Hamlet Versus the Logical Positivists
Part I: The Problem with Logical Positivism
In the early 20th century, a new and influential school of philosophy came into being in Europe; originating in Austria and Germany and known as Logical Positivism, it was, in fact, the leading modern philosophical school of thought for a number of decades.
The logical positivists were vastly influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—it's probably not overstating the case to say the Tractatus was their Bible—even though Ludwig W., while not unsympathetic to the positivist school, was not himself a logical positivist.
Essentially, the positivists were deeply opposed to a philosophical outlook that values metaphysics of any kind. They considered metaphysical statements to be not wrong, but rather—to use their own dismissive epithet—“meaningless”, and therefore unworthy of inclusion in the methodology of any reputable school of philosophy. Were you to read any of the major logical positivist tracts—and I strongly recommend you not do so because they are tedious, dry, humorless, and infuriatingly, stereotypically Teutonic in the worst sense of that word—you will run across truly obnoxious assertions about what "metaphysical statements" are good for; assertions of the These-are-the-types-of-speculations-best-left-to-poets-and-"artists"-and-other-intellectual-lightweights-who-lack-even-a-semblance-of-the-sort-of-rigor-of-thought-that-is-required-for-philosophy flavor. To be fair, the logical positivists didn't hate poetry; they just didn't get it—a failing they attributed to the poets and the poetry rather than to themselves. (The “I don’t understand the French language therefore the French language does not make sense” logical fallacy.) Hence, they kinda looked upon art in general as harmless but meaningless, and they encouraged all metaphysicians to accept the positivists’ generous offer of exile to Poets' Island because they—i.e., those who, like poets and literary artists, dabble in the WITCHCRAFT of metaphysics—were no longer welcome on the mainland of the United Philosophical States of Empiricism.
In one way, it makes perfect sense that this school of thought should have gotten traction when it did because scientific empiricism and mathematical rigor were all the rage in the late-19th and early-20th century and the positivists wanted philosophy to be viewed in the same vein as those disciplines—they were signaling, "Hey, guys, we can be all fact-based and logical. Ours is a scientific discipline too!" (Which, it should be noted, is just objectively wrong.) But to my mind, the fact that this school of philosophical thought managed to get any traction is weirdly inexplicable because metaphysics, which is precisely the philosophical discipline that the positivists wanted to eradicate, had been the centerpiece of western philosophy for millennia (and continues to be); and one of the things that makes philosophy not only interesting, but necessary, is that it is not science or math or anything else: It's philosophy, with all that entails, including a history (and future) of metaphysical speculation.
Trying to be more empirical and "logical" caused the positivists no end of problems because it eventually obliged them to try to purge language itself, to attempt to replace the everyday language that we all use to express ourselves with a more "precise" version that is less ambiguous and less susceptible to (heaven forfend!) inadvertent metaphysical prepositions. There are numerous drawbacks to this approach, not the least of which being its Orwellian Newspeak implication, which is problematic itself since it is essentially an attempt to make metaphysics and metaphysical expression a form of thoughtcrime, which is chilling and colossally wrong-headed. Not to mention impossible.
The positivists either never fully appreciated (or disingenuously tried to tap dance their way past) the fact that the "connection" between any physical object and the language we use to describe or denote that object is essentially the result of a metaphysical leap of faith, an epistemological fiat. There is no empirical connection between a table and the word "table" other than what we arbitrarily claim exists. We can say things about a table that can be shown to be either true or false—it has a flat top (true); it can leap tall buildings in a single bound (false)—but we can also say things that are true about the word "table" that are plainly false about tables or even any particular table; e.g., it is indisputably true that "tables" has six letters but tables don't; "tables" has two syllables, but tables don't; etc. In short, the word “table” is not the same thing as the object it purports to describe.
Thus, the positivists' stated belief in a class of “meaningful” and “non-metaphysical” statement that “is true in all possible worlds” proved to be their downfall; because it is glaringly obvious (to all except the positivists, it seems) that, due to the nature of language and the fact that things and the words we use to denote them are not one and the same thing, one can easily find statements that are true in this world but would be false in some easily-imaginable and distinctly possible alternative world: "All unmarried men are bachelors" would be false in a very possible alternative world in which the word "bachelor" has, for some reason, evolved to mean, not “a man who is unmarried”, but rather, say, “a table”. And in this world, it's simply not true—it is, in fact, demonstrably false—that “All unmarried men are bachelors [i.e., tables].” I think it could easily be proved empirically that “all unmarried men” may be many things but exactly zero of them are tables. In this world. But “All bachelors are tables” would be true in that easily imaginable alternative universe where “bachelor” has evolved in meaning, for whatever reason, to denote “table”.
