark is appalling from his point of view: Father murdered (probably — Hamlet is not yet certain about this) and apparently returned as a ghost demanding vengeance, mother re-married to his seemingly murderous uncle, Hamlet himself denied his inheritance/kingdom and so on. Who would doubt or condemn his desire for revenge? Or his sense of the urgent need for vengeful action? And yet Hamlet, oddly perhaps, prevaricates, he does, certainly for most of the play, take the time to think precisely on these events and when he stops prevaricating/thinking, and the “action” starts — a different kind of “rottenness” emerges in Denmark.

We can situate Hamlet’s predicament in relation to Desmond’s “fourfold sense of being.” This is used and developed by Desmond extensively throughout his works, and I can only provide the briefest of outlines of it here. The relevance of this concept, however, will become clearer during the discussion. Desmond describes the “fourfold sense of being” as the univocal, the equivocal, the dialectical, and the metaxological. The univocal focuses on our need for determinate objects and determining thinking; the equivocal on the inevitable decay of our univocal approach when it is exposed to the exigencies of circumstance; the dialectical reflects our various ways to attempt to reconcile these exigencies (“back” to something more determinate); and the metaxological which is the further recognition of something like the need to understand the nature of otherness, both between things themselves and, more ontologically, an ultimate “otherness” that transcends “our” reality and yet “underwrites” it, even as it confers its freedom(s), not unlike what Voegelin designates “First Reality.”

Few things are more dramatically equivocal than encounters deemed supernatural. The nature of the “reality” of such happenings is much to the fore, and this is certainly the case in Hamlet. Gertrude will tell Hamlet that “This is nothing but the coinage of your brain” (3.4.135) when referring to the ghost of Old Hamlet. Yet this “coinage” certainly affects the material world of Hamlet, as it affects his actions. What is the ghost (so troubling for many modern readers and audiences)? Is it real? Or just an “ecstatic” fantasy? In general, and especially after this encounter with Hamlet, I find Gertrude’s reactions and comments (especially to Claudius) extremely equivocal; and possibly in a “good” way in so far as she is trying to reconcile these apparently supernatural events into a dialectic that will help to “make sense” of the situation. Shakespeare is most concerned to convey dramatically the sheer horror of the situation in all its ambiguity and equivocality, which are not quite the same as each other: the equivocal is, I suggest, in Desmond’s work, linked more to the ontological, whereas ambiguity is more related to “solvable” or practical issues. Nothing can be “resolved” regarding the ghost, as Hamlet seems to be aware, “is it a spirit of health or goblin damned” (1.4.40) he may well ask. As usual, Horatio takes a more balanced perspective (balance, metaxologically, is the maintenance of poise in the tension of the poles of the metaxy), warning Hamlet of forms “Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason/And draw you into madness?” (1.4. 73-74). Yet, Hamlet seems determined to find the ghost’s speech compelling (1.5. 42-91). Indeed the “case” the ghost makes is most persuasive, but is it “really” Old Hamlet, or just “something rotten?” No-one but Hamlet hears this speech, thus it could be Hamlet’s imagination, even if the events the ghost describes “actually” happened. Is Hamlet’s mind already becoming deprived of reason? Soon Hamlet will state “thy (the ghost’s) commandment alone shall live…” (1.5.10 – emphasis mine). Whatever the status of the ghost, Hamlet is being drawn into what will become a lethal univocal perspective; one that will increasingly demand of him a determinate resolution; especially ironic if the ghost’s “commandment” is some kind of “fiction” of Hamlet’s imagination. Appropriately enough, this descent into univocalism is presented by Shakespeare in an entirely ambiguous/equivocal situation.

Yet Hamlet will resist any straightforward plunge into action, at least for a while. For much of the play his most singular determination seems to be to avoid action by substituting acting, in a typically Shakespearean chiaroscuro of equivocal truths in the “play within the play.” Yet, interestingly, when offering the Players advice, Hamlet comes close to a metaxologically balanced perspective, condemning those (actors) who “have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made them, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably” (3.2.32-34). Yet that which can be “imitated” must possess a truth because imitating the fundamentally inauthentic would seem a pointless parody of an anyway meaningless humanity, and this seems to be Hamlet’s view here. Therefore, there must, in its essential being, be an authentic human truth to be imitated. How might that truth become manifold? Just a little later Hamlet, addressing Horatio, will describe him:

