Having recently arrived at a sense of resolution to Hamlet’s dilemma, I have a couple thoughts on this process. First, the resolution:

In our exchange, you repeatedly presented Hamlet’s flaw as wanting to ensure that he send Claudius to Hell, which in my view critically distorts the flow of the text. Hamlet’s hand in Act III Scene III is stayed by the thought that by killing Claudius he will send him inadvertently to Heaven. He goes on to espouse his wish for the opposite outcome, but the thought that gives him pause is not that his revenge will not be extreme enough, but that his act of vengeance will in the larger context provided by the spiritual, and ethical, reality amount to the greatest of blessings – and so not be revenge at all. Again, all reference to Hell comes after the point that his hand is stayed.

Note that the decision is already at this point emphatically made. Talk of Hell comes after. At the moment of choice, the decision is between ‘an eye for an eye’ (sending the villain to judgment in the same state as his father had been sent) and repaying profound harm with the greatest profit.

It is, in my view, only by conceiving of it this way that one actually inhabits the dilemma. I have objected to your presentations of this moment because they have always to my mind distorted the choice being made and so actually missed the extent of the virtue being asked of Hamlet in that moment. He is not faced with settling for ‘mere revenge’ or ’super-duper revenge’; and does not err out of an intemperate satisfaction that demands more than an eye for an eye. He is faced with a choice between eye-for-an-eye revenge (again, sending Claudius to judgment full of his sins) and revenge that on a greater level might prove the greatest beneficence.

As I’ve said before, it seems exceedingly strange to me to suppose that the moral compass – the same moral compass that speaks against revenge in The Tempest – would in Hamlet advocate for revenge. If he’d only listened to his heart he would have murdered his uncle in cold blood. It is a bizarre statement. Conceived in this way, however, i can reconcile the two instances of moral decision. Had Hamlet killed Claudius with the belief (even though mistaken) that he was dispatching the villain in the best possible state relative to judgment he would have embodied the virtue of loving the sinner but hating the sin.

This has already been said in the comments to the last post, but i want to bring it out here as a fundamental difficulty i’m having with following your perspective, which seems to me internally inconsistent. From the text, we know:

1. Claudius is guilty of murdering Hamlet’s father. (Act III Scene III)
2. The Ghost calls Hamlet to “revenge” this murder. (Act I Scene V)

We’ve previously agreed that for Hamlet to murder Claudius would be perceived by the audience at the time as justice. As the Ghost from the start calls for “revenge,” by agreeing that it would have been just for Hamlet to carry out the duty the Ghost puts on him we have agreed that in the context of the times, such “revenge” would have been considered just.

So I don’t see how it matters that Hamlet uses the word “revenge” as he considers killing Claudius at the end of Act III Scene III. The same word has been used throughout the play to describe the duty in general. By saying that sending Claudius to Heaven would not amount to revenge, Hamlet isn’t distorting his aim beyond the limits of justice. At least his usage of the word “revenge” doesn’t in itself indicate such a distortion, as it has from the start been the word used to describe his aim. If we’re going to identify his fault as being that he seeks revenge, then we have to call it a fault from the start.

On an unrelated note, this came to me in a dream this morning: we all say Ophelia, she’s the only one; when someone’s got to hang, she’s the one who’s hung.

In thinking on this I remembered being taught in high school that Hamlet’s flaw was an excess of thinking. My 11th grade English teacher labeled him (no doubt she’d read this somewhere) an ineffectual intellectual; a judgment that echoes the opening statement of Olivier’s film version of the play: “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” On this blog, by contrast, Anonymouse and Sanity (who, granted, may be one and the same person) have identified the prince’s flaw as an excess not of thought but passion for revenge. Both of these perspectives miss what Hamlet describes as the purpose if playing:

whose end, both at the
first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the
mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature,
scorn her own image, and the very age and body of
the time his form and pressure.