Natural languages routinely evolve in the way adumbrated above. The positivists made their school-of-thought's survival dependent upon bringing about a problematic world in which natural language itself would be forbidden to do that.
One of the most wonderful features of any natural language, though, is this very ability to evolve as needed to accommodate the linguistic needs of the speakers and users of that language.
That's why Shakespeare’s Hamlet is so useful in demonstrating the paucity of the positivists’ view of language.
Part II: Doubt; or, “By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me!”
Admittedly, Part I, above, does not make it obvious what-all this has to do with Shakespeare, but I will try to make that clearer here:
In Shakespeare's Hamlet, we have an outstanding example of the marvel of ambiguity that is the English language. Whereas the logical positivists yearned to “free” natural languages from ambiguity and thereby effectively turn them into artificial languages—lacking nuance, incapable of reflecting the variety of human experience of, and interaction with, the world—Shakespeare, in contrast, celebrates this aspect of the English language. Shakespeare depicts life’s essential messiness and ambiguity, shows how difficult it can be to describe, demonstrates that it can't be reduced to simple true-or-false statements, and shows us that what can't be thus reduced is most definitely not therefore “meaningless”.
“Is Hamlet truly mad or is he faking it?” To this day, readers ask this question about Hamlet because you can answer "yes" (or “no”) to either half of that disjunct. The play provides solid textual evidence to make a convincing case either way. Doubt, the excluded middle between the binaries “yes” and “no”, “true” and “false”, is at the heart of Hamlet, just as it is in real life, which is why the theme and title of this post is: Doubt; or, “By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me!”
In Hamlet, Shakespeare uses language to reflect the essential dubiety of human epistemological pursuits. So much of the play is about what characters “know”, think they know, and don't really know at all—and it thereby becomes a rumination on what it is possible for anyone to truly know. Hamlet's mother and his uncle (the king) are trying to figure out why Hamlet is in such a funk. (One would think “dead dad” would explain it, but part of the problem in Denmark, as Hamlet himself notes, is that no one else seems particularly upset by King Hamlet-the-Elder’s sudden demise—including his widow.) Polonius claims he knows: Hamlet is lovesick over Polonius's daughter, Ophelia. Polonius’s “proof”: Hamlet gave Ophelia a letter that includes this poem:
Which, on the face of it, seems to be an overt poetic profession of love.
But is it?
Language, as I have been saying, evolves. "Doubt", today, basically means "to be skeptical of", which it also meant in Shakespeare’s day. But the word "doubt" comes from the Latin dubitare, which meant, yeah, "to doubt"; but also "to consider or suspect".
It retained that second meaning in Shakespeare's time (but has since shed it). Look again at Hamlet's poem to see an example of "doubt" being used to mean "suspect". The third line makes sense only if "doubt" there means “suspect” or “consider”:
Be skeptical of the fact that the stars are fire; be skeptical of the fact that the sun moves ... but ...
Be skeptical of truth to be a liar...?
No. It has to be Consider truth to be a liar; Suspect it is a liar. It has to be that—just to make sense.
So then, of course, the issue becomes ... which meaning of "doubt" does Hamlet intend in the fourth line? Never be skeptical I love? (“Doubt” in what we today consider its usual meaning?) Or ... never suspect I love? (I.e., I don’t love you?)
So, the poem on the whole: profession of love or profession of anti-love?
We can't possibly know, and if we think we do it's because of whatever prejudice we already have about Hamlet and his state of mind. "Hamlet must intend doubt to mean 'doubt' here because Hamlet loves Ophelia."
And how do I know Hamlet loves Ophelia?
Because Hamlet says he loves Ophelia.
Except maybe he doesn’t say that.
When Hamlet first sees the ghost of his father, it beckons him to go off with it; which Hamlet agrees to do. But his fearful buddies grab him and try to prevent him from going off with this possibly infernal apparition. Hamlet responds to their attempts to restrain him with the lines:
In Elizabethan times, “let” was another one of those odd words, like “doubt”, that mean both something and its opposite [1]—a contronym. To Shakespeare, “let” meant both “allow”, as it does today, but also “prevent”; Hamlet is using it in the latter sense.
Again, this kind of ambiguity—which would have driven the positivists around the bend—is precisely what makes Hamlet a great play. Meaning is expanded, not constricted, by this linguistic flexibility, and the linguistic pliability and ambiguity mirror the ambiguity of the world we live in. Hamlet is all about perceiving things and thinking you know what they mean only to find out...well...maybe not so much.