             And blest are those

             Whose blood and judgement are so well co-meddled

             That they are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger

             To sound what stop she please. Give me that man

             That is not passion’s slave and I will wear him

             In my heart’s core – ay in my heart of heart – 

            As I do thee. (3.2. 64-70)

Thus, we know at least one way that Hamlet would describe an authentic truth. Horatio, here and throughout the play, manifests an authenticity, through his genuine love for Hamlet, which flows from the balance consequent upon that “co-medalled” transcending of mere Fortune. There is unity linking Hamlet and Horatio, a community, that displays some characteristics of agapeic consciousness between them, a form of metaxic mutuality in the sense that Desmond describes when he states that “Agapeic being in metaxological community points to the transpersonal that less suppresses the personal as fulfils its release into a more ultimate communicative transcending beyond self” (Desmond, 2008, 191). Hamlet’s comment, we see, reveals that he recognises at least some of the potential possibilities for authentic truth here, where “blood (passion) and judgement” co-meddle, such as consciousness of others’ “otherness,” perhaps even at times of the intimate, and intimately strange otherness within us. Horatio is ethical, as Hamlet must know, and he seems to possess what Desmond describes as “the education of the singular ethical agent” (Desmond, 1995, 526 – italics Desmond’s). Desmond relates this to “universal responsibility. In the education the opposition of the equivocal is turned around into an appreciation of the relatedness that goes with the community of being. The will is evil if it is wilful, that is, full of itself alone, shut in itself in opposition to the good…” (ibid). This is a meonic view of the world: Horatio has it; Hamlet does not. Or, at least, he seems to lose or fail to fully realise it. Why? Desmond also talks about elements of the “ethical universal,” the “good” or some of the good (in the “between”) over which we never have mastery. Understanding this is something like what the education of the singular or ethical agent should lead to. However, this is not the guaranteed outcome in the equivocity of the metaxy, the between. It could not be without the denial of genuinely free will, which denies the Darwinistic insistence on the reduction of human beings to machines and thus without free will, and consequently without moral responsibility. We might ask how evolutionists could actually deny free will, without the free will to deny it! Their “denial” comes closer to demonstrating that, in fact, there must be free will and thus also ethical responsibility. The “ethical universal” is like what Desmond in later works refers to as the “intimate universal,” which is also linked to aesthetic sensibility, or the passio essendi, and this raises the question of whether Hamlet has this kind of sensibility. The answer will be, perhaps unsurprisingly, both yes and no, and this will help us understand more clearly why Hamlet loses or fails to attain a meonic or a fully metaxological perspective, even though he can recognise something like this in Horatio.

Claudius is a far less perceptive character than Hamlet. Nevertheless, in his “my offence is rank” speech (3.3.36-72), he seems to undergo a curious “attack” of conscience and like Macbeth (but unlike Iago, a nihilistic phaulos who has no conscience, nor any inclination to prayer) he will find prayer impossible in the wake of murdering his brother, which he now perceives as having “the primal eldest curse upon’t” (line 36). It is a little puzzling, perhaps (except “dramatically,” of course), initially when Claudius suddenly manifests, albeit rather belatedly, this apparent conscientiousness, but it does show that he has a sense still of that “undiscovered country” (the transcendent beyond) but his “agapeic” sense (no human being is entirely without the potential at least for this), has been so “distracted by desire” that it must have been virtually non-functioning — a common enough human condition — the consequence of derailed or misguided free will. Claudius seems to have almost become “entropically nihilistic,” virtually, that is, the opposite of agapeic. This portrayal of Claudius is, I suggest, one of Shakespeare’s dramatic purposes for this character, in terms of ethics and morality.  Metaxologically, Claudius could be described as one of those who have failed to observe Voegelin’s admonition “NOT to immanentize the Eschaton”: the apotheosis of self-assertion.

This type of derailment of the will is, to begin with, something that Hamlet seems unlikely to suffer (in a way he is all qualms of conscience). But there are many forms of such distortion, and in his soliloquies, Hamlet seems most “at risk,” while he traverses the boundary or interface of the between with the beyond, in a very human encounter with transcendental/metaxological mindfulness as he reveals his deepest thinking.

