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?

If you’re driving at 100 km/h, a car coming toward you at 80 km/h will seem to be racing toward you at 180 km/h. If you’re both going the same direction, it’s moving backward at 20 km/h, from your perspective. We knew that light was an electromagnetic wave, and it should make a difference if we’re moving into or away from the wave when we measure it. Like waves in water and sound waves in air, it was believed light waves traveled through a medium—the ‘luminiferous ether.’ Only if you were stationary relative to the ether would you measure the true speed of light.

The decisive experiment was conducted by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley in 1887. Since the Earth is hurtling around the Sun at over 100,000 km/h, we’d expect to detect a relative difference in the speed of light. But regardless of how their instruments were oriented, Michelson and Morley couldn’t find the predicted effect. Regardless of the observer, light is always measured as traveling 299,792,458 meters per second in empty space.

Einstein solved this paradox in his special theory of relativity: throwing out the ether hypothesis, he realized that if the speed of light was absolute, time and space must be relative.

Imagine you’re standing beside a railroad on which a train is traveling close to the speed of light. You see two simultaneous flashes of light: one right in front of the train and one right behind it. What would you see if you were standing in the middle of the train? Because you’d be racing toward the front flash and away from the other, the light of the front flash would reach you first. And because you’d measure the same speed of light from both directions, you’d conclude the two flashes were not simultaneous! To the passenger on the train, the person standing by the tracks is actually racing backward, toward the rear and away from the front flash, which is why they see the two flashes at the same time. Whether two events are simultaneous or not is a matter of perspective, and in relativity there is no privileged perspective.

This is known as the relativity of simultaneity, and it leads to two other extraordinary phenomena: length contraction and time dilation. Because to measure something you need to locate each end of it at the same time, observers will differ about the length of objects approaching the speed of light. Someone beside the tracks will measure a significantly shorter train than one of its passengers. And observers will also disagree about the flow of time: someone looking into the train will see its clocks running slow and everyone moving in slow motion. But from the passengers’ perspective, since the outside world is racing backward, it will be contracted and evolve in slow motion.

Together these principles solve the problem that Einstein faced. Speed is distance over time, and because distance and time vary in just the right ways, the speed of light remains constant. In other words, if time dilates and length contracts, light has more time to go a shorter distance.

Time and Eternalism

Einstein’s theory of relativity would have delighted the perspectivist Nietzsche, who once remarked, “there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective ‘knowing.’” But it would also have given him a new way to understand eternal return.

We can distinguish two main views about time: presentism and eternalism. Presentism holds that nothing exists outside of the present: the past has ceased to exist and the future does not yet exist. On the other hand, eternalism holds that everything—past, present, future—equally exists. The universe is one vast ‘block’ of space and time: things are located in both.

The special theory of relativity strongly implies an eternalist view of time. As the physicist Roger Penrose highlighted with his Andromeda paradox, the relativity of simultaneity means that two people walking toward each other on the street may inhabit very different ‘presents.’ For one of them, an invasion fleet from the distant Andromeda galaxy is on its way to Earth; for the other, the Andromedans haven’t even decided to invade yet. But how could this be, unless these events just exist in spacetime, all along? And if we consider all the possible presents of all possible observers, there remains no region of spacetime that wouldn’t be present or past to someone.

So far we’ve focused on special relativity, but in 1915 Einstein presented his general theory of relativity, which broadened the theory to account for gravity. Gravity was no longer a force but the shape of spacetime itself, which curves around massive objects. Near them time stretches out (gravitational time dilation). Clocks move slower the closer they are to the surface of the Earth (we constantly correct for this for GPS satellites to work).

In special relativity, spacetime is smooth. Though observers have different ‘presents,’ each has only one, which extends throughout the universe. But in general relativity, an observer’s ‘present’ depends not only on their velocity but also on the distribution and mass of matter. How we define a universal ‘present’ for a given observer depends on how we choose to slice up spacetime, which is ultimately somewhat arbitrary, and time is not only relative but radically local. This seems like a deathblow for presentism.

The block universe seems far from our commonsense view, in which time flows. If everything already exists within it, wouldn’t it be static? This was an assumption behind the most famous paper in the philosophy of time: J. M. E. McTaggart’s The Unreality of Time, published in 1908 (if we assume time’s reality). The paper is valuable because it shows how the commonsense presentist view is incoherent while illustrating a basic mistake about eternalism.

For McTaggart, time implies both an ‘A series’ and a ‘B series’: in an A series, events are ordered from future to present to past; in a B series, events are ordered as earlier or later than each other. Time requires change, and because the relations between events (the B series) are unchanging, this must come from their relation to the A series: an event is first future, then present, then past. In other words, change occurs because an event changes its position in the A series; change is used to explain change—a vicious circle! And if the first level of change requires an A series, the second level must also, and so on, in a vicious infinite regress. Therefore, concludes McTaggart, time is unreal.

But what if all you need is the B series? McTaggart’s rejection of eternalism depends on the fallacy that time itself flows: the A series and B series move past each other. But time doesn’t flow; time is flow. Change is already inherent in the B series as the ordered sequence of events that make up a changing object. An event is a momentary instance of change; it doesn’t change! Eternalist spacetime (the B series updated for relativity) isn’t static just because everything exists within it.

But at this point another objection arises: how can eternalism account for the experienced present? Even if there’s no absolute present, it certainly seems I’m living my life from a particular point within it, which continuously sweeps forward in time. If my whole life exists in block time, why is there any subjective present at all?

An eternalist would respond that we experience our life from every point in it, though to a being in time what this looks like is exactly what we get. One moment flows into the next in the temporal order; when we experience our life, we experience this flow. Just like a being in space, a being in time has to experience from somewhere, and so each of us experiences our whole life, but from the moments within it.

To better grasp this, we could represent it a couple of different ways—though both are deficient to the extent that they implicitly place time within time. We could picture ourselves as ‘forever’ living every moment of our lives, simultaneously. I am always experiencing myself now, when I was 10, and when I will be 70, and in each of these moments I feel: this moment is the present, and I was just in the moment before. Or we could picture it as a cycle, like the eternal return: I subjectively live my life all the way through then return to the beginning and live it through again. The point is that all of my life exists, and all of it is a life—animated, experienced, lived.

