Karl Jaspers : Hamlet and the Problem of Truth

Delacroix - Self Portrait As Hamlet (1821)

Karl Jaspers

Tragedy is not enough

The Problem of Truth

Hamlet

An unprovable crime has been committed. The king of Denmark has been murdered by his brother, who has then taken the throne himself and married the slain man's wife. A ghost has revealed this to Hamlet, the murdered king's son, alone, without any witnesses. No one except the criminal himself - the new king - knows of the crime. In the present state of Denmark no one told of the murder would believe it had occurred. The ghost, because he is a ghost, cannot be a conclusive witness for Hamlet. The crime itself cannot be proved, though Hamlet senses it, almost as if he knew. Hamlet's life is now dedicated to a single task: to prove the unprovable, and, after proof, to act.

The whole play is the drama of Hamlet's search for truth. But truth is not only the answer to the bare question of the facts of the case. It is more. The state of the entire world is such that this crime could take place, that it could remain undetected, that it still eludes clarification. The moment that Hamlet realizes his task, he also knows that:

The time is out of joint. 0 cursed spite

That ever I was born to set it right!

Any man in Hamlet's place, knowing what no one knows and yet not knowing it for sure, sees all the world in a new and different light. He keeps to himself what he cannot

communicate. Every human being, every situation, every ordinance stands revealed as in itself untrue through its resistance to the search, its subservience to a conspiracy against the truth. There is a flaw in everything. Even the best-intentioned among the good fail in their own way (Ophelia, Laertes). "To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand."

Hamlet's knowledge and his desire for knowledge set him apart from the world. In it, he cannot be of it. He acts the part of a madman. In this counterfeit world, madness is the mask which allows him not to lie about his real feelings, not to feign respect where he feels none. He can speak the truth through irony. Whatever he say, true or untrue - equivocal for all - he can cover with the mask of madness. He chooses madness as his proper role because truth admits of no other.

The instant Hamlet realizes that he is marked as an exception and is fated to exclusion, he is shocked into full recognition of what is happening to him. He addresses his friends as if he were taking leave of all possible sheltered human existence - yet at the same time he conceals from them that this is his farewell:

I hold it fit that we shake hands and part;

You, as your business and desire shall point you,

For every man hath business and desire,

Such as it is; and for my own poor part,

Look you, I'll go pray.

But the mask assumed is only a disguise in daily life. Hamlet must assume an actual role, that of the seeker for truth in a world radically untrue, the role of avenger of the crime committed. This role cannot be carried through without equivocation, impurity, distortion. Hamlet must take upon himself the agony of the tension between his nature and the role assigned him, until he can no longer see himself as he is but must reject himself as someone

warped and twisted. This alone explains his judgments on himself.

Many interpreters have pictured Hamlet as a man unable to make up his mind, nervous, hesitating, and ever late - an inactive dreamer. Many self-accusations seem to confirm such an opinion:

Yet I,

A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,

Like John-a-dreams ...

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action . . .

How all occasions do inform against me

And spur my dull revenge! . . .

. . . or some craven scruple

Of thinking too precisely on th' event -

A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom

And ever three parts coward, - I do not know

Why yet I live to say "This thing's to do,"

Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means

To do't.

Indeed, Hamlet must appear inactive; he continually finds a reason for not acting. And he strikes himself that way. He speaks every one of the words above in order to drive himself to action. But that precisely is the basic characteristic of the tragedy. Hamlet is always in action; he is forever seeking the goal of truth and the conduct that will correspond to it. His reasons for hesitating are entirely and thoroughly justified if measured by the yardstick of what is actually true. It is the situation forced upon him by fate that makes him appear a weakling paralyzed by reflection. Hamlet is in no sense cowardly or irresolute. Rather, the opposite manifests itself again and again:

I do not set my life at a pin's fee . . .