What is a soliloquy? And what, precisely, is Hamlet at risk of (doing) or from? Well, obviously a device that dramatists use; but we all soliloquise and, as Desmond observes, “All speaking is pluralisation, doubling of the self. Even to talk to oneself in soliloquy or monologue, one has to be two – speaker and listener. Monologue is hence dialogue with the self as other. Plurivocity is unavoidable” (Desmond, 1995, 392 – footnote 13). Desmond will also state “The ‘monad’ of self is infinitely rich in itself” (ibid, 384 – emphasis Desmond’s). This is an aspect of idiocy, understood here as Desmond uses it to describe the deepest intimacy of self with self, an intimacy that also transcends agapeically beyond itself towards others and the ultimate heterodoxic otherness of the Beyond – the Transcendent overdetermined source of being. Therefore, as Desmond puts it, “the idiocy of being…is presentiment of overdetermination” (Desmond, 2002, 186). This is not an “object” that can be determinately possessed, or even described; yet we can be aware of its presence as, I suggest, Hamlet is as he soliloquises: a soliloquy is thus plurivocal in an overt way.

This kind of idiocy is also an aspect of what Desmond calls “posthumous mindfulness” which “is the later knowing of what was and what is; it is knowing the elemental from a distance that undergoes the otherness of life, yet in the intimacy also knows no distance” (Desmond, 2001, 177). A soliloquy is thus a pluralistic “encounter” with both the intimate and the heterodox. Hamlet’s words reach into the very “excess,” as the otherness within idiotically and into the otherness of the transcendent beyond (paradoxically, here, also idiotically) that “underwrites” the metaxy. It is little wonder that Hamlet is taking a risk as we all do when we undergo this sense of otherness; and thus, we can, or should, empathise with Hamlet when he is engaging in soliloquising as a form of mindfulness.

What trajectory of Hamlet’s personal mindfulness can Shakespeare present and develop during them? Hamlet’s first soliloquy, “O that this too too sullied flesh would melt…” (1.2. 129-159) reveals him as focussed on those most closely related to him, principally Claudius, but also, perhaps to a surprising degree, on Gertrude. Yet, even in this early soliloquy Hamlet displays a mindfulness of metaphysical conditions, even if he interprets them negatively, and he sees the world as being “an unweeded garden that grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature/ Possess it merely.” But this is a metaphysics of the world, not a metaxology that would also look beyond it.

In his second soliloquy (2.2.485-540), delivered just after he has been talking to the players and watching the dumb show of the play within the play, Hamlet is already increasingly concerned with more obviously metaphysical questions as he reflects upon the ability of the players to “act” so convincingly, merely “For Hecuba? / What’s she to him, or he to her, That he should weep for her?” Hamlet contrasts this to his “real” situation, and asks “What would he do/ Had he the motive and that for passion/ That I have?” Hamlet does not spare himself from self-criticism in any way in this speech — but still he does not act. Shakespeare, as a mindful dramatist, revels too in this maelstrom of equivocity, where authenticity and ambiguity seem almost hopelessly intertwined.

The third soliloquy (3.1.54-88) sees an overtly metaphysically focussed Hamlet. He asks the ultimate question: “To be or not to be,” questions the role of “outrageous fortune,” considering whether it would be “nobler in the mind to suffer” its “slings and arrows” or, and this is an important question here, whether one should “take arms against a sea of troubles.” Yet this question gives Hamlet a pause for reflection because it immediately casts up, as it were, the fully metaphysical question of the uncertainty of finality in death: “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/ When we have shuffled off this mortal coil…” Ominously, he seems to conclude that, “Thus conscience does make cowards – And thus the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” which leads to events of “great pitch and moment” to “turn awry and lose the name of action.” Yet, we might ask, is this what conscience does? At many other moments in the play Shakespeare is precise about portraying Hamlet as conscientious and thoughtful, as wanting to think; indeed is not his whole self-conflict in the play his very personal struggle between events, and characters that are inducing him into acting in ways that he seems most reticent to engage, by their largely selfish (Horatio and Ophelia are exceptions) sometimes utterly evil actions (such as Claudius’s)? Despite the kind of duress he is being subjected to, Hamlet does not act in overtly vengeful way: he still needs, it seems, to think more precisely upon these events. He is not yet of a mind that could conclude that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (Appendix 1, lines 11-12). This attitude is nihilistic: Hamlet is not, at least not yet.