This may seem to imply we have no free will: we’re thrown into our already-made lives and fated to live them out. But that’s not the case. Firstly, because eternalism doesn’t require causal determinism: it just says whatever happens exists, regardless of how it comes about. Human free will is just as compatible with eternalism as a universe fully determined by physical laws. And secondly, if free will exists then whenever I do something I freely do it. From the perspective of this moment, if I choose something in the future it’s not that I can’t do otherwise, simply that I don’t do otherwise. And if free will doesn’t exist, we’re no worse off than under presentism.

An Eternalist Life

We’ve now seen how modern physics makes a literal interpretation of eternal return untenable even as it establishes a new conception of time. Nietzsche’s idea returns with greater force in eternalist guise: we’ll call this the eternalist return.

I remember, as a teenager, being struck by a passage I read in Overqualified by Joey Comeau:

Everything that has happened or will happen exists together. Just at different times. People die, but that isn’t any different from the edge of a table. The table is still there. It just doesn’t stretch that far.

This is a purer conception than Nietzsche’s, which requires objective recurrence. Recurrence would only beg the question: are the other iterations of me really me? An eternalist return escapes this: I am exactly who I am, my every contour in spacetime.

So, if true, what does it mean for us, practically?

Firstly, it forces us to evaluate our life as a whole, rather than as something continually falling into nonbeing. If we know we live our whole life eternally, our attitude toward it becomes far more significant. How do we feel about it, and why? Have we spent our time being petty, reactive and resentful, or noble, active and generous?

Secondly, it requires us to deal with the negative aspects of our past. No one’s ever lived without guilt or suffering, but events only take on their full meaning within a whole life. What we do with them matters, and the misfortune from which much good flows may truly be fortunate. In this way we actively incorporate them into a life we affirm. At the same time, some events could genuinely be exceptions—but we have to make them so by letting them go (if we were wronged, we forgive; if we did wrong, we don’t repeat it). As Alexander Nehamas notes in his book on Nietzsche, whether one actively incorporates them or genuinely lets them go, one has no reason for resentment.

Thirdly, it means we live all our most powerful, joyful, loving moments eternally. There’s no need to anxiously cling to experience. The passing moment is already eternal, and you open yourself to its richness most fully when you let it flow. The poet William Blake’s brief meditation on eternity captures this perfectly:

He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

Finally, it challenges us to create a beautiful future. If the question, “Do you desire this once more and innumerable times more?” drives me, I want my very next act to matter. And this doesn’t just mean self-cultivation: if eternalism is true then everyone’s life is as eternal as mine. Each brief good moment you give another is eternal, too. At the same time, it prompts us to become as excellent and strong as we can be, that we may truly affirm the eternal lives we’re living.

And yet, real tragedy exists. However eternal, our lives may end at any time, and there may be things we can never incorporate or render exceptions. These, too, are eternal. This is the dark side of eternalism. Though we can’t evade this, we may better deal with it. We may consider how goodness and tragedy are intertwined (the same physical laws that allow our bodies to move and grow allow for their torment and destruction); we may observe how the threat of tragedy fuels the preciousness of what we have; if we can, we may savor tragic beauty, which makes tragedies some of the finest examples of human art. And finally, we may face the tragic conditions of existence forthrightly, even when we cannot affirm them—the last, noblest stand of the human being.

Nietzsche spent the final decade of his life insane. For him, this would have been a fate worse than death. And yet, he knew it was a possibility: for most of his life he suffered from similar symptoms as his father, who died of a brain disease. I often wonder if there was a moment, at his strongest, when he would have affirmed his whole life—even with this.

Epilogue

While the theory of relativity strongly implies eternalism, this doesn’t hold for all of physics. The popular Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics seems to require an absolute present, in which the possible becomes actual. Relativity and quantum mechanics are the best theories we have for explaining the largest and smallest structures of our universe, respectively, but physicists have struggled for decades to unite them. Assuming a union is possible, we don’t know whether this will reduce quantum presentism to relativity’s eternalism, or vice versa. Suffice it to say, we haven’t heard the last word on time. So while the essential insight of Nietzsche’s eternal return is extremely plausible given modern physics, it remains one perspective among others. And both of these facts may well have pleased Nietzsche.

The Nietzsche Stone on the shore of Lake Silvaplana. Photo by Armin Kübelbeck, Wikimedia Commons (license).

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…?

Assuming continual change of character to allow for new interests and desires, would there be any meaningful connection between my 100-trillion-year-old self and my 200-trillion-year-old self? Considered together, these would appear to be completely different selves. It’s not clear that my awareness of their connection via a long series of memories or causal events is sufficient to unite them as my life in a way that matters to me.

There are a couple of ways to think about this. If character is constitutive of personal identity, then my eternal life would fragment into countless selves, no longer being my eternal life in any sense at all. While if the self is an underlying substance or some continuous chain, even though I could say that objectively it is my own life that continues forever, subjectively it might not matter enough for me to want it. Though such an ever-evolving life would avoid the problem of tedium, it would obliterate my particular character.

A thought experiment (for those who like their lives): if you were offered the opportunity to live another 100 years but only as a subjectively completely different person, though your memories of your present life were preserved, would you take it? Perhaps people’s intuitions will vary on this, but I’d be inclined to refuse the offer. Likewise, I’d refuse the prospect of a madness that entailed a mental split between myself and another personality—even if this other personality was really great and only helpful. (At the end of the essay I’ll discuss a key qualification to these points, which may account for different intuitive responses.)

Our particularity is an important part of our identity. Who I am now, the unified character I have now, across my natural lifespan—this seems crucial; and given infinite time, the transformation of character would become replacement of character, endless times over. The prospect of infinite connected changes in character thus fares no better than the the prospect of infinite disconnected ‘lives.’

The fact is, we depend on the finitude of our lives for our particularity: it means we cannot do or be all things. But given an infinite lifespan, we must either be a particular self overcome with the tedium of sameness, or an endlessly varying self. And if endlessly varying, I might as well start anywhere, and can never end up anywhere. In a religious context this aspect of the problem of eternal life becomes even more acute: what relation does my 200-trillion-year-old self have to the self I was in this human life, supposed to be all-important in determining my eternal destiny?

