Philosophia

What if you lived exactly the same life you have lived—eternally? How would you react to this? How would you live the rest of your life, in light of it?

This was the provocative challenge posed by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche at the end of the 19th Century, who asked us to imagine a universe that eventually repeats itself in every detail, over and over again. He called this the eternal return.

In his autobiography, Nietzsche recounts the momentous day the idea came to him. In the late summer of 1881 he was walking beside the beautiful Swiss alpine Lake Silvaplana. He paused beside a huge pyramidal rock and the idea first struck him. It would become the central idea of his poetic–philosophical masterpiece Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which he’d begin two years later. But he would first present it in the penultimate aphorism of his 1882 book The Gay Science, under the title ‘The Greatest Weight’:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”

Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” would lie upon your actions as the greatest weight. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

Along with his matchless style, you can hear in this just how transformational the idea was for him. For Nietzsche, eternal return was the ultimate triumph of immanent reality over a posited transcendence. As he suggests in Beyond Good and Evil, it was the fruit of his attempt “to think pessimism through to its depths and to liberate it” from the lingering religious sense that it’s bad that God is dead and there’s no salvation beyond this world.

While powerful as a thought experiment, it’s unclear how seriously Nietzsche took the idea as a theory of how the cosmos actually works. Though somewhat plausible in the physics of his day, later scientific developments effectively rule it out. And yet, in an ironic twist, modern science lends strong support to its central insight that everything is eternal—not through endless repetition, but by existing in four-dimensional spacetime.

The Physics of Eternal Return

In his published works, Nietzsche never directly argues for the literal truth of eternal return, either presenting it as an existential thought experiment (as in the passage above) or distancing himself from it by literary means. The closest he comes is in the fictional Zarathustra, in which the title character argues for it, in a vision, against the personification of rational seriousness! Later, the doctrine is explicated by his talking animals, while he gently mocks and eventually ignores them. And yet the book is indisputably centered on Zarathustra’s successful attempt to will the eternal return of all things. From this it would seem Nietzsche was skeptical about the literal truth of the idea while insisting on its existential import.

However, his private notebooks tell a different story. From the time the idea came to him in 1881 until right before his final collapse in 1889, his notes suggest he took it quite seriously as a scientific theory. The final note contains his most developed proof for it: if time is infinite, the universe composed of a finite quantity of force-centers and force, and each new combination of these is fully determined by the previous, then the universe must go through the exact same series of combinations an infinite number of times.

So Nietzsche's reluctance to present eternal return as a serious theory in his public work may not have been because its reality didn't matter; rather, he may have been biding his time until it could be rigorously demonstrated by science. And it already made a good deal of sense given the physics of his day. Ironically, less than three weeks after Nietzsche’s collapse, the physicist Henri Poincaré revealed his recurrence theorem demonstrating that certain closed systems confined to a finite space will inevitably return to a state arbitrarily close to their initial state. If the universe were such a system, it would recur eternally.

Unfortunately, it appears that it isn’t. Given Nietzsche’s antagonism to Christianity, it’s fitting that a Catholic priest would render his theory unsound. In 1927, just under four decades since his collapse and three since his death, Fr. Georges Lemaître argued the universe was expanding. And in 1931 he proposed the entire universe expanded from a single primeval ‘atom.’ In subsequent years, evidence for this accumulated and it became known as the Big Bang theory, after that primordial ‘explosion.’ Today it’s the scientific consensus.

There’s three ways the Big Bang undermines eternal return as conceived by Nietzsche:

Firstly, it means that time is not beginningless: it began at the Big Bang, so there cannot have been an infinite number of past cycles.

Secondly, it means that space is expanding. There are ever new regions for matter and energy to move into, undermining the recurrence of past states. This is not the kind of system Poincaré recurrence could apply to.

Finally, it implies an utterly unproductive final state of the universe. As per the second law of thermodynamics, entropy increases over time: the energy in a system becomes less organized, more dispersed, less usable. Things fall apart. Unless there’s enough gravity in the universe to reverse its expansion (and current evidence doesn’t support this), it will end in heat death, with all energy evenly spread out. Nietzsche knew the second law but didn’t consider it a threat: in beginningless time, if heat death were possible it would have already happened. Not so in a universe only 13.8 billion years old.

The Relativity Revolution

There was an even more fundamental revolution in physics, however. In 1905, just five years after Nietzsche’s death, Albert Einstein published his special theory of relativity. Prior to this, physicists has been stumped by a curious paradox: the same speed of light was measured by all observers, regardless of their own velocity. How could this be?

It seems that there is nothing more more desirable than eternal life—so much so that this forms the basis of the most successful world religions. In general, even those who don’t believe in it grant that they would want it, if only it were possible. But what would eternal life mean? And, if we think this through, is it really desirable? I will argue that it isn’t: that if we think this notion through it either breaks down or is not something we would wish for ourselves.

