Absurdism In Hamlet

"Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."
--Albert Camus

"This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart."
--Albert Camus



I have thus far written two respective posts about absurdism, the first explaining how absurdism differs greatly from nihilism [1] and the second proving that a kind of theistic absurdism is the most optimistic thing we can hope for in the absence of special divine revelation from God [2].  As those who have read both posts will know, I, as a rationalist, actually have a great amount of respect for absurdism as a worldview because of its rationality and logicality.  It is not a worldview that people can simply set aside comfortably and without receiving challenge from it, nor is it something that can be denied in a universe where God has not revealed himself beyond natural theology and the proofs of an uncaused cause for the material world found in logic and mathematics.

Absurdism, as I have defined and explained elsewhere, is a philosophy adhering to the idea that existence is absurd.  The reason for this is because we humans have limited knowledge and cannot know what the objective meaning of human life is, if such a thing is even real.  This worldview does not deny meaning exists; it merely (and accurately) holds that left to ourselves we have no way of knowing what that meaning is.  The plethora of claims that various things or concepts are meaningful which people often cling to cannot all be true at the same time, but they can all be false.  As an aside, anyone who wants proof of this idea that existence is not obviously meaningful despite our emotional tendency to hope otherwise merely needs to notice that many claims made about meaning cannot be made without committing a logical fallacy.  Faced with this inability to know the meaning and fulfillment we crave, we must then ask ourselves why we would not kill ourselves.

Because of this, we have three options for how to conduct our lives.  We can lead ourselves to think that we can invent our own meaning, deluding ourselves with a subjective illusion that does not necessarily reflect reality.  We can commit suicide to escape the absurdity of life, potentially discovering the truth about existence on the other side.  Or, last of all, we can defy the absurd by persevering despite the futility of thinking we can discover meaning with our current limitations.  The third option, however, often ends up resembling the first.

While reading Shakespeare's Hamlet this week for a college assignment, I discovered that the titular "protagonist" actually embodies the struggle at the heart of absurdism.  I will quote several portions of the play and provide an understanding of the absurdist ideas present in each.

The first passage I will inspect is in the first act:


"Oh, that this too, too sallied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His cannon 'gainst self-slaughter.  O God, God,
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world."

(Page 1772; 1.2.129-34)


Early on in the play Hamlet, the character of the same name, the prince of Denmark, reveals a dissatisfaction with life that manifests itself in the desire that suicide were not a sin against God and a declaration that life is uninteresting and futile.  This excerpt also has significance because it does not omit Hamlet's theological beliefs but admits them in relation to the problem he faces.

This passage does not mark the sole time Hamlet verbalizes the subjective appeal of suicide to him, as he devotes a famous soliloquy later in the play to the very subject.  Ironically, despite his theological beliefs, he will cite the uncertainty of what follows death as a reason why suicide might not be preferable to enduring terrestrial difficulties and trials:


"To be or not to be: that is the question . . .

Th'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 th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin [3]?  Who would fardels bear
To grunt and sweat under a weary life
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?"

(Page 1802; 3.1.55, 70-81)


Some parts of this soliloquy sound very much like the words written by the absurdist philosopher Albert Camus, as provided below:


"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest -- whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories -- comes afterward. These are games . . ."


Both individuals, one historical and one fictional, realized the central dilemma of life.  Matters of science, history, and personal matters all pale in comparison to the existentially all-important questions--is life meaningful?  Why not kill yourself?  Can anything objectively justify this existence we have found ourselves thrust into without our own consent?

According to Hamlet, the answer is that humans fear the unknown existence that may await them after the death of the physical body if consciousness lives on.  Why accelerate the arrival of new troubles if you cannot even stand the ones you have now?  This is another layer to the dilemma of the absurdist: not only does one have to 1) decide whether to commit suicide or to persevere in an absurd life while still inhabiting the same epistemological limitations as before, but one 2) must grapple with the fact that if one continues to remain alive (and thus does not commit suicide) then one cannot know certain things about existence or escape the insanity of life, and if one chooses to prematurely die by one's own hand then one also remains in uncertainty about what comes after life.  Uncertainty greets us no matter which path we take.

In this renowned paragraph, Hamlet dives directly into the most pressing and all-engulfing issue.  He displays an existential and emotional honesty and transparency that few ever demonstrate.  Of course, by this point in the play he has determined to feign madness in order to project an image of himself for others to view, and thus readers may claim that his apparent indecisiveness about living--whether he wants to "be or not to be"--is part of the fabricated act.  But, as I showed by quoting an earlier passage from scene two of act one, Hamlet was already expressing a complaint about the supposed immorality of suicide and mentioning that life holds no allure for him.  His reason and experience had already marched him to confront the subject of life's meaning, if one exists, and the urge to relinquish his own life by ending it.

In his "To be or not to be" oration, he mentions for at least the second time in the play a mental struggle with a desire to kill himself.  There may be more such references I did not detect.

Now, allow me to present another relevant idea of Hamlet's, the last that I will dissect:


"What piece of work is a man--how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals--and yet to me what is this quintessence of dust?  Man delights not me--nor women neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so."

(Page 1794; 2.2.264-270)

"We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots."

(Page 1824; 3.6.21-22)


Hamlet compares humans to animals at least twice, saying the first time that although we are a seemingly magnificent species--one which possesses grand intellect, beauty, and apprehension--we are just dust that ranks among the highest form of animal life, and exclaiming the second time that we participate in an inescapable cycle of life and death just like other observable animals like maggots.  Obviously, if he thinks life is devoid of meaning (strange because he is not just a deistic or agnostic theist but a semi-Christian one), then he will not elevate humanity to some special status above animals, for that reeks of a more overtly Christian ideology that would contradict his despair.

These lines I have collectively shown and assessed are not merely the delusional ramblings of an insane person, but they instead represent a direct confrontation with the greatest questions about existence.  Does existence, human or otherwise, have meaning?  Why not kill ourselves now and thus expedite our journey to whatever afterlife might wait us?  Why think ourselves higher than or more valuable than worms, especially if for all our sophistication we are nothing but the "paragon" of the animal kingdom?

Interestingly, Hamlet seems to believe in a particular type of theology that attributes God with having "set his cannon against self-slaughter," aka, with God having condemned suicide as evil.  He seems to sincerely believe in his theology, because he even abstains from taking advantage of an opportunity to kill his uncle Claudius, who had committed adultery with his mother and murdered his father, merely because he believed that killing Claudius as he engaged in prayer to God would allow his soul to ascend to heaven, and Hamlet wanted him to face damnation after death.  Yet never once does he try to ground meaning for existence in the God he acknowledges at least in his words.  There can be no other escape from absurdism, yet Hamlet does not even appear to ever entertain the possibility.

I appreciated these portions of Hamlet because I have very thoroughly contemplated these ideas in recent times.  I wish other people sounded far more like prince Hamlet than they usually do, as that would indicate that their minds are headed in a direction that will force them to either understand or seek truth.


[1].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/09/on-absurdism.html

[2].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/12/theistic-absurdism.html

[3].  The notes in the book I read Hamlet in identified a bodkin as a dagger.


The Norton Shakespeare.  Shakespeare, William.  Ed. Greenblatt, Stephen.  New York: Norton and Company, 2016.  Print.