After the players have performed The Mousetrap, and Hamlet has apparently fully satisfied himself that Claudius has actually murdered Old Hamlet (presumably he didn’t “actually” trust the Ghost) he delivers himself of what might be called a soliloquy (3.2.376-389), although its main import seems to be to demonstrate that Hamlet is finally becoming sufficiently “psyched up” for action: “Now I could drink hot blood/ And do such business as the bitter day/ Would quake to look on,” and we feel that the rhetoric seems to be for his benefit as much as ours.

However, even now Hamlet does not act in any coherent or even rational way. We have his curious encounter with Claudius at prayer, and Hamlet cites theological reasons for not dispatching him forthwith. This may be sound enough religiously speaking, but it is perhaps a curious moment for Hamlet to become scrupulous in this fashion. It does, of course, serve to raise the dramatic tension. Then we have the bizarre murder of Polonius, and Hamlet’s almost slapstick removal and concealment of the body. The serious point is that Hamlet is becoming profoundly mentally unbalanced by the relentless concatenation of events that are buoying him along.

Shakespeare has brought us very carefully to what, I wish to suggest, is an often overlooked, almost understated, yet critical bifurcation point for Hamlet: his encounter with the Norwegian Captain. It is interesting to note that from 1676 until the end of the nineteenth century this scene was left unperformed and, indeed, it is often left out in modern performance. I would argue that this demonstrates no less than a fundamental misunderstanding, certainly an overlooking, of an important aspect of the play.

What happens in this scene is simple enough. On his way to England under the orders of Claudius, for typically nefarious purposes, Hamlet along with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, others, but not – importantly – Horatio, encounters a Norwegian Captain. This soldier and his troops are on their way “against some part of Poland.” Hamlet assumes it must be against “the main of Poland” or for “some frontier” (a border or fortress). Yet it is not; and Hamlet and the Captain have the following exchange:

Captain:

                Truly to speak, and with no addition,

               We go to gain a little patch of ground

               That hath in it no profit but the name.

               To pay five ducats – five – I would not farm it,

               Nor will it yield to Norway or the Pole

               A ranker rate should it be sold in fee.

Hamlet:

              Why then the Polack will never defend it.

Captain:

               Yes, it is already garrisoned.

Hamlet:

               Two thousand souls and twenty ducats

               Will not debate the question of this straw.

               This is th’impostume of much wealth and peace

               That inward breaks and shows no cause without

               Why the man dies. I humbly thank you, sir.

This seems like an entirely reasonable response by Hamlet to what, in any objective assessment, would surely look like an abject folly. Horatio, had he been present, may have reminded Hamlet of “carnal, bloody and unnatural acts, / Of accidental judgements, casual slaughters, / Of deaths put on by cunning, and for no cause” (5.2.365-367). Too late for Hamlet, it is to Fortinbras that Horatio delivers these words. We may be reminded of similar follies in our own time.

What follows in the play is Hamlet’s final soliloquy, often cut in performance, yet what Pennington (Hamlet, 2006, see note on p. 360) called “amazing,” describing it “as perhaps the best of Hamlet’s monologues.”

Let us look at this important speech (4.4.30-65), asking first what sort of subsequent reflections to his own reaction to the Captain we might have expected from Hamlet. More thinking precisely about things? More consideration of the complexities of the characters motivations? More self-reflection on what he has actually done and the consequences of those actions? More dialogue with the ever-balanced Horatio? (What a pity Horatio had not been there to offer reasoning advice, and how significant that Shakespeare has him absent.) In fact, we do get all of this, and will consider it further below. Yet, what does Hamlet actually say in this soliloquy?