He risks his life with temerity wherever he makes his appearance. He has presence of mind and instantly hits upon the proper decisions (for example, in dealing with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). He is superior to all; he is bold, and able to fight with his sword as well as with

his wit. It is not his character that paralyzes him. Only the predicament of a man who knows - with a sovereign command of penetrating vision - yet does not know, makes him linger.

When for an instant his temper sweeps him away in a supreme outburst of passion and he kills Polonius, thinking him the king, he still is in no sense at one with his own violence, not even if the king had been his victim. For the meaning of his task requires not merely that the king should be killed by some avenger; the real task is for someone to demonstrate convincingly just what this king has done. Compared with the average so-called man of determination who rushes into action with blind impulsiveness, Hamlet indeed does not act, at any rate not with unthinking immediacy. He is, as it were, caught up in his knowledge, and in the knowledge of his ignorance.

On the other hand, those who have nothing but determination in their forceful assurance, their unthinking obedience, their. unquestioning brutality - they are in reality caught up in the narrowness of their illusions. Only a dull-witted enthusiasm for that drastic and immediate resort to action which characterizes men passively subservient to their impulses could accuse Hamlet of inactivity. The opposite is true. The instant he first saw his task clearly, Hamlet said:

My fate cries out

And makes each petty artery in this body

As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve.

This commitment he kept unto the very last, right through his quick turns of decision in the fatal duel with Laertes. Every shade of the play reveals Hamlet's tension between clearest vision and active commitment in a single movement toward his goal. It is interrupted only once, by the stabing of Polonius, a blind deed of impulse, not one of clear vision. Action and mask, however, do not in themselves constitute the whole truth. This truth is realized only as deed and mask are revealed to Hamlet's contemporaries, at whom his will is aimed - those who must make this truth part of their knowledge. This is confirmed in Hamlet's last words to Horatio, who wants to die with him:

O good Horatio, what a wounded name,

Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind mel

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,

Absent thee from felicity awhile,

And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,

To tell my story.

Hamlet's fate is a riddle to which there is no answer. It is the story of a man whose will to truth is without limit; but it cannot point out the just, the good, and the true as such. The drama ends in silence. And yet some fixed points stand out. They are not in themselves the whole truth, but Hamlet endorses them in the course of his destiny; they are guideposts not for himself but, through him, for others. His affirmation of this world manifests itself as his affirmation of the men who belong to him in his tragedy, and through their contrast they once more raise his exceptional character and fate to almost unscalable heights.

Horatio is Hamlet's only friend, a man truthful and loyal, able to endure, ready to die, one whom Hamlet can address in these words:

Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice,

And could of men distinguish, her election

Hath sealed thee for herself. For thou hast been

As one, in suff'ring all, that suffers nothing;

A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards

Hast ta'en with equal thanks; and blest are those

Whose blood and judgment are so well commingled

That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger

To sound what stop she please. Give me that man

That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him

In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart,

As I do thee. Something too much of this!

Horatio is related to Hamlet in nature and character. But task and destiny lead Hamlet on the lonely path of a fundamental experience that he can share with no one. Fortinbras is a man who lives and acts unquestioningly under the simple illusion of this world's reality. He acts without anxiety. He stresses honor. After Hamlet's death he simply states:

For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune.

I have some rights of memory in this kingdom,

Which now to claim my vantage doth invite me.

He at once makes use of what has happened, but he respects with quiet shock the fate of the dead prince. In ordering the highest honors to be paid him, Fortinbras once more confirms Hamlet's quality, as it would have shown itself to the world from Denmark's throne:

For he was likely, had he been put on,

To have prov'd most royally.

Fortinbras, that ignorant realist unaware of his ignorance, can live. His strength is of the finite kind, limited to the natural purposes of his position, unaware of the hopelessness of a merely finite existence. As for this world's finite purposes, Fortinbras enjoys the confidence

of Hamlet, the clear-sighted:

"He has my dying voice."

Still, despite Fortinbras's nobility, his life dedicatee only to honor is limited and false. This was expressed earlier when Hamlet compared himself with Fortinbras:

Rightly to be great

Is not to stir without great argument,

But greatly to find quarrel in a straw

When honour's at the stake . .