This passage presents to my mind a more convincing image of Shakespeare’s purpose in writing Hamlet, than does the notion that it is meant to illustrate a simple moral like ‘revenge is bad,’ or indecision will really fuck you over. The idea, more generally, that the aim of tragedy is to present a superhuman figure who is undone by a single flaw seems to me excessively reductive. Hamlet indeed touches on this theme, in the Act I conversation with Horatio that Olivier mines as precursor to his own summary sentence:

So, oft it chances in particular men,
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
As, in their birth–wherein they are not guilty,
Since nature cannot choose his origin–
By the o’ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit that too much o’er-leavens
The form of plausive manners, that these men,
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Being nature’s livery, or fortune’s star,–
Their virtues else–be they as pure as grace,
As infinite as man may undergo–
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault

Yet still i regard this general understanding of tragedy as excessively reductive as it too easily leads to moralizing over the supposed defect, however conceived. By imagining the story is essentially about *the* tragic flaw, one might dispense with coming to an appreciation of the nature of the predicament, and simply ’solve’ the dilemma from the outside. Hamlet’s inclusion in his description of the purpose of playing of showing “the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” suggests to me that Shakespeare view his art as doing something other than simple moralizing.

On this blog, the revenge is bad thesis hangs on one scene, in which Hamlet is supposed to overstep the line from justice – which we might define as retribution in service to the true or common good – and selfish revenge. Let’s consider the passages in question, where Hamlet has the opportunity to kill Claudius and in so doing avoid the bloodbath that follows. They conclude Act III Scene III, and begin with Claudius alone:

KING CLAUDIUS
O, my offence is rank it smells to heaven;
It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t,
A brother’s murder. Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will:
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent;
And, like a man to double business bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin,
And both neglect. What if this cursed hand
Were thicker than itself with brother’s blood,
Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens
To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy
But to confront the visage of offence?
And what’s in prayer but this two-fold force,
To be forestalled ere we come to fall,
Or pardon’d being down? Then I’ll look up;
My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? ‘Forgive me my foul murder’?
That cannot be; since I am still possess’d
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition and my queen.
May one be pardon’d and retain the offence?
In the corrupted currents of this world
Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice,
And oft ’tis seen the wicked prize itself
Buys out the law: but ’tis not so above;
There is no shuffling, there the action lies
In his true nature; and we ourselves compell’d,
Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,
To give in evidence. What then? what rests?
Try what repentance can: what can it not?
Yet what can it when one can not repent?
O wretched state! O bosom black as death!
O limed soul, that, struggling to be free,
Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay!
Bow, stubborn knees; and, heart with strings of steel,
Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe!
All may be well.

Retires and kneels

Enter HAMLET

The gist of this speech has been previously discussed. To repeat: Claudius admits to his crime and yearns for forgiveness; though being possessed still of the fruits of said crime he doubts he can be forgiven. Though the function of prayer is to reconcile sinner to innocence, the form of prayer alone is insufficient. Indeed, as Claidius keenly understands, a proper prayer cannot even be formulated so long as he has not repented of his crime. The efficacy of prayer is dependent upon this repentance. Still, in desperation, Claudius wills himself into the posture of prayer. It is in this forced posture that Hamlet comes upon him, seemingly vulnerable yet made inviolable by Hamlet’s interpretation of the scene.

HAMLET

Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I’ll do’t. And so he goes to heaven;
And so am I revenged. That would be scann’d:
A villain kills my father; and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
O, this is hire and salary, not revenge.
He took my father grossly, full of bread;
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;
And how his audit stands who knows save heaven?
But in our circumstance and course of thought,
‘Tis heavy with him: and am I then revenged,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and season’d for his passage?
No!
Up, sword; and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed;
At gaming, swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in’t;
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,
And that his soul may be as damn’d and black
As hell, whereto it goes. My mother stays:
This physic but prolongs thy sickly days.

exit

Previously I wrote that Hamlet was not concerned with sending Claudius to Hell, only with not sending him to Heaven. Clearly that’s not accurate. Note, though, that what he’s aiming at is the parity of sending Claudius to face judgment in the same state of unpreparedness as had his father. From within the perspective of the worldview at the time, disposition relative to divine judgment was, at least ideally, supremely important. As I’ve touched on before, solving this issue by ignoring the conundrum speeds down the path to premature moralizing. Though Hamlet speaks fiercely here of waiting till Claudius is in the very depth of his sin, he is not actually dominated by this will – which i would agree goes past the parity of justice – as is demonstrated in the following Act, when he kills Polonius behind a curtain in his mother’s room, mistaking him for the king. The principle that actually guides him is not, fierce words aside, sending Claudius to hell, but rather not inadvertently sending him to Heaven by dispatching him in the midst of some act that guarantees his salvation.