Preciousness of Life

As finitude supports the particular identity of my life, it also supports the value that I find in this life. We’ve already seen this in the fact that endless life would lead to tedium if one’s character remained the same: that this doesn’t happen in actual life (except in limited and transient ways) is because our desires and interests cannot be exhausted within the limited time assigned to us. We can thus be deeply and genuinely engaged in our lives; their finitude guarantees the inexhaustibility of their interest to us in relation to our fairly fixed characters.

But finitude also guarantees the preciousness of our lives, to ourselves and each other, and of the things within our lives. As Borges put it in his story The Immortal, another fictional treatment of the problems of immortality:

Death (or reference to death) makes men precious and pathetic; their ghostliness is touching; any act they perform may be their last; there is no face that is not on the verge of blurring and fading away like the faces in a dream. Everything in the world of mortals has the value of the irrecoverable and contingent.

Among the Immortals, on the other hand, every act (every thought) is the echo of others that preceded it in the past, with no visible beginning, and the faithful presage of others that will repeat it in the future, advertiginem. There is nothing that is not as though lost between indefatigable mirrors. Nothing can occur but once, nothing is preciously in peril of being lost. (p. 15)

I would amend that slightly, though I believe the thought is consonant with Borges’: instead of mortal men’s ‘ghostliness’ I would put their ‘tangibility.’ In everlasting life nothing would be lost and so the felt distinction between ‘here’ and ‘gone’ would largely dissolve. In our finite lives, viewed with an awareness of death, it is as though everything that is cries, ‘Here I am! Here I am!’ against a backdrop of beginningless and endless silence. The intensity of that cry is its reality, its presence. In everlasting life there would be no such silence and cry: no such contrast, and so no such significance; everything would recede, would become ghostly, would be like a dream.

Virtue

A further way that finitude fills our lives with value: it seems necessary for virtue. At the very least, the virtue of courage seems importantly related to the real prospect of death. If I cannot die, I can never be courageous in the face of death. Perhaps one could be courageous in other ways (especially if we admit certain kinds of suffering or misfortune into eternal life); but courage in regard to one’s own death does seem very important. It has certainly been the most lauded throughout human history. And I think there is good reason for this: there is a kind of self-transcendence, a stepping completely beyond oneself, in bravely facing (and embracing) one’s own finitude; this power of stepping completely beyond oneself is rightly felt as more admirable than the power of enduring sufferings and misfortunes that leave our self and the possibility for future good intact.

Though courage is the most obvious example, I suspect the other virtues also depend on finitude. What would patience or prudence be in a life of infinite duration? What would compassion or love be were human lives no longer precious through their fragility? And underlying all virtues is the urgency of virtue: acquiring and practicing virtue is something we must do now; we have limited time to do it, and the lives that we affect are also of limited duration. It is notable that the Western monotheistic religions make so much of this urgency in this life yet obviate it in the next.

Aesthetics

Finally, just as the ethical life of immortal beings would be impoverished, so would their aesthetic life. Borges alludes to it in the passage quoted above. The sentence that follows: “The elegiac, the somber, the ceremonial are not modes the Immortals hold in reverence.” One wonders how much of an aesthetic life there could be in eternity at all. Would any story (of however happy an ending) resonate as it does for us mortals without any real threat of irrevocable loss? Gone completely would be the art form and the sense of tragedy, that focuses directly on the phenomena of finitude and death. This may strike the reader as a questionable thing to regret the loss of. I will grant that it is ambivalent. Yet it is beautiful in its ambivalence, in a way that everlasting life is not. In focusing on these dark realities and treating them as such, it seems to me that tragic art can somehow, strangely, make them luminous.

Temporal Eternity: A Life Transfigured

So far we’ve been considering lives that are more or less like what we live now, but extended for an infinite duration. We’ve found that retaining the same character will render this life unbearably dull, as we will eventually exhaust all our particular interests and desires. We’ve also found that allowing for infinite changes in character over time won’t help us, as this would either destroy the self that we are or fracture the self to such an extent that such an endless existence would not be desirable. We might therefore imagine lives that are more radically different than those we live now. It may be that everlasting life is only good if one is immersed in a very specific activity or set of activities.

Pleasure

One simple possibility is that pure pleasure or bliss would justify living forever. It would always remain enjoyable, and so life would always be good, however long it goes on. There are at least a couple of problems with this. First, if in this scenario I am not self-aware, it is questionable whether this is my life, in the way that matters, or just a bare life drowned in bliss. And this would hardly be a human life, but more the condition of an animal. But if I am self-aware, how could I not inwardly rebel against this subhuman condition or at least tire of it? The self-reflective nature of humans would ensure that, even if it continued, the pleasure would become merely a thin surface over a deeper dissatisfaction.

Intellectual Activity

So let’s explore the other extreme. What about a life of the purest intellectual activity? This is the condition to which the Immortals of Borges’ story commit themselves after centuries of immortality. In his essay, Williams notes the apparent merits of eternal intellectual inquiry:

The activity is engrossing, self-justifying, affords, as it may appear, endless new perspectives, and by being engrossing enables one to lose oneself. It is that last feature that supposedly makes boredom unthinkable, by providing something that is [...] at every moment totally absorbing. (p. 13–14)

The problem then becomes, once again, relating this to me. Williams comments:

If [these intellectual activities] are genuinely fulfilling, and do not operate (as they can) merely as a compulsive diversion, then the ground and shape of the satisfactions that the intellectual enquiry offers [the person], will relate to him, and not just to the enquiry. The Platonic introjection, seeing the satisfactions of studying what is timeless and impersonal as being themselves timeless and impersonal, may be a deep illusion, but it is certainly an illusion. (p. 14)

In other words, intellectual inquiries, embodying particular interests and desires of a particular individual, are dependent on a particular character; they must either change or the character must change, but as noted before, neither of these seems satisfactory. And we’re faced with a further difficulty, because even if the ‘Platonic introjection’ were true and intellectual activity could really be pure, timeless and impersonal, grounded in itself rather than the particularity of any thinking being—in that case, again, what is it to me? As Williams remarks, this “could be as well realised in the existence of Aristotle’s prime mover” as any particular man (p. 15).