Hamlet seems rational enough, but his discourse reveals his inward confusion; it is as if his encounter with the Captain has been having its effect, sub-consciously as it were, as elements of it are transformed into in his speech. His comment that “all occasions do inform against me” is reasonable enough – they do. However, his confusion is quickly manifest as he links man’s basic needs, sleeping, eating, with beastliness, contrasts this with his ability for “large discourse,/ Looking before and after” (a form of posthumous mind, see above), reflects upon “That capability and godlike reason” and how to use it, and so on. Yet it is now, I suggest, that Hamlet’s reason fails him as he “reduces” what he perceives as his inability to act vengefully to a negative consequence “Of thinking too precisely on th’event” which, he apparently comes to feel, seems to prevent or impede his access to a kind of heedless “Bestial oblivion,” a “craven scruple” that is in his way. This is surely a curious circumscription of his preceding understanding of the panoramic range of “large discourse?” He goes on to compare the exhortation of “Examples gross as earth” with “divine ambition,” clearly recalling the self-sacrifice of soldiers for the “little patch of ground,” that he had called “th’impostume,” an abscess that could reveal “no cause,” except the non-cause (“the invisible event”), so to speak, of something like ennui which, catastrophically, leads to death. Now, and surely Shakespeare is being ironical, not condoning, Hamlet says, “Rightly to be great/ Is not to stir without great argument/ But greatly to find quarrel in a straw/ When Honour’s at the stake.” Whereat Hamlet now ponders: Thinking what? Shakespeare doesn’t exactly tell us – he lets us ponder too, as Hamlet muses upon “the death of twenty thousand men/ That for a fantasy or trick of fame/ Go to their graves like beds, fight for plot/ Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,/ Which is not tomb enough and continent/ To hide the slain?” Yet, whilst earlier (3.4 124-126), with Gertrude, seeing the Ghost that she apparently cannot see, he fears but can still feel, or maybe even hope, that her compassionate looking at him, this “piteous action,” could convert his “stern effects” into “tears perchance for blood,” now he demands that “from this time forth/ Let my thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth.” This is not logical; it is not reasonable; but it is dramatic, and events will now inevitably be toward the carnage at the play’s conclusion.

What has happened from a metaxological perspective? Simply put, Hamlet has almost completely lost any sense of otherness, and it will all end tragically as we know; but there is still complex path to explore before that finality. At the start of Act 5 Shakespeare presents the graveyard encounter. As an example of the playwright’s “black humour” it is unsurpassed, but an icy current of a profound nihilism runs through it. The upshot is Hamlet’s reductio ad absurdum of “tracing the noble dust of/ Alexander” till “a find it stopping a bung hole” to which Horatio, pithily but not unreasonably, replies, “’Twere to consider too curiously to consider so,” a balanced response that reminds us, in a timely fashion, what is at stake when thinking becomes unbalanced – a risk ever-present in our metaxic condition – and tends toward false univocalisms, as Hamlet’s do here. Hamlet draws his nihilistically inclined conclusions, ironically “determinations” of nothingness, and the “loam” of life itself is become nothing too – no more than a stop for a beer-barrel. Although, we might reflect that even this is something.

Earlier we have seen how Hamlet’s “compelled valour” (4.6.17) can cause him to leap into action quickly enough in straightforward univocal circumstances, yet when he has had the opportunity to think, which is during most of the play, the equivocalities and ambiguities have become clear to him, and he has deferred to act; but he is now beyond such reticence, and any compelled valour that he displays will not be balanced by any cautioning reflective distance.

Curiously, but perhaps inevitably, in our existence in the metaxy our condition is one in which, as Desmond appositely puts it, “We have neither the bliss of the beast’s ignorance nor the blessedness of the god’s gnosis” (Desmond, 1995, 464). Our being thus, like Hamlet, in the between, our reaction to unbalancing events and/or states of mind leads to deepening ambiguities to which, paradoxically, a common response is to seek out and embrace more securely univocally determinable positions which, nevertheless, will prove to be false idols, infidelities finally revealing and also generating further equivocities that we become less inclined to treat dialectically often resorting either to a self-assertive will to power that is uninterested in, that may even deny, the possibility of community with others or, and this is closer to Hamlet’s condition, manifests in a fatalism, even an egotistic and reckless (these are not incompatible) amor fati. The possibility of a metaxological, agapeically nuanced response is, as we shall see, beyond the scope of Hamlet in, as he calls it, the “prison” of Denmark, as Shakespeare dramatically presents it. Desmond would see the metaxological alternative as “agapeic community” considered as a “togetherness itself” which is “the releasing of the participants into their own freedom, supported in the promise of their self-transcendence. Freedom in its promise is let be, and the very letting be is the welcoming of this promise to realize itself in the between, in the service of the other, the service of the good” (Desmond, 1995, 449). Yet, as Desmond also reminds us, “the letting be is always a hazard” (ibid. 450), as it will prove to be in what follows.