And yet I agree that Hamlet errs in not killing Claudius then; but it is an error, in my view, relating to one of the dominant themes of the play: the difference between appearance and reality. Claudius only seems to be in a state of repentance, as his final couplet tells:

KING CLAUDIUS

[Rising] My words fly up, my thoughts remain below:
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

In other words, Claudius tries to pray, but fails due to the fact that he is not truly repentant. So here, Hamlet, who has heretofore been the master of appearance and reality, mistakes the one for the other.

wherein i admit to an error yet conclusively prove my point. but first, coffee and a donut…

last week i flew cross country on a plane and wrote a long post with a similar title. i still plan to return to that post – to post that post. this is something of an introduction and tangent. an introductory tangent.

first, i’d like to remove politics from this blog and over to Hamlet’s Nation, and that way to separate out that particular species from the genera of discussion here, leaving Androids in Love as a place to discuss love, narcissism and the phenomenon of coming alive. a phenomenon intimately connected with the so-called God’s Eye View, henceforth GEV.

ToCome Alive (CA) is to participate in the GEV. In traditional terms – and by Tradition i am referring to the tradition of thought and feeling inherent to civilization – to participate in the GEV is to be ensouled; and it is possession of a divine soul – a soul which participates in the GEV – that characterizes a human being.

This is a segment from an excellent video series I’ve been watching lately titled The Century of the Self. This particular segment is about halfway through the series and reminded me of a number of the conversations on this blog over the years.

As any sufficiently advanced technology will appear to be magic, any sufficiently convincing illusion will be taken for real. Thus Goebbels declared Truth to be the greatest enemy of the State. This opposition, or rather, the description of this opposition as one of antagonism (truth as enemy of the state) epitomizes the contrary attitudes of science and politics. Science likewise opposes its conceptions, it’s paradigms, to Truth; as similarly Hamlet describes the function of dramatic art, to serve as mirror held up to Nature.

Though the art of Government, idealistically apprehended, also lies in accomplishing reflection (as epitomized in the work of Confucius and America’s constitutional democracy). So we’ll need to find the source of antagonism elsewhere. Rather than this attitude being a difference between Politics and Art and Science, a polarity of attitudes exists within each.

Politics as an art of achieving and maintaining power becomes increasingly a matter of suppressing Truth, and thereby enters into an antagonistic rather than complementary relationship with it. The necessary evil becomes the unnecessary evil. The mirror becomes an instrument of self-deception rather than reflection.

But perhaps we need not look at it as a defect. Rather, we can see this development in terms employed by the I Ching: yang, yin, old yang and old yin. The old yang has grown antithetical to itself and so transforms (if the Way is not obstructed) into yin. The paradigmatic knowledge, in moving from reflection of reality to mere self-referentiality, transforms (if not obstructed) into basic receptivity. Knowing grows old and need be replaced by receptivity to learning. This receptivity (yin) then matures (becomes old yin) and gives birth to new knowledge (yang).

It is because of this intrinsic cycle of transformation – the dynamic interchange between macrocosmic Reality and microcosmic cognitions of reality – that the axes of Art, Science and Politics are termed enantiodromic.

[from a dkos comment...]

the primary problem with conspiracy theory, insofar as a site like this goes, is that it undercuts the fundamental premise of election-focused activism. conspiracy theories place the real fulcrum of power outside the agreed upon political system. once you stop believing that the agreed upon system is in fact the system in power – or put another way, that the agreed upon system is operating in the agreed upon ways – then the purpose in organizing politically to articulate a vision and win elections is profoundly compromised. to acknowledge conspiracy is to acknowledge that the system is being critically gamed by people acting in a criminal manner. that the system, in other words, is being run by secret means, responding to private directives and not the public will. so, even though conspiracy is the historically demonstrated norm of those in power, it remains an outrageous claim relative to our own country.