To explore these questions, we first need to discard those forms of eternal life that are obviously bad. We want to consider only the best and strongest examples, because we want to see whether there is any coherent notion of eternal life we could hope for. If there is not, this suggests eternal life is inherently undesirable—at least for beings like us. So we must exclude from the outset the kinds of life a person clearly wouldn’t want to have. We are not considering eternal hell, for instance. Similarly, we are not considering a situation where someone lives forever while the physical aging process continues as normal, rendering them decrepit beyond recognition. Instead, we will assume eternal youth (or any age you wish) and consider lives that range from that of a normal human being of moderate happiness (many who lead such lives claim they would want to live forever) through to the best life we can possibly imagine.

But what do we mean by ‘eternal life’? ‘Eternal’ can signify either infinite temporal duration or a mode of being that transcends time as we now experience it. I will refer to these as the temporal and atemporal interpretations of eternal life, respectively. As the temporal interpretation is easier to imagine and represents what is most commonly hoped for, I will begin with this, before proceeding to atemporal interpretations. Finally, by ‘life’ we must mean our own lives—for each of us: my life, not someone else’s. This criterion may seem straightforward now, but will become less clear and more crucial as the argument progresses.

Temporal Eternity: A Life Like This

Under the temporal interpretation, eternal life flows just like this life except that instead of ending it flows on and ever on for an infinite duration. There is no fundamental change to our experience of or relation to time, except that now our life goes on forever. At first sight, this prospect is attractive. If we like our lives and want them to continue, if we fear death and the harm it would do by cutting us off from all the good things we have, surely more life is better—infinite life, best of all.

But there’s a problem here that Bernard Williams highlighted in his classic essay, The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality. The title is taken from a play by Karel Čapek, in which a woman (EM; most recent alias Elina Makropulos) takes an elixir that extends her life by 300 years. In those 300 years, however, she has become bored, cold, and indifferent; her unending life has become joyless. She refuses to take the elixir again, and dies. In his essay, Williams argues that the tedium that consumes EM would always result from an endless life. For she is a particular person with particular desires; she has a relatively fixed character. On a long enough timeline, all those desires will be satisfied; all the things she could do or experience as the particular person that she is would be exhausted. If they nevertheless continued, in a repetitive fashion, they would become unbearably tedious. Alternatively, if she deliberately varied her experiences:

“Then the problem shifts, to the relation between these varied experiences, and the fixed character: how can it remain fixed, through an endless series of very various experiences? The experiences must surely happen to her without affecting her; she must be, as EM is, detached and withdrawn.” (p. 8)

So whether she repeats the same things or deliberately does different things, a similar emotional outcome of inner deadening occurs.

One objection that has been raised (e.g. by Fischer) is that although some pleasant experiences can be exhausted, there are also ‘repeatable pleasures’ that one can experience any number of times without them losing their savor. Fischer gives the examples of sex, eating fine meals, drinking fine wines, seeing great art, and listening to beautiful music. Judiciously spaced, we can go on enjoying these forever, without ever getting tired of them. But that doesn’t seem quite right; that we can imagine going on enjoying these for an exceedingly long time doesn’t in itself mean that we could enjoy them forever. That the first of such experiences tend to be the most powerful, that we tire of specific instances of them, that they require spacing at all, suggests that our capacity for them is indeed limited. That there is a lasting freshness about many things in life, even if repeated innumerable times, is perhaps due to the sheer brevity of life: so much novelty slips into each experience, so much inexperience remains in us. The distinction between repeatable and unrepeatable pleasures appears to be a relative rather than an absolute one, a distinction nullified by infinity.

Variation of Character

In his essay, Williams discusses a couple of attempts to get around the problem of eternal tedium. First, he explores the possibilities of a series of disconnected ‘lives,’ in each of which the person has a different character and thus different interests and desires. But, he explains, this attempt fails: the person could not bring his future ‘lives’ into a meaningful relation with his present life, so as to be able to judge their value—to hope for them or otherwise. Because his character in each ‘life’ is different, the standards of judgment will be different. He could not, therefore, meaningfully desire eternal life under this model.

The second attempt Williams mentions is similar, but allows for connection between ‘lives’ via memory. Put slightly differently, we keep living the same life but our character continually changes. He calls this the Teiresias model, after the mythical long-lived prophet who lived radically different lives, and he dispenses with it quickly, considering that it ignores:

… the connexion, both as cause and as consequence, between having one range of experiences rather than another, wishing to engage in one sort of thing rather than another, and having a character. Teiresias cannot have a character, either continuously through these proceedings, or cumulatively at the end (if there were to be an end) of them: he is not, eventually, a person but a phenomenon. (p. 12)

But I think he dispenses with this proposal too hastily, because it seems that even within the span of a normal human life, one’s character can change considerably. Concerning the Makropulos case, we might well ask: why doesn’t EM just evolve with her experiences, as we seem to do in actual life? Although I am the same self I was 20 years ago, I am also, nevertheless, different: I have a different understanding of the world and myself, different abilities, different loves and desires, a somewhat different character, have been shaped in different ways by the people I have known and the events I have experienced. Each of these transformations seems meaningfully related to me, and each opens me up to new areas of experience, new desires, new potential forms of fulfillment. I expect the same will be true in 20 years’ time—why not even more so in 200?