This, then, is the state of things that will develop in Act 5. Hamlet still prevaricates, and yet we can see this now as something like his “consciousness” of the “fourfold sense of being” that Desmond has described. Hamlet will state, “There is a divinity that shapes our ends” (5.2.10) even as he has just praised “rashness,” curiously juxtaposing what he seems to understand as the univocal singularity of divinity with the ambiguity of chance, which would seem to put the situation beyond any final resolution by Hamlet, or indeed anyone else. A little before this, in the graveyard scene, Hamlet had stated (to Horatio), “We must speak by the card or equivocation will undo us” (5.1.130), suggestive of the whole context of the play, but there is no “card” or rulebook, for life, at least not in any simplistic or univocal sense. Thus, only dialectic, constant dialogue and “thinking more precisely” on events can even attempt to “solve” life’s riddles (even if that may mean the apophatic “solution” of demonstrating that, and perhaps why, they can’t be solved). To grasp why they (our attempts) must fail, and yet why we must persist in our metaxically conditioned-yet-free will (only an absolutely unconditioned will could be absolutely free) that is our human being which is, nevertheless, not merely an indigence, not virtually “nothing” yet, on the contrary, a meonic fullness; but we need an agapeic form of mindful consciousness, a kind of insight that could enable a “leap” in faith, as Bernard Lonergan would say, to know and understand this; and also what Desmond would call an acceptance of “the ecstasies of metaxological outgoing, which itself is an elemental realism that is beyond itself and for the other as other, or beyond itself in a letting be of the other in its otherness, a letting be that is a respect, bordering on the transcendence of religious reverence.”  (Desmond, 2001, 181 – footnote 9)

Hamlet will not, or cannot, fully attain this metaxological state of awareness: he will continue his inevitably increasingly fruitless quest to find certain (univocal) assurances. He will begin to interpret chance events as heaven’s “ordinance” as he seems to seek some kind of divine approval even now that would justify his actions, although circumstances may seem to justify them anyway. Hamlet has doubts in any case, despite the apparent circumstantial certainties of the situation, after all there is no doubt now, at least about Claudius’ culpability. Does Hamlet, then, have a sense, still, of something more ultimately equivocal in all of this?

Hamlet however now begins to see his world as a knot that has snarled him, this “drossy age” as he calls it. We sympathise: as a son and heir to a kingdom he has been betrayed by the most abject and self-serving manifestation of will to power by Claudius, and all his routes to any form of agapeic mindfulness have been closed off.  His metaxic self-communion through the soliloquies has come to nothing. Neither have his potentially fruitful dialogues with the ever-faithful Horatio yielded any way out, finally becoming almost ironic. In their last private exchange, after Hamlet has exclaimed to Horatio, “Thou wouldst not think how ill all’s here about my heart – but it is no matter” (5.2.190-191), and he has dismissed the coming lethal duel with Laertes as “but foolery,” he seems to ignore Horatio’s final words to him: “If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will forestall their repair hither and say you are not fit” (195-196), which would have been Hamlet’s final opportunity to take a different course. Instead, Hamlet responds with: “Not a whit. We defy augury. There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be, “tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all, since no man of aught he leaves knows what is’t to leave betimes. Let be.” (5.2.197-202) This is not a good letting be, or a letting be of the good.

Was Horatio’s “advice” correct? It is our ability to think, to rationalise, to develop and foster mindfulness, that is the essence of our being human perhaps our fullest potentiality for, as Hamlet himself has described man, “how noble in reason; how infinite in faculties…how like a god” (2.2.270-275): but importantly not a god, yet perhaps, in a Thomistic sense, man could be analogically like a god. Perhaps it is this that should be “Let be?” Do Hamlet’s words, though, sound more like a kind of amor fati, a “mere” fatalism that does not seem like any kind of valorisation of action for action’s sake by Shakespeare?