Vision of God

This brings me to the next possibility, which, in fairness, is the most sophisticated position advanced by the Western monotheistic traditions: the details vary but we may summarize the overall idea as ‘life with God’ or the beatific vision. In these conceptions, eternal life isn’t just about living the present kind of life forever, or even about pure intellectual activity, but principally about the nearness to and apprehension of God—the vision of God, to use the most common metaphor. As God is infinite, how could this activity ever get boring? As he is the ultimate good, grounding all other goods, how could it ever become unsatisfying?

This may well be the most compelling approach to eternal life. Still, there are problems. First, it depends entirely on the concept of God—but is there such a reality, and can we really conceive of it? The questions are famously and perhaps interminably debatable. This very fact suggests (and many believers will agree with this) that such a being or reality escapes our understanding—whether due to his sheer ontological transcendence or simply to the incoherence of the concept. To wish for eternal life based on the beatific vision, then, is to exercise faith in a God that will ground and justify that life, making it not only bearable but supremely desirable, in a way we cannot understand. It is, in other words, to have a faith that eternal life is good. Faith in God is prior to it; it is not prior to a faith in God.

Granting that the vision of God may not be comprehensible to the human mind ahead of time, the images we have of it do not seem very helpful. Would it be absolute and absorbing bliss? Then we seem to have the first example we dealt with in this section: too much of this is depersonalizing and characterizes a life less than human. Would it be more like intellectual activity, then? (And by yoking this with a pure intellectual bliss we perhaps escape the problem of the subhuman.) But then we have the problem that brings: it does not seem to be us absorbed in the contemplation; this too is depersonalizing.

Is it, then, best described as a limitless adoration or love, forever fulfilled or reciprocated? Regarding love I’ll only note the following: if God is essentially personal he must have a character; and if God is eternal, that character must have a relation with eternal life—which is the very problem we’ve been wrestling with! Add to that the fact that the loves we know in this life are conditioned by finitude: the finitude of particularity and the preciousness afforded by the finitude of time. What is it to love an infinite being? What is it to be both personal and infinite? But here, I fear, we go too far; we must proceed no further and remain silent.

Descending a little, I want to point out that in the Western monotheistic religions, the beatific vision occurs alongside the resurrection of the body. So it is not just that one will be absorbed in divine contemplation; one will be a living bodily human being, at the same time. There is a sense then that one will live one’s eternal life not lost in the divine vision, but inspired or informed by it. Regarding the more ordinary activities of life, one could argue that the love, joy, or vitality infused in us by the vision of the infinite God will sustain any activity we do, preventing it from ever becoming boring. In actual life, when we feel inherently joyful, vital, and full of love it often seems we can do anything, any number of times, even those things that would typically be tedious or uninteresting. G. K. Chesterton once remarked on this propensity in children:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. (Orthodoxy, Ch. IV)

I will close this section, then, with this thought: that eternal life may be a life like ours but grounded in the vision or infused with the power of God. However, though it may be that such a life preserves our identity in a meaningful way while being truly worth living forever, this hinges on a premise we cannot understand: namely, God. It may be rational to hope for it if one has faith in God, but I am still not sure I want it. Perhaps I am stubborn, but something still seems lost. I’m not sure if I want—either myself or any child—to actually be able to exult in monotony forever. I’m not sure it would be better than a world where the child says, “Do it again!” and the grown-up groans and everything has its place and time.

Atemporal Eternity

I will turn now to the second interpretation of eternity: eternity as transcending time as we now experience it. Consider a mathematical object—the number 2, for instance. It doesn’t seem right to say that it exists everlastingly, as though it exists at or in every possible moment. This would suggest it is somehow contained by or subordinate to time. Rather, it seems more appropriate to say that it exists (if it exists as an independent reality at all) outside of time, atemporally.

So, the first sense of atemporal eternity I want to explore is this pure one, in which one exists completely outside of time, with no inherent relation to it. The problem with applying this to eternal life is that lives are different from mathematical objects. Lives have contents that occur in a temporal sequence. Lives are lived—that is to say, they inherently involve the phenomenon of time. The idea of a life completely and simply beyond time is, I would say, a contradiction in terms; something simply inconceivable. An utterly timeless life would be utterly vacuous.

Spacetime

But this isn’t generally what is meant when an appeal to atemporal eternity is made to ground the desirability of eternal life. Instead, an intimate connection with this life we are living is supposed. To illustrate this, we can take the concept of spacetime in the scientific theory of relativity. In this, time can be considered the fourth dimension of space. Objectively, it is not essentially different from the three dimensions of space. The difference is subjective: while we experience the ability to move in any direction in space, we seem to move in only one direction in space—always from the ‘past’ into the ‘future.’ But in the worldview of relativity, everything that exists in spacetime—simply exists. There is no objective ‘now’ to move or pass through. As there is a subjective perspective within time in which we continually inhabit a present moving in one direction, perhaps we could also imagine an objective perspective outside of time to which our entire life is given simultaneously as one coherent object. In philosophy this view of time is known as eternalism: all times are equally real.

In a paper responding to the debate spurred by Williams, “The End of Immortality!” Eternal Life and the Makropulos Debate, Mikel Burley proposes an atemporal interpretation of eternal life that draws on modern theology and the philosophy of eternalism: one’s life is already eternal as part of the whole spacetime manifold that is eternally present to God, so it’s all the more important how we live this life. Stephen De Young recently sketched out a similar idea, wherein we will timelessly reinhabit the blessed moments in our lives (you can see my response to it here).

Burley isn’t explicit whether we will assume God’s perspective on our own lives, such that I will experience my life as a whole, altogether and simultaneously. Let’s say we won’t; that this is a capacity belonging to God alone. In this case, I could still say my life is ‘eternal’ in the eternalist sense, but I could only ever experience it subjectively from within, part-by-part, with the same flow of or through time that I currently experience. In other words, to me, my eternal life would be qualitatively identical to a strictly finite life (i.e. a life under a theory of time where the past genuinely ceases to exist). Nothing would be gained by having an eternal life; the only gain could come indirectly, through positive effects of knowing the fact of the atemporal eternity of my life.