why is this? we have no problem seeing the conspiratorial character of aggressive, imperial, governments historically and worldwide. we have no problem accepting it as a fictional description of events in our own country. why not take the reasonable step of suspecting that the historical norm applies to America?

it’s another instance where rationality is trumped by faith in American exceptionalism. though of course, as is normal, rationality is prevented from knowing that it’s been trumped by a sense of emotional outrage implicitly certain of its justification. an emotional sense, that is, that the premise being asserted or suggested is outrageous. This, incidentally, is why charging Glenn Beck with being motivated by racism is an apt counter to the news that Van Jones signed on to a petition questioning the integrity of the official 9/11 Report. By fighting outrage with outrage we might avoid violating our own sacred premises while still protecting Obama’s appointment.

political reality, ultimately, is not determined by facts, but by emotional adherence to a particular story of national identity. it is because of this that Chomsky only gets on television outside of America. not because he’s not rational, informed and insightful – which he abundantly and obviously is – but because he articulates a worldview that denies American exceptionalism… including the exceptionally non-conspiratorial nature of American political power.

if this were actually a reality based community, the concept of American exceptionalism, in all its forms, would be rationally disassembled as yet another imperial myth. but this isn’t science, it’s politics; and in the political world, reality is determined by strategy, not by facts. facts are everywhere fixed around policies driven by cryptic reasons. driven within government by conspiracies of special interests acting in secret and veiling their activities by a sham public process of representative democracy; and driven within the public mind by unconscious processes of personal and collective narcissism.

as Reinhold Niebuhr remarked, “perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy.”

but, again, people who have widely lost faith in the process are bound to exclude themselves from the process. so, it is essential, from a political perspective, to preserve your party’s sense of faith in itself and the process – and thus, to enforce a sense of disdain toward enervating conspiracy theory. theory, that is, that undercuts the potential value, and so the strategic possibilities, of the process.

the rejection of ‘conspiracy theory’ is part of the more general protection of faith in American exceptionalism – whether that exceptionalism is viewed as an historical reality or an historical opportunity to change (at last!) the dismal norms of history. reflexively labelling it, to put it kindly, crazy is just another instance of a characteristic emotionally self-protective behavior of social groups. by using emotional abuse to defend sacred premises those premises are kept free from rational examination and the survival and self-image of the group is preserved. just as GWB had a vested interest in declaring that we must never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories, so too does the Daily Kos community. conspiracy theory threatens the whole edifice of motivational identity. we cannot be the people we’ve been waiting for if the system is a farce covering for a criminal syndicate. in order to believe that we are them, we have to believe that the system is either essentially representative or that we are in a position to make it so by the commonly accepted means of ‘more and better Democrats.’ theories of government by criminal conspiracy undercut either form of this necessary faith.

of course in this sense the conspiracy theorist has already reached the complete cynicism as regards government that is likely near a majority opinion in this country. the conspiracy theorists, however challenged by fact, have been emotionally prescient in their complete disbelief.

and herein lies the root of the secondary problem with conspiracy theory: thinking conspiratorially can really drive you crazy. it is psychologically perilous for an individual to entirely lose faith in the dominant narrative of his or her society. to be alienated from this worldview brings a crisis in sanity. one becomes open, then, to truth – to actual reality as opposed to the storybook strategic realities of politics – but also to all manner of crackpot anxieties. even Hamlet, among history’s wisest minds, was driven near to madness by the awful truth communicated by his father’s ghost.

i don’t mean to say that a culture’s notion of virtue is nothing more than the glorified self-interest of the dominant class. that, i think, certainly is one possibility – what you might call the road more travelled. i believe, however, in the existence of the road less traveled. however, it seems to me that the two roads have a tendency to turn into one another. tyranny can come out of good intentions, and aggrandized self-interest can be a progressive force.

the development of Capitalism provides an excellent example of the intercourse of these two sorts of virtue. as i read Lao Tzu, whose wisdom i trust more than most any other, the Way is exactly a vital exchange between Good and Evil. Hence, the Fall from Grace (i.e. the Fall from the Way) is exactly a disruption of this intercourse of self-interest and integrated survival (what is called imperialism). for radical ecologists, this Fall is nothing other than civilization as we know it. this is the essential Christian view as well, though it is much distorted by integration into a system of worldly power. Islam, too.