. . . while to my shame I see

The imminent death of twenty thousand men

That for a phantasy and trick of fame

Go to their graves like beds . . .

Hamlet can be neither Horatio nor Fortinbras. Does he himself lack all possibility of fulfillment ? Hamlet's quest for truth with the terror of its final resolution seems to allow him no self-realization except in a negative sense. The poet only once allows Hamlet to conceive, if but for a moment, of a chance for self-realization. That is when, full of confidence, he writes to Ophelia:

Doubt thou the stars are fire;

Doubt that the sun doth move;

Doubt truth to be a liar;

But never doubt Iove.

By an absolute standard Hamlet experiences inside himself something unshakable, something that is more than truth. For even truth can be deceptive, whatever its appearance:

that is the theme of this tragedy. But Ophelia fails him. Hamlet's one chance vanishes in this most dreadful of his soul's disruptions.

Hamlet's way to truth presents no salvation. There is an area of ignorance, a constant awareness of limits, surrounding his fate. And beyond the limits is there nothingness ? That these limits do not border upon nothingness is quietly suggested throughout the play, in hints which seem to carry everything.

Hamlet refuses to give in to superstition - he refuses not only from clarity of knowledge, but also from confidence in something unspecified yet all-encompassing:

We defy augury; there's a special providence in the fall

of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come .... The

readiness is all. Since no man knows aught of what he

leaves, what is't to leave betimes?

And with an even more deliberate view toward concrete action:

. . . let us know,

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well

When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us

There's a divinity that shapes our ends,

Rough-hew them how we will . . .

The ways in which Hamlet speaks of his ignorance do

not point to nothingness but to transcendence:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,

Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

The attitude of ignorance seems charged with incomprehensible meaning when the ghost, appearing to Hamlet, refuses to speak further:

But this eternal blazon must not be

To ears of flesh and blood.

And, in Hamlet's last words,

"The rest is silence."

After all this restraint and indirection, Horatio sets the seal on the story with his moving words to his dead friend:

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince,

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest !

To none other, perhaps, of his dying heroes has Shakespeare given such a farewell. To be sure, when compared with such recurrent types as the Stoic sage, the Christian saint, and the Indian hermit, Hamlet does not provide the model for any widely followed form of life. But he remains unique as the truly noble man, unwavering in his will to truth and to sublime humanity. He enters wholly into this world; he does not withdraw from it, but finds the world

excluding him. He is unique in his utter self-abandonment to fate, in his heroism without pathos.

It is the predicament of man which achieves expression in the parables of the play Hamlet. Can truth be found ? Is it possible to live with truth ? The condition of man supplies an answer to this question: All life-force stems from blindness. It grows from imagined knowledge, in myth taken for faith, and in the substitute myths; in unquestioning acceptance, and in mind-narrowing untruths. Within the human predicament the quest for truth presents an impossible task.

If totally manifest, truth paralyzes - unless man finds a way, as Hamlet does, through desperate heroism and uncorrupted vision, in the restless movement of a shaken soul. Reflective thought - rational consciousness - enfeebles man, unless the unbroken drive of a personality gathers even more strength in the clear light of knowledge.

But such a drive consumes itself without concrete fulfillment, leaving an impression of greatness, superhuman - not inhuman - in its failure. This is also confirmed from other points of view. Thus Nietzsche understood that man can never fully accept truth, that to err is necessary - that is, he must err in regard to the fundamental truths which in every case are the premises of his existence. Or again, Hölderlin has Empedocles offend the gods by trying to reveal the whole, truth to the people. It is forever the same question: Must man die of truth ? Does truth spell death ?

The tragedy of Hamlet represents man's knowledge trembling at the edge of destruction. There is in it no warning, no moralizing, only a man's knowledge of fundamental reality in his awareness of his ignorance and in his will to truth, whereby his life is shattered :

"The rest is silence."

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