Atemporal Perspective

But let’s assume that Burley means we will come to share in God’s eternal perspective, at least in regard to our own lives. Then a different problem arises: is this atemporal experience of a four-dimensional object really the experience of a life? It seems that the flow of time is intrinsic to life: living is something dynamic, immersive, a process, a movement into ever-new possibilities. From this atemporal perspective, how could my life be a real life rather than merely a devitalized image of a life?

But there is an even deeper question: who am I as atemporal experiencer of my life? Experience itself seems to inherently require the flow of time. When I represent myself (or God) contemplating the finished object of my life, I actually imagine this contemplation as an experience in time, because I have never had an experience outside of time and don’t know how to have one. All experience, all contemplation I have ever known is temporal: in states of absorption, the awareness of time may move from the foreground to the background of consciousness, but these states are still constituted by a flow of experience—first this, then that, then another.

It might be objected that in certain mystical states one transcends the flow of time altogether, but I think these must be an extreme example of the case of absorption. A true experience of atemporal eternity would have no duration, and therefore no real place in the flow of our experiences, no ‘substance’ by which to lodge in our memory. It would leave no trace. That states of apparent timelessness are remembered implies that they were lived through, which implies that they were not atemporal after all. If no experience can be atemporal, if the very nature of life and experience is to flow, then the concept of eternal life as an atemporal perspective on my life breaks down.

The prospect of atemporal eternity cannot be salvaged by suggesting we ‘inhabit’ our eternal life. This could mean that we live our lives atemporally—but as noted above, this notion seems self-contradictory, inconceivable. Or it could mean that we live our lives in time while maintaining an atemporal awareness of them—which not only suffers from the problem that atemporal experience seems just as inconceivable as atemporal life, but has the additional problem of how exactly this atemporal experience could be combined with temporal experience in the same individual.

Conclusions

I have tried to show how if we really think through the notion of eternal life, whether we take it in a temporal or atemporal sense, it is not desirable. If eternal life means endless duration, we are faced with the dilemma of unbearable tedium or endless changes of character—but given the first, I don’t want it, and given the second, it doesn’t concern me: it isn’t my life that will be eternal. If we posit God as an inexhaustible object of desire and source of vitality, we must first comprehend the notion of God—but this task is formidable, to say the least. On the other hand, if we take eternal life in an atemporal sense, it is either indistinguishable from the life we are living or else inconceivable: life and experience are inherently temporal.

Why, then, do so many of us think that we want eternal life? Well, because we don’t want to die. We could see this as a paradox of human existence: that we neither want to die nor want to live forever; we are faced with a choice between two evils (though, mercifully, the choice is made for us). Or it may not be a paradox at all. Instead, we could put our situation like this: life is good, but not forever—a finite life is good. It may be that the duration of a good life can be expanded far beyond the natural lifespan. It may vary with the type of person and the activities they engage in. But, in my view at least, it can’t be infinite.

It seems to me that notions of eternal life are abstractions from actual life. It is actual life that we love, if we love life: we expand this in our minds to eternity. But if we look closely at our actual life, we will see that it is constituted by time, death and finitude. In attempting to think eternal life we abstract our life from these integral factors and are left, upon closer inspection, with something that seems alien and undesirable.

Two Senses of ‘Life’

But, I confess, there is an certain ambiguity here: between life in the sense of life-force or act of living, and a life in the sense of ‘my life’ or ‘your life.’ I alluded to this ambiguity when entertaining the possibility of an eternal life in which one’s character was continually evolving and when posing the question of whether you would accept a complete replacement of character in exchange for 100 more years of life. Even staying close to the experience of actual life, there does seem to be something in me that would say “Yes!” to this proposal. This would seem to be life in the first sense, the force within me which is itself impersonal but which supports my personality.

This life that I most basically am may always want to continue—but this does not mean I want this particular self (this life) to continue forever. One way to put the relation between the two might be like this: life expresses itself as a life. By conflating the two senses of ‘life,’ eternal life conceived as eternal personal existence attempts to satisfy the demands of both: for the first (let us grant) wants to go on forever, but the second wants to be something particular, an integral whole. But because these contradict each other, the attempt necessarily fails.

A fruitful question then arises: beyond the thought experiments sketched out here, can the life-force in me already express itself as different lives? Does it, perhaps, express itself as many different lives in sequence? This would be reincarnation. Or is there only one life-force, expressing itself as every life? This would be a form of nondualism. Or—we needn’t think of this life-force as some unitary substance: rather than being the one universal self it may be that, at the fundamental level, I have no self at all, that ‘life’ refers to the phenomenon of life, the process of life, occurring wherever it occurs; that it is not the same ‘life’ that unites me to myself of 10 years or 5 minutes ago, no more than it is a different ‘life’ that animates you. This would be akin to the Buddhist view. The process of life strives for eternity, and in doing so coalesces these particular lives that we are, that are of such value.

Usefulness of Eternal Life

Is the hope for eternal life, in the personal sense, therefore useless? I don’t think so. In relieving one of the fear of death, it can open one up to living more fully, freely, lovingly, beautifully. Between the terror of death and the dread of eternal life, the former is by far the more powerful. As the virtue of courage is attained by aiming closer to foolhardiness than the opposite and more powerful vice of cowardice, the same is true here. Within life, in those times when we feel that the future is bright and assured and there is nothing to fear, we can be lavish in the meantime: generous with our time and attention, accepting or even affirming of all things; we have the vitality for it, and need not self-protectively cling to anything. At its best, I would suggest that belief in eternal life affords a good finite life. Everything is ambivalent, however: at its worst, it can afford a resentful denial of this life, a destructiveness that poisons every part of it, as Nietzsche so well described.

If I didn’t believe that a deeply good life could be embraced without a belief in eternal life, I’m not sure I would publish this essay. But that is not the case. Nietzsche may be helpful here too, as may a consideration of the two senses of ‘life’ described above.

I’ll end with a clip by Alan Watts that speaks to this. You could take it as being about the fundamental reality expressing itself as a particular human life in all its finitude, or about the movement from abstraction back to this same actual human life—or both.