Judgment Day

the Day of Judgment that is an article of faith in the Christian and Islamic traditions expresses the understanding of Imperial Civilization as founded upon a Fall from Grace; Grace being the State in which Good and Evil (compassion and self-interest) engage in a vital living intercourse. This, incidentally, is the Real foundation of the more or less fictional transgressive morality (the special rules for special people) that is inherent to all systems of the self-selected Elect. That is: all of those transgressive moralities (from the Jewish slaughter of the inhabitants of Canaan on down) are rooted in the dynamic Reality of the Way, which mixes up the categories of Good and Evil as part of an integrated Ecology.

The Key element of society, as Confucious said, is jen, humanity. Same thing Socrates called Virtue. This being the sentient action that links social forms to the vital, trans-conceptual, dynamic Way that the entire universe depends upon and expresses. The Human Endeavor is to marry Nature and Culture; or from the opposite perspective, Heaven and Earth. it’s not easy. all you need is Love, but there’s nothing harder to find and keep.

Cheney and Ritual Existence

I don’t think Cheney would describe his actions as immoral. I take Cheney for one of those guys who firmly believes himself engaged in the higher morality, the transgressive morality, of a self-selecting Elect. There are of course real consequences to embracing such a morality, but all high officials use these sorts of denial mechanisms to one degree or another. The wise, as Lao Tzu said, treat people like straw dogs – which is to say, as instruments in the great ceremony of civilized existence.

Ethics and Shame

i agree with your basic sense of ethics. it sounds like you think i don’t, but i’m not sure why. i’ve previously described accountability as a developmental tool. what i’ve said is that i don’t know, personally, what amounts to true accountability. i think the key is to satisfy one’s own sense of accountability, which is complicated by the imposition of what we might call false shame.

as i see it, we live in a society governed by false, imposed, shame. hence the pandemic hypocrisy of every institution from bank to church to state to marriage. the world as i see it is full of people embracing standards with some degree of deception, just as a means of survival. being confused is one way to comprehend the dissonance.

i, personally, am not a paragon of virtue. you ask what makes me ineffective? it’s that, in a nutshell. so, yeah, i’m working on it. right now, i’m working through The 7 Habits book. it’s actually quite fantastic, if you’ve never read it. i got it from Audible.com for free, as an audiobook. i highly recommend it. (an open door right there, jake) i’ve been listening to it as i work. i’m also getting more serious about meditation and physical practice again. and becoming more financially stable. oh, and re-engaging music as a practice. all in all, the Human Endeavor, on the microcosmic level.

Virtue

i agree with Socrates, and i’ve paid for that belief. my sympathies lie with the idealists, but the real issue is not what one believes, but whether or not one embodies that belief… which is to say, whether or not one truly understands. i don’t. but i definitely feel the necessity of becoming better at making an effort to. i always have felt that necessity, probably too much, too soon. as has been said: foolishness consists of arriving too early and waiting too late. thus, as Hamlet says, losing the name of action.

[this fragment of a recent comment gets at somewhere i've been meaning to head]

some years ago i was apprenticing with a particular counselor, whose name and nature i’ll withold. i had a deep ambivalance as regards the man, which was to some extent a function of my own lack of self-acceptance. from another perspective, though, that ambivalence was entirely well-founded. something was not right in the state of Denmark… which is to say, in his marriage of rhetoric and reality. so what’s to be done?

i ended up parting company. a reasonable choice. the problem was that i abandoned my calling in abandoning my flawed mentor. on the other hand, that abandonment has allowed me to develop in ways i otherwise wouldn’t have. there seems something necessary in it. now, the coming alive question comes down to this: reconciling the calling and the turning away from calling.

that’s what makes me come alive: those experiences in which an error reveals a gift. felix culpa. the moments of understanding the necessity of identity.

in Islam, this understanding is referred to as Iman; which is the second in the three part process: Islam (submission), Iman (faith) and ishan (excellence). i’ve always had a problem with that first part, submission. obviously, identity is fundamentally an act of submission to some form of constancy. this, incidentally, is what Sylar lacks, why he has the hunger, and why he is ‘cured’ by transmutation into Nathen Petrelli.