The problem is with the length of time we’re contemplating: namely, an infinite length. While it’s true we change or evolve in many important ways through the course of a human lifetime, it’s also true that we remain very much the same. If I consider how different I was 20 years ago, I can still easily recognize the same basic character, the same principal or overarching interests and desires, and I can clearly see how who I am now emerged from who I was then. This may also hold true for the next 200 years—two or three lifetimes isn’t all that long. But—20,000 years, two million years, 200 trillion years…?

Last year I took part in a live discussion on Hamlet for Justin Murphy’s Other Life* community. Hamlet is probably my favorite Shakespeare play, so I jumped at the chance to reread it. As I did so, what struck me most was Hamlet’s resentment: his raging against being while failing to directly act against his enemy, his self-deception, his general reactiveness, the way his expansive consciousness only abets his inaction, his outbursts of cruelty against the relatively innocent. I put forward the thesis that Hamlet embodies Nietzschean ressentiment. Justin somewhat disagreed: for him, Hamlet’s problem wasn’t his inactivity, but that he was too active. He should never have sought vengeance but renounced it like a good Christian—indeed, Hamlet’s problem is really that he is man caught in between a pagan morality he no longer believes and a Christian morality he cannot or will not yet embody. The real, unsung hero of the play, Justin argued—is Horatio, his steadfast, understanding, but totally inactive friend.

Justin’s ideas about Hamlet are in excellent company—no less than the intellectual titan René Girard argued basically the same thing. Unfortunately, though—as I’ll argue later—they’re both wrong. Instead I’ll argue that Nietzsche (far more of a Titan) was right—not only in what he explicitly said about Hamlet early in his career, but also what he would have said about him at the end of it. In brief, Hamlet is Dionysian man, granted a paralyzing insight into the heart of being—but how he interprets it, and that he cannot recover from it—is due to his ressentiment. Hamlet is both Dionysian and Ressentient** Man. And finally, that we love him nonetheless is precisely because we see in him these dangerous propensities we ourselves possess.

Ressentient Man

Ressentiment—the French form of ‘resentment’—is a philosophical term popularized by Nietzsche, who used it to describe the secret feelings of revenge that motivate the morality of those who feel oppressed yet cannot directly fight back.

The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and produces values: the ressentiment of beings to whom the real reaction, the deed, is denied, who can only indulge in imaginary revenge… (Genealogy of Morals, First Essay)

In Nietzsche’s view, this ‘slave revolt’ in morality produces the Christian value system, with its ultimate fruition in modern egalitarianism. But he was not the only one to write about ressentiment: the philosopher Max Scheler also wrote a brilliant analysis of the phenomenon. Though he agreed with Nietzsche that modern egalitarianism was based on ressentiment, he denied that that it formed the core of Christianity. Here is how he described it:

Ressentiment is a self-poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite. (p. 4)

The negative emotions that plague Hamlet’s soul are apparent from our first encounter with him, at the usurping king Claudius’ coronation. While he limits his comments to disguised sarcasm in the presence of the king and his new wife, Hamlet’s mother, as soon as he finds himself alone he vents his spite, lamenting not only his mother’s hasty remarriage, but his own existence, and the world itself:

O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. O God, God, How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t, ah, fie, ’tis an unweeded garden That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. (I.ii.129–137)

Here already we find Hamlet’s sorrow and anger grown far beyond their ostensible cause. And at this point he has not yet met the ghost, and has no knowledge of his father’s murder. By Act II, now burdened with this knowledge, he seems to positively delight in denigrating existence, building up beautiful metaphors only to tear them down with spite:

...indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire: why it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a 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? (II.ii.305–317)

In Act III, in the famous soliloquy, “To be, or not to be,” he again laments his very existence and seems to long for death—though he knows he lacks the courage even to kill himself. Immediately following this, Ophelia appears, and he vents his resentment cruelly upon her (though this must be exacerbated if he knows that the king and Polonius are spying on the scene). “Get thee to a nunnery,” he tells her repeatedly. “Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” Human life is condemned—and women especially, for perpetuating it, and for deceptively attracting and attaching men to it.

In all these speeches, we can recognize the effects of ressentiment. When the direct expression of vengeance is repressed, it poisons the mind: our resentment spreads to encompasses more and more things. First we may denigrate our enemy’s qualities, activities or judgments—all that is closely associated with him. Then it may spread to more distantly related things. Eventually, Scheler notes:

When the repression is complete, the result is a general negativism—a sudden, violent, seemingly unsystematic and unfounded rejection of things, situations, or natural objects whose loose connection with the original cause of the hatred can only be discovered by a complicated analysis. (Ressentiment, p. 21)

The ultimate result of this may be a denigration and rejection of existence itself.