Let's suppose you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years' worth of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have.

And you would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say, “Well, that was pretty great. But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control, where something is going to happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be.” And you would dig that, and come out of that and say, “Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?”

Then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream where you are now. You would dream of the life that you are actually living today. That would be within the infinite multiplicity of choices you would have, of playing that you weren't God.

Because the whole nature of the Godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he's not. The first thing that he says to himself is, “Man, get lost.” Because he gives himself away. The nature of love is self-abandonment, not clinging to oneself. Throwing yourself out, as in, for example, in basketball: you're always getting rid of the ball. And that keeps things moving. That's the nature of life.

So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is. And you're all that; only, you're pretending you're not.

My series on the Odes of John Keats, following Helen Vendler’s interpretation (playlist here). Vendler believes Keats’ six great odes should be read in order as his, often meandering, journey toward a final affirmation of immanence and becoming—of life, nature, and existence as it is—Beauty and Truth finally united:

• The Ode on Indolence
• The Ode to Psyche
• The Ode to a Nightingale
• The Ode on a Grecian Urn
• The Ode on Melancholy
• The ode To Autumn

A video explaining Max Scheler’s Hierarchy of Values, including an introduction to material value ethics, how he applied the phenomenological approach to value, and a description of the ordered hierarchy of values that came from this.

A video on Justice and the Violence of Life. How do we reconcile our need for justice with the inherent violence of life? This is a development of this post on here. In the video, I explore various religious and philosophical approaches to the problem: Nietzsche's affirmation of violent life, the Christian idea of the fall of creation, the transhumanist desire to transform everything, the Hindu belief in the universe as God's play (lila), the self-sacrificial theology of Simone Weil, and the ethical thought of Max Scheler.

A conversation with Aron van Os, who wrote a thesis (The Pious Antichrist) on Nietzsche’s complicated and ambivalent relationship with Christianity. We discuss Nietzsche's inner conflict between the ideals of 'Dionysus' and 'the Crucified,' how this conflict eventually became one-sided and destructive, and how it could become harnessed as a productive and positive tension that embraces both this life and the transcendent.

A long and wide-ranging conversation with my friend ‘K.’, based upon my video on Justice and the Violence of Life. This was fascinating and, I think, incredibly fruitful. I can’t begin to summarize the topics we covered, but the timestamps are a good guide.

I hope to have some more videos up in the near future. I’d love to do some more interviews, and also hope to do another video on Scheler and a video (or series of videos) on Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

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)

I wouldn’t argue against Hamlet being a character of great consciousness and inwardness; he clearly is. But I believe these qualities are intertwined with his ressentiment, and because of this, have very definite limits. He uses awareness, even self-awareness, as he uses art and words—all of these are (apart from the value they have in themselves) an evasion of action and a substitute for it. And his ressentiment warps his consciousness; exactly how self-aware is he? As mentioned before, his first soliloquy is silent about what must have then been his main complaint against Claudius: that he stole the throne from him. Likewise, his ressentiment warps his view of Ophelia and his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, so that he ends up treating all of them with shocking cruelty.

Yet he certainly has some self-awareness. Thus he continually berates himself for avoiding what he swore to do. With sometimes more, sometimes less acuity, he knows that action is needed, the nature of that action, and that he is avoiding it. And this, I think, is why he never gives way to that full-blown value-inversion that Nietzsche talked so much about. A slave revolt in Hamlet’s aristocratic values would look something like this: I should not kill or depose the king; I do not want to be king and do not want retribution; instead, I will remain passive victim, innocent and harmless and unresisting—and thus be morally superior to him, thus get the better of him! But it never comes to this. If Hamlet distorts the natural order of values, it is by elevating words above action, rejecting his love for Ophelia, and denigrating the splendor of existence.

And yet, there does appear a strange transformation in his character in Act V, when he returns to the Danish court after escaping the English execution arranged for him by Claudius (and knowing full well of it):

By returning, he has no options beyond killing or being killed. The same mob that followed Laertes could more readily be summoned by the prince, beloved of the people, according to Claudius’s earlier, rueful admission. Yet Hamlet entertains no such prospects. Power is there, whenever he chooses to take it, but he no longer desires to be king. (Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, p. 86)

And yet it is in the midst of Act V, right before he is challenged to the duel with Laertes, that Hamlet repeats his intention to kill the king (“to quit him with this arm”) and at last explicitly admits that he has “popped in between th’ election and my hopes” (V.ii.65). Hamlet still desires to be king.

Yet there is something changed about him. Bloom calls this “a stance that is indescribable: call it quietism, disinterestedness, wise passivity, or what one will” (ibid., p. 141). We see this as he departs for the duel, knowing he may very well be going to his death.

Horatio. If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will forestall their repair hither and say you are not fit.

Hamlet. Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now, if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be. (V.ii.220–225)

Bloom understands this as a kind of Nietzschean affirmation of fate, the creative transformation of time’s “It was” into “Thus I willed it!” (see Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Pt. II, Of Redemption). But the imagery is Christian, referring to the words of Jesus: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father” (Matthew 10:29).

Hamlet’s transformation is, I think, neither Nietzschean nor Christian, but really just a continuation of his ressentiment in a different mode. He still has no plan for deposing the king, and yet, at the very end, he does kill him. He dies neither an innocent lamb nor a bold and decisive hero. What has changed is his self-conception, his words, his language. Commenting on these lines, Weisberg observes:

Rather it seems to me probable that the speech signifies a continuation of ressentient inactivity, a replacement of one literature for another in Hamlet’s persistent desire to be mediated by literary norms in dealing with Claudius […] Hamlet is not choosing faith, any more than he is choosing action. He is merely investing a new set of words with the responsibility to motivate him to a vengeance which he has long considered proper. This new vocabulary, this transposition from Greek to Christian metaphor is no more than literary ressentiment re-articulated. (335–336)

Even the act of finally killing the king is basically reactive and prompted by words:

...he seems in the end to drift into the vengeance, needing even in the midst of the duel scene’s ensuing carnage the shock of Laertes’ dying words (a final literary mediation?) “The King, the King’s to blame” to stumble toward the long-awaited deed. (336)

In appearing to embrace passivity, the Hamlet of Act V comes closer than ever to an inversion of his noble values. But in the final scene, paradoxically, we see flashes of his native nobility. He apologizes to Laertes, then forgives him as he lies dying. He fights honestly, valiantly, and, true to Claudius’ prediction, never inspects the foils. Indeed, his very return to Elsinore is heroic—he could easily have fled elsewhere when he learned of the king’s first plot to kill him. He strives to act yet resists this at the same time; all the while his resentment burns within him and warps his consciousness—however vast it grows.

