Simon Critchley - The Hamlet Doctrine: Knowing Too Much, Doing Nothing

FOR SOME, and it is a popular view that goes back at least to Goethe, Hamlet is a man who simply cannot make up his mind: he waits, hesitates, and is divided from himself in his madness, all the while dreaming of a redeeming, cataclysmic violence. In this view, Hamlet is a creature of endless vacillation, a cipher for the alienated inward modern self in a world that is insubstantial and rotten: Denmarks a prison, Hamlet sighs. For others, Hamlet is the great melancholic who is jealous of Claudius because he has realized his secret desire, namely, to usurp the place of his rival in the affection of his mother.

For still others, Hamlet is not so much a bather in the black sun of depression as too much in the sun of knowledge. Through the medium of the ghost, he has grasped the nature of that which is; that is, himself, his family, and the corrupt political order that surrounds him. Unlike some of the heroes in Attic tragedy, like Oedipus, who act first and then find out the truth later, Hamlet knows the truth from the ghosts mouth in act 1. This truth does not lead to action but instead to a disgust with or nausea from existence. In this view, Hamlet is a kind of anti-Oedipus: whereas the latter moves ragefully from ignorance to knowledge, and his insight requires the loss of his sight in a violent act of self-blinding, the great Dane knows the score from the get-go, but such knowledge does not seem to lead to action. Maybe action requires veils of illusion, and once those veils are lifted, we feel a sense of resignation.

Whatever the truth of the various interpretations, there seems to be a significant disconnection between thought and action in the person of Hamlet. Consider the famous To be, or not to be soliloquy. After contemplating suicide as an attempted quietus from a weary life, Hamlet ponders the dread of life after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns (apart from the ghost, of course, who seems to have a return ticket). The possibility of life after death puzzles the will and makes us endure the sufferings that we have rather than risk ones we know nothing of but that could be much worse. He continues:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pitch and moment,

With this regard their currents turn awry

And lose the name of action.

Thought and action seem to pull against each other, the former annulling the possibility of the latter. If, as Hamlet says elsewhere, there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so, then thinking makes things rather bad, and any resolution dissolves into thin air. Speaking of thin air, we might notice that when the ghost makes his final appearance in the play, in a scene of almost-unbearable verbal and near-physical violence, with Hamlet raging at his mother for her inconstancy, the ghost says that This visitation / is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose. Hamlet confesses to being a tardy son who has not committed Th important acting of the ghosts command.

The ghost asks Hamlet to step between his mother and her fighting soul and speak the truth. For a moment it seems as if he mightdear mother, you are sleeping with your husbands murderer. But as she mumbles the word ecstasy, Hamlet careens into the most pathetic of adjurations, begging Gertrude not to sleep again with Claudius, laying down arms before the truth, once again. Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works, the ghost says.