But where is all this coming from? What is the original cause of Hamlet’s ressentiment? We found Hamlet already denigrating existence in the second scene of the play, before he knew that the new king Claudius murdered his father. Did his feelings then stem simply from outrage at his mother’s quick remarriage to her late husband’s brother, combined perhaps with grief over his father’s death? Obviously, hearing from his father’s ghost intensified things considerably, but then—the great puzzle of Hamlet—he hardly rushes to take revenge (we’ll return to this point in a moment).

As Richard Weisberg points out in his article Hamlet and Ressentiment, it is not until the final act that we learn he holds an additional grievance against the king:

Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon— He that hath killed my king and whored my mother, Popped in between th’ election and my hopes, Thrown out his angle for my proper life… (V.ii.63–66; italics mine)

The Danish monarchy was elective; though nearly always hereditary, the succession could be altered by an elective body. Hamlet was crown prince, but Claudius seems to have bought off or otherwise influenced this body to appoint himself king instead. This direct affront to Hamlet may be the original source of his ressentiment. By the very nature of circumstances, he is prevented from responding to it, from unleashing his vengeful feelings. Under Claudius, he is still the crown prince: his eventual succession to the throne will depend on the influential king’s sanction. He is therefore bound to silence: “But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue” (I.ii.158).

His vengeful feelings, therefore, fester. That Hamlet doesn’t mention this direct affront in his first soliloquy, but rather focuses on his mother’s unfaithfulness to his father’s memory and the new king’s unworthiness, might already be the result of the repression and displacement characteristic of ressentiment. The message of the ghost worsens the situation terribly. Its message that Claudius obtained the throne through the murder of Hamlet’s father should spur him, finally, to action. By the aristocratic code of ethics of his station, his action against the king would now be justified, even incumbent upon him. Indeed, he certainly talks like this—but that is all he does, at least until the very end—talks.

Weisberg believes this is the key to Hamlet’s peculiar type of ressentiment, as well as his popularity. Hamlet’s is a literary ressentiment: he continually needs “words, words, words” (II.ii.194) to re-articulate and re-experience his situation, and his gift for words and mental agility fuel this. His verbal productions serve a number of related purposes: they perpetuate his resentment (as one perversely loves to remember painful wrongs against oneself); they allow him to reinterpret it (as it becomes more about his mother’s faithlessness than his own ambition); and, most importantly, they give him the illusory sense that he is doing something about it. The value of words is elevated, however ambivalently, above the value of action—of the action he craves but cannot do.

According to Weisberg, the crux of the play and of Hamlet’s personality can be found in his response to the ghost near the end of the Act I. To the ghost’s parting words, “Remember me,” he responds:

...Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven! O most pernicious woman! O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain! My tables—meet it is I set it down That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain. At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark. [Writes.] So uncle, there you are. Now to my word: It is “Adieu, adieu, remember me.” I have sworn’t. (I.v.95–112)

Here already, immediately after hearing of his father’s cruel fate and in the very process of vowing to avenge him, we can see Hamlet’s literary ressentiment undoing his resolve. The beginning of this passage promises a new Hamlet, with a mind cleared of all literary and intellectual baggage, intent only on action, on avenging his father. But he instantly begins to build a needless structure around his new resolve: “Yes, by heaven! | O most pernicious woman! | O villain, villain….” He must verbally go over it all again, instead of simply rushing to action. And worse: he actually writes this down in the notebooks he always carries with him, following up this pseudo-action with the phrase, “So uncle, there you are”—as though he had actually done something to him; a phrase far more appropriate for the hero standing over the villain’s bleeding corpse.

From this brief passage, it is clear that Hamlet will not rush to fulfill the ghost’s command, but will interminably delay—and it also predicts the form this delay will take. In speech after speech and play after play (whether the play-acting of his “antic disposition” or the literal plays he stages), he will represent his situation, the need for action, even his own shirking of action—but will not act.

There is a striking example when Hamlet has the perfect opportunity to slay the villainous king as he kneels in an (ultimately vain) attempt to pray: his literary proclivity intervenes once again and he invents a reason not to do it. If the king, he reasons, is killed while repenting for his sins then he goes to heaven, while his father suffers in purgatory—an insufficient retribution. But this is specious; we see through the role of the too-severe vengeful hero that Hamlet casts for himself. In close quarters with the defenseless king, he is repelled from the act by the same factors that have already delayed it, though he hides this from himself and attempts to reinterpret it with words.

These factors need not involve moral repugnance at the act (we will consider this possibility later). They may be as simple as cowardice (will the guards discover him? will he himself be put to death as a regicide?), or just the sheer disconcerting magnitude of the act of taking the life of someone at close quarters—something the young Hamlet is surely unpracticed in. What is crucial here is not so much the nature of his apprehensions as the alternative channel that has already been carved for his energies to run down—i.e. his literary propensity.