Man of Conscience?

So far, I’ve assumed that some form of retributive action against Claudius is good, is the right thing to do. It certainly accords with the ethos of his noble upbringing and position. In this case, his hesitation can only be viewed as a failure. However, in his article Hamlet’s Dull Revenge, René Girard disputes this: Hamlet’s reluctance to avenge his father is really his great virtue; his failure is that he doesn’t go far enough and renounce revenge completely.

According to Girard, Hamlet is a play split against itself: on the surface it is a revenge tragedy, providing thrill and catharsis for common theatergoers rooting for revenge; on a deeper level, however, it is a denunciation of the whole genre and reality of revenge. In his reading, Hamlet’s intended revenge against his father’s killer would just be one link in a long chain of revenge killings. It would not only be destructive, but futile. At the same time, it is absolutely what is expected of him by his social milieu—and by his audience. Hamlet half-consciously intuits the evil and futility of revenge and struggles against his play to avoid it.

But at the same time, he seeks it. He cannot give it up completely. And so Hamlet himself is split against himself. This leads to his “dull revenge”—the sick revenge within him, whose symptoms:

…always resemble that unnameable paralysis of the will, that ineffable corruption of the spirit that affect not only Hamlet, but the other characters as well. The devious ways of these characters, the bizarre plots they hatch, their passion for watching without being watched, their propensity to voyeurism and spying, the general disease of human relations make a good deal of sense as a description of an undifferentiated no man’s land between revenge and no revenge in which we are still living. (p. 296)

We are in this situation due to the “Judeo-Christian ferment” begun by the Bible, which ultimately rejects violence and revenge and exposes the dynamics of victimization, by which the innocent Messiah was put to death. Even as secular people, we cannot shake this awareness, and yet we cannot definitively renounce revenge. Given this dilemma, Hamlet resorts to ‘strategy’:

Thanks to the notion of strategy, men can postpone revenge indefinitely without ever giving it up. They are equally terrified by both radical solutions and they go on living as long as possible, if not forever, in the no man’s land of sick revenge. (p. 297)

‘Sick revenge,’ I would say, looks a lot like ressentiment. But while the latter stems from weakness or cowardice, the former stems from genuine moral awareness. Both rob us of the release of poisonous feelings through direct action. The question is: which of these does Hamlet suffer from?

In his article, Girard notes:

It cannot be without a purpose that Shakespeare suggests the old Hamlet, the murdered king, was a murderer himself. […] However nasty Claudius may look, he cannot look nasty enough if he appears in a context of previous revenge; he cannot generate, as a villain, the absolute passion and dedication demanded of Hamlet. The problem with Hamlet is that he cannot forget the context. (p. 283)

But what is this context? I cannot find where Shakespeare suggests the old Hamlet was a murderer. He was a warrior, in which capacity he “smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.” He fought the King of Norway in single combat, openly and lawfully, and won. His ghost must walk the night and fast in fires (i.e. endure purgatory) until “the foul crimes done in my days of nature | Are burnt and purged away”—but are these crimes murders? Does one go to purgatory and not to hell for unrepented murders?

And in any case, what had he done to Claudius? Shakespeare gives no indication King Hamlet had harmed him, except by being the rightful king and Gertrude’s husband. Where, then, is the long chain of revenge in which the younger Hamlet will be just another link?

With this, I think, Girard’s reading of Hamlet falls apart. Hamlet’s sickness started before he learned about his father’s murder: it is present in his first soliloquy, when Claudius’ only crime against him is to have been elected king instead of him, just as the elder Hamlet’s only crime was to have been king instead of Claudius. But, as Hamlet learns from the ghost (and as is confirmed for us by Claudius’ prayer)—Claudius murdered King Hamlet and usurped the throne. From the moment he knows this, he knows he is justified in acting, that it is in fact his duty to act.

He tries various means to rouse himself to this. One thing I agree with Girard about is the importance of mimesis. Hamlet repeatedly tries to catch enthusiasm for his cause from others. One wonders to what extent his attempt to turn Gertrude against Claudius is because her shift in attitude would strengthen his own resolve. A more obvious example is Laertes, outraged son of a slain father. Hamlet’s imitation of his grief reaches an absurd pitch at Ophelia’s grave, and shortly after he accepts Laertes’ invitation to duel. One is driven to mimic one’s enemy. Weisberg suggests that Hamlet also envies Claudius—not just because he is king, but because he can act decisively, and is a better actor than him (he plays his part better than Hamlet can play his). He maintains it is not only his resentment, but also this repressed envy, that poisons Hamlet’s mind.

Conclusions

For Girard, Hamlet represents all of us, in the midst of a long and awkward transformation from a pagan to a truly Christian moral consciousness. As Justin Murphy remarked, Hamlet is man ‘in-between’ pagan and Christian, torn in two, unable to properly avail himself of the virtues of either.

Hamlet has a strange relationship with Christianity. On the one hand, the play is steeped in it: it provides the basis for the purgatorial ghost of Hamlet’s father (or the demon masquerading as him, if we prefer to read it this way); Claudius prays, and tries—but fails—to repent; Hamlet quotes scripture in the final scene. On other hand, Hamlet seems to drift beyond it. He continually espouses or assumes a kind of nihilism. Despite having spoken with a spirit that was witnessed by others, the notion that death might not be oblivion occurs to him during his ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy only as a second thought: “To sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub” (III.i.65; italics mine). When he is dying, his words are stubbornly unreligious.