Hamlet’s final “let it be” (line 322) suggests that he accepts his “fate” even as he wants his “cause” presented “aright” by Horatio; but what could be finally “aright” about Hamlet’s “cause” anyway, even if we could unequivocally specify what it was? If it was justice, or even self-justification it seems instead that the equivocal has ironically triumphed here, even as the inert univocalism which, ironically (equivocally), isn’t even “vocal,” it is the final “muteness” of death as it overwhelms the characters, innocent and guilty alike. They will no longer be part of any dialogue or dialectic, and their agapeic and ethical potencies are not sacrificed but merely lost – this is the play’s tragic essence. And Shakespeare’s moral warning? It is, I suggest, about the choices we make and their relationship to the context in which we make them; it is also, given the complex equivocality of our contextual circumstances – the very exigencies of our lives in the metaxy – also about the need to reflect mindfully, agapeically and metaxologically, upon them, before taking any action, perhaps especially at critical bifurcation points. We near the end of our discussion where it began, with the equivocity of Fortinbras’ final summing up (see above) as he looks at the corpsetrewn stage, and we, readers and audiences alike, are presented with a spectacle which must invite us to consider reflectively the consequences of the decisions made, especially Hamlet’s, and the actions performed, and their consequences.

Is Hamlet a kind of “Nietzchean?” Does he see the beyond as only “will to power?” Perhaps, but does he have or retain any sense of something like Plato’s summum bonum? Desmond asks, of us and of this fascination with will to power if, “When we wake up to the baseless fabric of this self-hypnosis, perhaps a century hence, will we rub our eyes and say, what silly hymns we have sung – or shouted; let us again find a God worthy of song!” (Desmond, 2001, 157). Actually, Hamlet does “wake up,” at least he begins to, but does he realize, or “evolve” towards an understanding of “otherness” in the agapeic sense of “a good beyond the good?” Desmond, talking about Nietzchean “individualistic self-apotheosis,” simultaneously contrasts and aligns this with “self-affirming will to power as my will to power versus love of fate as the necessity of the will to power of the whole” (ibid. 155). Yet this is a paradox that is indeed a kind of delusion, an “enchantment…even if it entrances many arrested in the adolescent posture of desire desiring itself, or the will willing itself, or eros in love with eros.” (ibid. 155) But this is “poetic sorcery, even black magic,” what Voegelin would call “the wisdom and magic of the extreme.” Yet this only partly describes Hamlet. Recall his remark to Rosencrance and Guildensterne (Hamlet, 2006, Appendix 1) that “Denmark’s a prison’ and, as Rosincrance replies, “Then the world is one” and we are reminded too, that Hamlet has long before called it a “sterile promontory” “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours” and man “this quintessence of dust” (2. 2. 265-275). These comments by Hamlet suggest that even as he says “let it be” he still retains a sense that perhaps all could have been otherwise, after all his negative images above only make sense because they carry the trace of their positive opposites, that rather could have been Hamlet’s in a different but “undiscovered country” and had Denmark not been a prison for him in so many ways. This is his tragedy, and Shakespeare has had his drama to write and produce, and it is perhaps the art of tragedy that finally, and most fully, transcends here. Nevertheless, we may still ask if art is, or should be, moral, even if Shakespeare’s work is moral, as I have suggested above. I would answer yes, if it is to be oriented towards the good, especially the good as transcendence. Otherwise, art would be only “art for art’s sake,” which is a meaningless phrase that reduces art to nothing more than a “means for means sake” – with no end in sight. As such, art would be only another nihilism, another descent into the abyssal infinite regression of our now-become-groundless self-assertion, however socially or communally presented, and thus without ultimacy or final relevance. Shakespeare’s work, if it was void of a moral dimension, would also be meaningless in this sense. In Hamlet, our sense of Hamlet’s personal tragedy is that something has “gone wrong,” something of the goodness of being is perplexingly absent metaphysically in the prison-world of Denmark. The play itself is Shakespeare’s, if I may put it so, metaxological artistic exploration of this absence: this is the play’s moral and ethical dimension and, as Desmond comments: “This is one reason why great works of art, such as a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, are works of ethics, ethics not only in a humanistic sense but in probing our perplexity about the metaphysical consent to the ultimate goodness of being” (Desmond, 2001, 187 – emphasis Desmond’s).