There are times where he seems to regret his slipped opportunities to kill the king. For instance, in his soliloquy right before he leaves for England: “How all occasions do inform against me | And spur my dull revenge!” (IV.iv.32–34). This points to a final purpose of his continual literary productions: to rouse himself to action. As Weisberg says:

The play as a whole may be seen as an unsuccessful effort on Hamlet’s part to purge himself of the delusion that his pen or his tongue are suitable replacements for his sword. (p. 332)

Indeed, that soliloquy ends with the rousing words: “O, from this time forth | My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” But thoughts, and words, are passive—and can never, of themselves, cross the chasm that separates them from action. Again and again Hamlet uses his overdeveloped capacity for words to avoid and/or rouse himself to deeds. But what comes of this?

On the voyage to England, it is true, Hamlet seems to act bloodily and decisively. He discovers Claudius’ secret commission to the King of England to have him killed, and replaces it with one demanding the deaths of his friends-turned-informers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Although not explicitly stated, it seems highly unlikely that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were aware of the sealed contents of the letter (why would the king entrust them with this knowledge when he didn’t have to?). Apart from this, their only crime is to have attempted to find out what was afflicting Hamlet’s spirit and to alleviate it—at the secret behest of the king, yes, but a king they could not know was a murderous usurper, and for the sake of a friend who was deliberately pretending to be out of his mind. The cruelty of Hamlet’s action seems out of all proportion to the situation.

We see something similarly excessive in his treatment of Ophelia, whom he apparently loved. At best, he realizes she is being used by the king and Polonius, and this seeming betrayal fuels his wrath against her. Shakespeare hints at this. But even then, does he assume her intent is to harm him? She knows as little about the king’s true nature as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Hamlet lashes out against those he can lash out at—anyone who has some association with the real object of his anger, whom he never utters a clear and direct word of rebuke to until the very end. His explosive resentment wounds the mind of his beloved and takes the lives of his friends. The nearest he comes to actually revenging himself on Claudius, it is in a sudden moment of passion, stabbing a man behind a curtain—who turns out to be Polonius. Because he avoids the justified act of retribution, and despite his resort to words, words, words, Hamlet wreaks much tragic and avoidable havoc.

Dionysian Man

It was Nietzsche who coined the term ressentiment, at least in the sense it’s used here. And he also had something to say, quite explicitly, about Hamlet—though what he wrote might seem to be in a certain tension with what I’ve claimed so far. This is what he wrote in The Birth of Tragedy, after describing the Dionysian state of ecstatic intoxication:

For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence contains, while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experiences of the past become immersed. This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will-negating mood is the fruit of these states.

In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no—true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man. (Section 7; p. 59–60)

Thus Hamlet feels the futility and absurdity of all particular things, of all particular actions. He has sensed beyond our myriad self-protective social illusions the one vast and boundlessly violent will of nature. His brilliant intellect perhaps once led him to this realization, or his passionate heart intuited it. Perhaps it was his love of music or of tragic plays. In any case, it was confirmed by the senseless death of his father and his senseless replacement by his uncle—on the throne of Denmark and in the bed of the queen. Hamlet knows it is not this specific time that is out of joint, but time itself. The world of ordinary human experience, in which the cosmic will is painfully divided and feeds on itself—this is the fundamental problem, and a problem that seems to admit of no solution within life. One can only ask: “To be or not to be—”

But this unbounded nausea at existence seems a little different from Hamlet’s individual resentment against Claudius for usurping his father and him. In fact, Nietzsche says that the Dionysian man sees truly into the essence of things. Indeed, ‘Dionysian’ is generally a very positive term in Nietzsche’s writing, standing in contrast to the highly negative term ‘Christian.’ Does Nietzsche’s stated view of Hamlet contradict my Nietzschean interpretation?

It’s not so simple here, though: The Birth of Tragedy was Nietzsche’s first book, and in it his philosophy was not yet fully developed. For a start, he had not yet developed his notion of ressentiment. The book was primarily concerned with explaining ancient Greek tragedy as the combination of Apollonian (dreamlike, form-giving) and Dionysian (intoxicated, form-dissolving) tendencies. In it, it is the combination the two that is affirmed; each by itself has its problems. Nietzsche’s translator Kaufmann notes that in his later work the term ‘Dionysian’ signifies something different: namely, the life-affirming combination of Dionysian and Apollonian, in contrast to the life-denying Christian tendency which is alien to it (p. 20).

So when Nietzsche talks about Hamlet as the ‘Dionysian man’ in Birth of Tragedy, it is far from an unconditional endorsement of Hamlet’s perspective. Hamlet has something that the more superficial men around him lack, a certain insight into the essence of reality; but he lacks something too, something that renders his insight more dangerous than beneficial.

In his late work Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes:

...judgments and valuations of life, whether for or against, cannot be true: their only value lies in the fact that they are symptoms; they can be considered only as symptoms – per se such judgments are nonsense. (p. 11–12)

How could one estimate the value of life? Nietzsche says the person who would try to do so “is a contending party, or rather the very object in the dispute.” The condemnation of life says more about the person who makes that judgment than it does about life itself. Even the Dionysian insight doesn’t have to lead to life-denial; it could instead lead to the greatest affirmation of life. For Schopenhauer, who had a very similar insight and whose philosophy heavily influenced Nietzsche, it indeed led to the condemnation of life. But even for the early Nietzsche of Birth of Tragedy, the same insight had the opposite significance (indeed, the book can be seen as his breaking with Schopenhauer). How this could be became, in a sense, the whole Nietzschean project.