I propose that, rather than being pre-Christian, Hamlet could just as easily be seen as post-Christian. Rather than being stuck between a pagan ethos he’s abandoned and a Christian ethos he hasn’t fully embraced, we can see him as stuck between a Christian and Nietzschean view of reality, as sunk in that nihilism that marks the transition from the one to the other. As Nietzsche suggested, he sees the futility of all things—not just of revenge—and this paralyzes him. He cannot embrace his role in life, or forge himself a new one. He cannot play a part in an existence that seems ultimately meaningless. This fuels his resistance to his surroundings and himself; it fuels our sense that he resists the very play he is in.

My thesis is that it’s ressentiment—not genuine moral rejection of revenge—that leads Hamlet to this impasse. Instead of taking action against Claudius and relieving himself of his toxic feelings, he lets these feelings poison his view of the world, until he comes to see all being as pointless and evil. It’s his ressentiment that leads him to the Dionysian realization and that colors his experience of it. For the fact that everyday life in the world is dwarfed by the vast heedless force of the cosmos itself is amenable to multiple interpretations. For a Schopenhauer, it can imply the ultimate negation of life’s value; for a Nietzsche, its ultimate affirmation. Hamlet could have gone the Nietzschean route, avenging his father (or decisively taking any other stance) while affirming life as a joyful and sublime, ultimately tragic play. But, I propose, it’s his ressentiment that stops him. He wants to be embittered; his ressentiment has progressed so far that he wants to convict life itself. To embrace life and act decisively would be to let this go, to realize his own will to power and the extent to which its frustration has warped his awareness.

Hamlet seems to have an ever-growing consciousness because this is where ressentiment flows when it cannot find an outlet in action. Thoughts and words and representations. He resonates with us and seems to represent us because we (many of us) share in his affliction. The person given to intellectual pursuits has a similar propensity to escape into thoughts and words rather than asserting himself in the world. This can be okay, if we are free of envy and vengeance toward the world, or at least recognize and deal with that which we do have. But it can be disastrous if we let it spiral into ressentiment. Weisberg concludes that we love Hamlet because “of the articulation by him of every literary individual’s peculiar problems in a political world” (p. 337). I’m reminded, too, of Justin’s remark that Horatio is the real unsung hero. For Bloom, “actually we are Horatio, Hamlet’s perpetual audience, which is why Horatio is in the play” (Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, p. 13).

This has been a rather Nietzschean interpretation of Hamlet. I should say that I’m not fully wedded to all of it. I’m not sure the Dionysian insight has been rightly characterized, either by a pessimist like Schopenhauer or a vitalist like Nietzsche, or that it even represents the final truth. I’m not sure that Christianity necessarily leads to nihilism or that nihilism yields to Nietzschean life-affirmation. And I wouldn’t simply identify Christianity with ressentiment, as Nietzsche does. There has been an overtly ‘noble’ Christianity—this is, indeed, the Christianity of when and where Hamlet is set. And even the self-giving radicalism of the earliest Christians can be seen as a noble generosity flowing from a felt superabundance, as Scheler pointed out in his book on Ressentiment.

I don’t think Girard is wrong to lament endless cycles of revenge, or the violence of unjust victimization. But to lament all violence? This becomes problematic because, as is obvious from the slightest acquaintance with it, biological life is constituted by violence (I’ve explored this problem more fully elsewhere). To accept or reject violence in this maximal sense thus quickly becomes ‘to be or not to be?’

The right question therefore seems to be: what violence is justified, and when? And with this I turn to the final topic I want to explore: what should Hamlet have done?

The most obvious option is kill Claudius—strike him down in retribution for his unjust murder of Hamlet’s father. Perhaps in secret, as he almost did when Claudius was praying. But this is not the only option. Hamlet could also, potentially, depose the king and put him on trial. Upon hearing of his own father’s death, Laertes is able to summon a mob and successfully storm the palace. Hamlet, adored by the people, would presumably be even more successful. Is there no evidence of Claudius’ crime? But there must be some; the play doesn’t show us Hamlet running around, making inquiries. Did Claudius tell no one of his plot? Did no one witness it, or its preparation? If he won Gertrude before the murder, did no one know of her adultery? Even to accuse the king, before the court and the people, even without deposing him—this would be an action noble, decisive, and just. And finally, if he has no other options, he may flee Claudius’ tyranny and return with a liberating army, as Malcolm does in Macbeth.

And he may, of course, freely renounce retribution and forgive. Though strictly speaking, if Claudius never repents, Hamlet can never forgive (what is one doing if one ‘forgives’ someone who isn’t even sorry?). Nevertheless, he may renounce retribution. But what would be motivating this? It’s actually surprising, given the Christian background of the play, that Hamlet doesn’t appeal to a Christian renunciation of revenge to avoid his duty. If motivated by his unacknowledged ressentiment, this would simply be its full fruition into an inversion of values. If he acknowledged his ressentiment and felt himself fully capable of taking vengeance and still renounced it out of love for something higher—that is a different story. That too is a genuine option.

But Hamlet does none of these. Though he gets his retribution in the end, it is at the cost of his own life and six others—deaths that could have been avoided had he acted with prudent yet decisive courage, one way or another. He could have justly purged the state of the evil Claudius and reigned long as a wise and just king. Even at the revenge-renouncing extreme, he could have lived (however long), wise and just, purged of his ressentiment, blessing the world rather than cursing it.

But, on the other hand, all that would have robbed us of a marvelous tragedy. In the end when the bold young Fortinbras arrives to claim the kingdom, as the bodies are removed and the guns blast their final salute—we can perhaps hear the immortal laughter and song of the satyrs.

References

Bloom. H. (1998). Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books.

Bloom, H. (2003). Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. Riverhead Books.

Nietzsche, F. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner (1967 W. Kaufmann translation). Random House.

Shakespeare, W. The Tragedy of Hamlet, King of Denmark (1963 Signet Classic edition). New American Library.

Footnotes

* If you’re an independent writer or thinker, I’d highly recommend joining this! There are regular live discussions on the Great Books, and unlimited opportunities to exchange ideas (theoretical and practical), inspiration, or work with others.

** This is a neologism, the adjective for ressentiment, used in Weisberg’s article and by Friedenberg and Gold before him (see his footnote 16).