One such instance of this is at the heart of the play. It's the play within the play.
Hamlet reckons he can expose the king's wrongdoing by staging a reenactment of the king's crime (“the play's the thing/ Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king”), which he needs proof of because the only evidence he has early on is...well...there was this ghost, you see...and he told me.... Hamlet goes off alone with the ghost—he doesn’t allow the others to “let” him—precisely to hear the ghost’s version. But suspecting the ghost may have an agenda, may have been sent by a demon to trick him, he decides to use the play-within-the play to produce “grounds/ More relative than this” to avenge his father’s supposed murder. Hamlet is making a good-faith effort to prove the ghost’s version of the old King’s murder before acting against the new King.
So Hamlet goes to all this trouble of re-staging the king's alleged crime to “prove” the king's guilt by getting the king to react in a way that would reveal his culpability. But he manages to do this in such a way that the play-within-the-play is different enough from the real world (of the play Hamlet) that it proves nothing, even though Hamlet deludes himself into thinking it proves the king guilty beyond a doubt. Look what Hamlet does with the play-within-the-play. He partially re-writes the drama that the players are going to perform ("Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines") so that it mirrors the circumstances of his father's murder. If the king reacts to this Denmark's Most Wanted reenactment, it could only mean one thing, right? That the king has a guilty conscience.
Well, uh, not so fast. Because as the play-within-the-play is unfolding, what does Hamlet say about the play's evil murderer as he enters the stage?
This is one Lucianus, nephew to the king
Nephew to the king. Claudius, the current king, is Hamlet's father's brother. Hamlet wants the play-within-the-play to pull double duty, as both reenactment of his father's murder (as alleged by the ghost) and as threat to Claudius.
Okay. So when the king reacts—and he does react—what is he reacting to? The reenactment of his crime? Or the clearly implied threat to his person? Thanks to Hamlet's muddying of the water, there is no way to tell. We in the audience know what Claudius is reacting to (it is, indeed, the reenactment of his regicide/fratricide), but that is only because we are privy to his thoughts—to information that Hamlet does not have. My point isn't that Claudius didn't kill Hamlet Senior (he did); it's that Hamlet hasn't actually proved what he thinks he has with the play-within-the-play, and he remains unaware of this fact.
Think about it: Hamlet is walking around, brooding, clad in black like a Danish Goth, angry not only because his uncle "hath kill'd my king and whored my mother" but also because he's not king since Claudius "Popp'd in between the election and my hopes". (The Danish throne was an elected office, for some reason.) And now all of a sudden he wants his uncle to watch this play ... in which a king is murdered by his nephew.
And it gets kinda weird here because Hamlet specifically asks his buddy, Horatio, to back him up on his interpretation of what went down, which is pretty much Horatio's whole role in this play—verifier of Hamlet's views, because no one else, including Hamlet's mother, seems particularly upset at the death of Hamlet's dad. (Hamlet is like: “Is it me, Horatio? Or should people hereabouts be a bit more upset about this?” Horatio reassures Hamlet, and, through him, us, the audience, that it’s not Hamlet.)
But how does Horatio react?
HAMLET
O good Horatio, I'll take the ghost's word for a thousand pound. Didst
perceive?
HORATIO
Very well, my lord.
HAMLET
Upon the talk of the poisoning?
HORATIO
I did very well note him.
So: Didja catch that?
Yep.
When he talked about killing him?
Yeah. I saw that.
And that's it. Horatio doesn’t say, "Yeah, dude, you're sooo right! I mean, if that wasn't an admission of guilt then I don't know my Rosencrantz from my Guildenstern!"
None of that. Just, "Yeah. I saw it."
Hamlet thinks he’s proved something, established a foundational truth. But he hasn’t.
And Hamlet is just full of ambiguities like that. But aren't they what make the play more rather than less meaningful? Hamlet, after all, may be the most philosophical play in Shakespeare's oeuvre (after King Lear, of course). It is a drama, it’s theatre, but it also contains much that is genuinely philosophical.
Maybe not to the logical positivists...but there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy!
Selected Works
There are numerous adaptations of Shakespeare’s Hamlet available at the library on DVD and Blu-ray and at least four versions available for download on hoopla
No Fear Shakespeare: Hamlet presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, with marginal notes and explanations and full descriptions of each character.
– by Tom G. at Hopewell
[1] For a modern equivalent, consider the verb “sanction”, which can mean “punish” or “endorse”. Thus, the exact meaning of the sentence: “The President sanctioned the actions of the group in question” can be correctly understood only in a more complete context.
This is marvelous, top to bottom. Thanks.
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