The book asks: how were the ancient Greeks able to affirm life so well, while having “looked boldly right into the terrible destructiveness of so-called world history as well as the cruelty of nature, and being in danger of longing for a Buddhistic negation of the will” (p. 59)? And it answers: because of their art; and preeminently, because of their art of tragedy.

Nietzsche believed there was great significance in the fact that the art of tragedy—that magnificent complex of music and drama—arose out of a simple chorus cast as satyrs. Satyrs were jubilant, playful, sexually potent creatures, part-human and part-animal, devotees of Dionysus. In the presence of this chorus, says Nietzsche, “the Greek man of culture felt himself nullified”:

...the gulfs between man and man give way to an overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the very heart of nature. The metaphysical comfort—with which, I am suggesting even now, every true tragedy leaves us—that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable—this comfort appears in incarnate clarity in the chorus of satyrs, a chorus of natural beings who live ineradicably, as it were, behind all civilization and remain eternally the same, despite the changes of generations and of the history of nations. (p. 59)

The actual drama of the tragedy—the words and action that occur on the stage—evolved as an Apollonian projection of the ecstatic Dionysian music of the satyr chorus. Even when choruses were no longer cast as satyrs, their function remained. Their song was an implicit affirmation of being, generating images and words that were beautiful in their very terribleness. It is in this condensation of Dionysian force into Apollonian form, combined with the fundamentally affirmative tone of the chorus, that the art of tragedy is healing rather than destructive.

“Art saves,” says Nietzsche (p. 59). To the Dionysian man nauseated with existence, “art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity” (p. 60).

So we can, at least potentially, know what Hamlet knows and say yes to the flux of becoming, to time perpetually out of joint, to life which in one sense is futile but in another sense “indestructibly powerful and pleasurable.” The artistic perspective, the Greek tragic perspective, brings us to this. We can therefore act, can decisively play our part in existence.

Now, Hamlet loves art—and in particular, it seems, tragedies. In an article titled Dionysus in the Mirror: Hamlet as Nietzsche's Dionysian Man, Timothy Pyles argues that Hamlet finds in art the healing that allows him to affirm life and finally act. When he sees the actor weeping for the Trojan queen Hecuba, he realizes Hecuba is just as fictive or illusory as the world in general and that:

…the only way to genuinely participate in such a fictive world, the only way to act in such a world of illusion, is to in essence play along. In order for Hamlet to take action and escape his Dionysian paralysis, he must learn to play his role in this world of appearances; he must convert his thoughts and actions, his very self, into an Apollonian representation. And it is the stage that affords this recognition, and thus, ultimately, this comfort. For, in the end, ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?’ [II.ii.569]. Why, nothing more than Hamlet’s father is to him, or he to his father; all such relationships, because all are grounded in individuation, are illusory. (A136)

For Pyles, the play Hamlet pivots around the play-within-the-play, The Murder of Gonzago or The Mousetrap that Hamlet stages to catch Claudius’ conscience. Pyles claims that in this artistic representation of his own situation he is finally spurred to action. His first action following the play is to confront Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “directly, accusing them of lying and of debasing him” (A138). And yet, I would say, it’s not so direct after all: he continues to feign madness, and uses a metaphor (“You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops…”) rather than explicitly accusing them.

His next decisive action, says Pyles, is the murder of Polonius:

...it is this act—this ecstatic, brutal, Bacchic act—that finally and totally redeems his Dionysian mind. This is an action so decisive, so extreme and deliberate, that it is impossible to imagine Hamlet having committed to it before this moment; that is, before his experience observing the performance of the players. Hamlet has been unshackled by the representation of his state, on the stage, to finally act. (A139)

But it is not a decisive, deliberate act, to which Hamlet ‘committed,’ precisely because it is ecstatic, brutal, and Bacchic. In a sudden rage he kills a man behind a curtain, and doesn’t even know who he is killing. Moments earlier (though still after the play) he lets his opportunity to deliberately kill the king slip. Pyles is mistaken: this is just the same Hamlet as before.

So why does art not cure Hamlet of his nausea at existence and his inaction? Perhaps this is because it depends, ultimately, on the individual will. Just as thoughts and words of themselves can never cross the chasm separating them from action, art can soothe and inspire but never of itself cause the individual to affirm life and act within it. In fact, because of its soothing and inspiring qualities, it can actually distract from this. Hamlet uses art like he uses words—as a substitute for life and action. The Mousetrap probably is just as much for his own immediate benefit as it is a means for catching out Claudius: he must see his tragic and senseless situation aesthetically—made sublime—and see also, perhaps, how it is avenged. But as we have seen, it doesn’t suffice to stir him to decisive action. His pessimism and despondency remain, he avoids killing the king, and the events of the play Hamlet only accelerate due to his hasty and confused slaying of Polonius. Perhaps he could have used the The Mousetrap’s inspiration to take a more affirmative and proactive stance—but chose not to.