Desmond will describe our modern situation, and its focus imaginarius as “the old prison walk from the valueless whole to the nihilism of the humanism that has lost faith in the will to power…we walk around ourselves as our own circles, or prisons, and we are back with raw power, and being as effective power, without worth. As caught in the logic of a certain self-determination, Hegelian, Marxist and Nietzschean ethics lie on the same continuum” (Desmond, 2001, 149). And thus my response is that Hamlet is not a Nietzschean (or Hegelian or Marxist etc.) but he, like Shakespeare his creator, is historically at a very early stage in the continuum that Desmond describes. I see Hamlet, as is Shakespeare, as an Early Modern, on the cusp, as it were, between an older “default theism” and the coming “default atheism,” between an older more holistic perspective, present from Plato through Augustine to Aquinas and others, to the modern “collapse” from Descartes, Kant, as well as those mentioned by Desmond, and the inexorable valorisation of ever more radical univocalisms in the form of hubristic will(s) to power and an obsession with autonomy. This is another false idol that ignores, not beings qua being necessarily, but the question of the whence of the coming to be of that being, those beings. Yet, as the character Alicia Western in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Passenger, talking about the nature of reality, puts it, “That the search for its definition was inexorably buried in and subject to the definition it sought. Or that the world’s reality could not be a category among others therein contained.” (McCarthy, 2022, 49 – emphasis McCarthy’s) If this is so then reality at its ultimate source is the heteros, that is the agapeic gifting source that both creates and lets be our own otherness, therefore it is not just another category, in fact it must be the Other, what Desmond calls the “overdetermined origin,” the heteroarchic source of categorial determinations which is not, as such, determinate category. In fact, it is the First Reality, the source of being itself. This is a realisation which is found, too, in the work of Voegelin, Lonergan, Barry Miller et al and is a realisation that could suggest a possibility of a return, at least to our bifurcation point, our encounter, so to speak, with something like Hamlet’s confrontation, at least in its bifurcatory quality, with the Norwegian Captain. Bifurcation points, as we have seen, elicit choices and decisions; Hamlet makes his, and it is interesting that as an “early cuspian” he seems to look “before” more than “after” in so far as any fatalism that he may display is of a theistically-tinged quality. He still acknowledges an “undiscovered country” – something fundamentally other and different – but this is tinged with a burgeoning sense of despair that this is an otherness that may not, or may not care to, influence in any way life’s happenings. After all, Hamlet knows we have “free souls.”

Our modern (post-modern?) situation is, obviously enough, not the same as Hamlet’s, yet we later moderns, who follow now much later from the beginnings of the early modern period, also make choices and decisions that determine our actions, and we seem to have moved more toward a thoroughgoing rejection of deism, instead giving ourselves over to the self-apotheosis of autonomy (see above). We would reject any “Hamletian” fatalism as we become or try to become like Nietszche’s “last men” ubermenschen, both masters of ourselves and nature too, and in control of our destinies. Or so we would hope. We may be the heirs of Nietszche, and far more “Nietszchean” than Hamlet, or Shakespeare for that matter, could ever have been in their early modern period.  

Yet perhaps this makes the moral dimension, discussed above, of Hamlet even more crucial and relevant to us. If Hamlet perhaps gives himself over to fatalism, whereas in modernity we mainly took the materialistic, exploitative, “mastery over nature” route, the result is similar: we thereby lose nearly all sight of the heterodox, individual othernesses as well as the absolute other that, as we saw above, is the overdetermined “source” of our coming to be, that is also not a source but the origin of source. The origin, the heteros that must be both Beyond and the beyond in us, beyond impossible (and meaningless) infinite regressions and their inevitable conditions of aporia: a recognition rather of the hidden god, in the intimate strangeness of being itself. Is it too fanciful to suggest that Shakespeare had something more like this in mind when he wrote his play, his historical early modern situation so apposite to “looking before and after,” and using “That capability and Godlike reason” that should not “fust in us unused,” and thus Hamlet would not be merely a tale of revenge, or a shout for or hymn to action. If so, the moral and ethical understanding of the play will require a “letting be” from us,  – we are free to “hazard” the gift of our given freedom, here to interpret Hamlet – but perhaps in a more mindful, agapeic and metaxological version than Hamlet’s, perhaps more like Horatio’s (or Shakespeare’s?), one that could maybe avoid yet another stage (the world stage of our will and ideas yes, but not only that – it is, as we have seen – the stage of the other to us also) being strewn with corpses.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Desmond, William (1995) Being and the Between. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Desmond, William (2001) Ethics and the Between. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Desmond, William (2008) God and the Between. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

McCarthy, Cormac (2022) The Passenger. London: Picador.

Shakespeare, William (2006) Hamlet. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor eds. The Arden Shakespeare: Third Series.  London: Thomson.

Voegelin, Eric (2002) Anamnesis. Edited by David Walsh. Complete Works Volume 6. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

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