But why would he choose not to? Here we again encounter Hamlet’s ressentiment. The Dionysian man is nauseated by particular action because of a true awareness of being; but Hamlet also resents existence because of his very particular situation. His resentment against being is not simply due to some ecstatic intuition, but stems from the poison of personal frustration—at the unacknowledged core of which is his own shunting from the kingship by Claudius. Hamlet wants revenge, and this thwarted desire finds an outlet in denigrating existence in general, which in turn paralyses him further—if existence is essentially horrible, unfair and absurd, what is the point of a particular act of retribution?

In short, it is Hamlet’s ressentiment that fuels and perpetuates his Dionysian paralysis. He could move beyond it into an artistic–affirmative stance which denies nothing of the Dionysian insight into being, but to do this he would have to sacrifice his resentment against being, acknowledge the nature of his resentment against Claudius, and overcome whatever cowardice he has.

Man Unlimited?

Harold Bloom saw it differently. In his books Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and then Hamlet: Poem Unlimited he praises Hamlet to the skies. “Consciousness is his salient characteristic,” says Bloom in the first book. “He is the most aware and knowing figure ever conceived” (p. 404). And a little later:

Hamlet, as a character, bewilders us because he is so endlessly suggestive. Are there any limits to him? His inwardness is his most radical originality; the ever-growing inner self, the dream of an infinite consciousness, has never been more fully portrayed. (p. 416)

The crowd roared. The noise echoed through the dark stone passages, into the cell in which Marcus and the others sat awaiting their fate. Above them, on the arena floor, men were being torn apart by animals – an appetizer for the fifty thousand spectators before the main course of the gladiatorial fights.

The chilling sense of dread that Marcus had been struggling against all morning suddenly seized hold of his heart and seemed to paralyze him. This was to be his first real fight as a gladiator. He had trained for this continuously for the past six months, with all the grueling rigor that training required. He was larger and stronger than he had ever been, and had been victorious in many of the practice bouts – though by no means all. But all the same, in this moment as he heard the crowd’s ferocity echo around him and imagined the desperate violence with which his opponent would meet him, he felt utterly helpless.

His head slumped forward and he held his face in his hands. “How did I get here?” he asked himself for the hundredth time.

Here he was, locked in a cell beneath the Colosseum, a slave about to die – yet he had been born a free man, a Roman. Before his calamitous change in fortunes, Marcus Postumius Tento had been wealthy and on the rise, a quaestor in the imperial province of Cilicia, assistant to the governor. In this role, he was in charge of the provincial finances; and, like nearly all such officials in the empire, had established a mutually beneficial arrangement with the governor, whereby each acquired some extra funds they were not, in theory, entitled to. Although one did not talk about this practice too openly, it seemed that everyone of importance turned a blind eye to it.

This suddenly changed when the magistrate Quintus Rutilius Lupus reported the governor’s arrangement with Marcus to the new emperor. Quintus was an ambitious and utterly unscrupulous man, frustrated with the slow pace of his career and desperate for a province. Though Marcus couldn’t prove it, he knew Quintus had himself engaged in the same behavior in the petty offices he had held so far.

The new emperor was young and idealistic, and the rumors of senatorial arrogance and corruption that Quintus sent swirling through the Roman populace added to the pressure. Marcus and the governor were removed from their posts and put on trial. The judgment: guilty. The sentence: damnati ad ludos – condemned to the games. The emperor wanted to make an example of them, to send a message that official corruption would not be tolerated.

Marcus ground his teeth as he remembered the callous and self-satisfied face of Quintus at the trial. The former governor killed himself immediately following the sentence, to avoid the disgrace of his punishment. Marcus was too attached to life to follow him.

Suddenly, he found himself stripped of all his wealth, stripped of his very citizenship. He was legally a slave, and was sent to the gladiatorial school to be trained for the games – to kill and be killed for the entertainment of the thundering masses above him.

But still, he considered, this wasn’t the worst fate that could have befallen him. He had not been condemned ad bestias, like the unfortunate victims, bereft of armor, weapons and clothing, now being ripped apart by the teeth of tigers and lions. Neither had he been sentenced to the cleaner, certain death of a beheading.

He reflected, tracing the same circle of thought he had done a hundred times before: this was not, strictly speaking, a sentence of death. He might yet live. Gladiatorial fights only rarely ended in death. More often, the loser submitted, and was granted his life because he fought bravely. Many gladiators lived long enough to retire. After five years he would be eligible to receive his freedom; perhaps sooner, if he really impressed the crowd.

“I must fight bravely,” he thought. “That is the only way I can survive.” He recalled the gladiatorial fights he had witnessed as a free man – the way a gladiator would continue almost to the very end, cut and smeared with blood yet still parrying the increasingly forceful blows of his opponent; how he might pivot to dodge the final blow then suddenly lunge forward and thrust at him, all his energies concentrated in that last desperate movement. He recalled the exhilaration he had felt as a spectator; the way the crowd adored the strongest, bravest, most skillful, most agile; all the fame and glory these accrued. He recalled the military training of his youth, all the discipline and fortitude it had drilled into him. He recalled, finally, the gladiatorial training he had just received, and all the practical skill he had acquired.

“I may be a slave,” he thought, “but I will not die like one. I will live, or die with glory.” The frigid terror that had filled his chest now retreated. He shook his head briskly, cracked his knuckles, and stood up.

He imagined the fight that lay ahead of him, imagined the desperate ferocity with which his opponent would come at him. He would need to match this ferocity, all while keeping his wits about him; he could not expend all his energy too soon or allow himself to be lured into a trap his opponent might set for him. “Yes,” he thought, “I need both prudence and courage – both to the utmost.”

“I am not a slave; I am a Roman,” he silently repeated to himself. He forced himself to imagine the worst, to imagine being slain in the arena. If he were struck down he would not, must not, flinch. He would not shamefully and hopelessly flee, would not abjectly beg for his life. He would simply await the verdict that the crowd, and the emperor, would give.

If he was to die, he knew the final blow would be quick. Right before it came, with his final breaths, perhaps he would hail the emperor – show him what a noble man he had cast to his death. Or he would curse Quintus. The crowd would ask each other, “Who is this Quintus Rutilius Lupus? Who is it that brought this noble Roman to this end, this man who fought so well and died so bravely? Was this Quintus’ action honest and just – or deceptive, ignoble, a vicious ploy to get himself a province?”

His hatred for Quintus burned hot within him and strengthened his resolve. “Yes,” he thought, “I will fight my opponent as I would fight that coward who dared not face me man to man.”

He looked over to a man sitting opposite him, who seemed to have been observing him. This was Lucius Aelius Audeo, one of the auctorati, those free men who voluntarily became gladiators for the sake of wealth and fame. At least, that is how they would brag to the other gladiators. In reality, they were nearly always driven to it by desperation. Lucius, for instance, had been utterly bankrupt, having squandered his fortune on women, wine, and dice; becoming a gladiator was the only way he could see of escaping his debtors.

When their eyes met, Lucius gave him a dark and knowing smirk. “I saw your terror,” he seemed to say. “And now I see you might just die like a man.”

Marcus quickly looked away. His gaze settled, instead, on a man sitting alone in the corner of the room, bent over himself and half shrouded in shadow. This was Stephanus, the man who had been assigned to fight him. In his late 20s, he was about half a decade younger than Marcus, and of a slightly more slender build, although he made up for this in fights with his slightly greater agility.

When he felt Marcus’ gaze he raised his head and looked back at him. His eyes were copper in the dim lamplight and his entire face appeared taut with pain. The look he gave Marcus seemed at once an urgent question and a desperate attempt to confide something to him. Marcus frowned, puzzled and somewhat concerned, yet not daring to talk with him here, so close to their fight and surrounded by the other gladiators. He recalled all he had discovered about this strange man.

He was a Greek of an insignificant family from the eastern city of Smyrna. He emigrated to Rome to try and earn a fortune, but his various schemes to this end had fallen through and he ended up all but destitute. He had therefore taken to theft to provide for himself – just until such time, he had told himself, when he was able to secure more legitimate and lucrative work. When he was finally caught, he was condemned ad ludos and sent to the gladiatorial school for training. He arrived shortly after Marcus had. Initially, he seemed normal enough, and friendly enough with the other men. But gradually, he seemed to withdraw: he spent more and more time by himself, and when with the others there seemed to always be a part of himself he kept back.

Then, late one night, Marcus awoke to the sound of hushed murmuring coming from Stephanus’ cell, which bordered on his own. One of the voices was Stephanus’; the other was the voice of a woman. Curious, Marcus got up and peered through the bars. He could just make out the back of her head, but her voice confirmed it was the serving girl – one of the slaves owned by the school, tasked with the menial chores that kept it running. She was sitting on the ground and talking with him through the bars. Her voice trembled with emotion as she spoke. As Marcus continued listening, he noticed Stephanus’ voice becoming more and more infected with the same trembling emotion.

Marcus could only catch snippets of their conversation. “He loves you,” murmured the girl to Stephanus. A little later Marcus heard her say, with emphasis: “Yes, you will see him.”

Conscious they might be overheard, she became quieter thereafter. Marcus now only caught the odd word: “suffering,” “forgive,” “glory.” After a while longer, he realized they had begun praying together. He stretched out again to sleep, his curiosity lost now it was clear their conversation concerned some religious cult rather than an attempt to escape or some erotic rendezvous.

Stephanus and the serving girl continued to talk whenever they could. Sometimes at night, whispering through the bars of his cell; sometimes in the day, while he was resting between trainings. Marcus observed all this, and his curiosity gradually returned.