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The Theatre, for many Londoners, was the place for catharsis, a place where the beautiful and ugly, the ridiculous and the sublime could be comfortably juxtaposed. The transcendental spectacles “on show” possessed an enveloping hypnotic effect that also demanded the judgement of a Shakespearean “universal voice” which arose out of the harmony of the powers of the imagination and the understanding. Shakespeares aesthetic ideas were thus composed of a multiplicity of representations that could not be represented conceptually, yet formed an independent self sufficient whole. Metaphors and transcendental analogies were embedded in the poetic rhetorically loaded language which the characters used to express their relation to the realm of the transcendental.
Wittgensteins notion of the logical form of language which “shows” its relation to the metaphysical or what cannot be said, explains the access we have when we are contemplating the world sub specie aeterni, as an aspect of the infinite. Psuché is the key basic term which is expressed in the aesthetic life, the ethical life, the religious life, and the political life, all of which contain elements that science cannot capture with its reductionist principles. To continue to use Wittgensteinian terms, the various language-games of the plays show their “arché” (principles) and assist in the taks of answering the Kantian aporetic question, “What is man?”
The World, for Shakespeare was best represented on the stage and we rational animals capable of discourse are characterised as actors whose life stages fell into seven phases taking us from infancy to the whining schoolboy, the mournful lover, the abrasive soldier, the judicious justice to old age in pantaloons and spectacles to end finally in a second childhood staring into the abyss of oblivion. This life is but a brief candle whose light signifies nothing: a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury. Even for those destined to experience something significant, there is the limitation that nothing can be conceptually said about the meaning of such experience: this can only be shown.
The Shakespearean soliloquy is often the locus of “what cannot be said”, filled with forebodings, weighty judgements and a cosmopolitan view of the world that thrilled the audiences of “The Globe”. Shakespeare must have been among the poets who, Freud claimed, discovered the power of the unconscious mind whilst at the same time acknowledging the sturdy stable ego of the Ancient Greeks who sought to judge even their own gods respectfully. Balance of mind was a virtue (areté) that brought them into the realm of the Good, and allowed an experience of eudaimonia (the good-spirited flourishing life). Wittgenstein characterised such a condition in the following terms.
“Ethics is the condition of the world like logic. Ethics and Aesthetics are one.”(Tractatus 5.621).
In this scenario the will enters the world that is “already there” and as a consequence allows us to believe in God (Notebooks, 8.7.16). Because the human will possesses the capacity to transcend the facts of the world, it is in these acts of will that Shakespeares Characters communicate the meaning of the intended aesthetic ideas, thus situating them in relation to the realm of the transcendental/metaphysical. Kant had claimed, prior to Wittgenstein, that the soul was the animating principle that possessed the power to present aesthetic ideas in a multiplicity of representations. Shakespeares poetic use of language expresses the spirit of the aesthetic idea. Experiencing the Sublime is also an intended effect of this use of language partly because it does not lie in the power of the imagination to capture the essence or the meaning of transcendence. Kant illustrates this issue of the significance of the sublime by referring to an aesthetic inscription upon a statue located in the Temple of Isis:
” I am all that is, and that was, and that shall be, and no mortal hath raised the veil before my face.”
Great works of Art such as Michelangelos “Times of the Day” express an important aspect of the world that we are born into and that has come down to us from the oracles of Ancient Greece:
“Everything created by humans is destined for ruin and destruction.”
The four sculpted nude figures stand guarding at the entrance to the Tomb of the Medici’s, manifest four forms of mourning/melancholia and invoke the power of the Freudian death instinct, Thanatos, over man, who is striving with all the life in his body for eudaimonia. These nudes are clearly also involved in the work of knowing oneself, and given that man is a rational animal capable of discourse part of this work will involve a will working at the boundary of the world, and part will involve the attempt to “show” in discourse the relation man has to the sublime/sacred. Freud’s “talking cure” is obviously important work for the ego that is having difficulty dealing with the power of the instincts, the external world, and ones relation to ones fellow man.
An analysis of the character of Hamlet is undertaken in the context of hylomorphic and critical Philosophy, and the suggestion is that he is located at Shakespeares third stage of life at the beginning of the play, namely the lover-stage. For this reason, it is argued, too much should not be made of his youthful hesitations given the fact that he is a Prince who has lost his father in a dreadful crime against the state. To use Freudian terms, Hamlets Ego and Superego were in the process of forming and it is important to recall here that for both Plato and Aristotle the lessons from their Ethical and Political lectures were difficult for students under the age of 30 years old.
The Freudian defence mechanism of Sublimation is of course related to the idea of the Sublime, but it is also an important part of the artistic process for artists like Shakespeare who had lost both a father and a son around the time of writing Hamlet. Michelangelo’s work of sublimation is “shown” in the faces of the four nudes guarding the Tomb of the Medicis.
Adrian Stokes, a Kleinian art-critic, believes that aesthetic form (arché) has two important aspects, firstly a state resembling passionate mania seeking to envelop via a hypnotic effect on the imagination and secondly, a measured perception of a multiplicity of representations that form an independent self-sufficient entity.
Sublimation is obviously an important element in the civilisation- building process if humanity is to avoid the ruin and destruction prophesied by the oracles. Aggression and excess desire need to be “sublimated” and displaced. Both Shakespeare and Michelangelo stood at the gateway to the modern world which would produce the Enlightenment and Kantian Critical Philosophy, but it would also give support to the dualism of Descartes and the materialism of Hobbes, who, in their turn, sought to undermine the spirit of Ancient Greek Philosophy in the name of a “new world for new men”. The Phronimos, the great souled man searching for the examined life was displaced as the new hero by the older model of the soldier, Achilles. The modern world sought a more primitive form of areté which questioned the rationality of man.
The most insightful characterisation of the character of Hamlet comes from Northrop Frye who claimed:
“The stock remedy for the claustrophobia of consciousness is action, even though human action is so often destructive or murderous. But consciousness is also some kind of death-principle, a withdrawing from action that kills action itself, before action can get around to killing something else. Hamlet himself often comments upon his own inaction in these terms often with a kind of half-realised sense that the Ghost cannot stimulate any form of vitality, however destructive in the living world, but can only draw everything it touches down with itself into the shades below.” (Shakespeare, Page 99)
This description also foreshadows our future concerns with this elusive ghost of Consciousness that we seek hither and thither. Hamlets death, then, sufficed to meet Aristotelian criteria for a tragic work, allowing a catharsis to occur and thereby ensuring the emergence of a feeling of justice for all those engaged seriously in the work of knowing themselves. This is part of Shakespeares aesthetic idea harmonising the powers of the imagination, the understanding, and reason. What we are witnessing in this play is the operation of Heideggers process of aletheia (unconcealment), in which the artist sets the truth of beings to work in the course of ” showing” the aesthetic idea embedded in a multiplicity of representations.
Shakespeares work enriches us by introducing us to the worlds of Emperors, Kings, Queens, Princes, University students, soldiers, merchants, lovers, lawyers and murderers in a manifold of Cosmopolitan settings: Florence, Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, Venice, Verona, Spain, France, Denmark, Cyprus, Austria, the Balkans, London, England, Scotland, Egypt etc. What we learn is that wherever we travel, eudaimonia is an extremely difficult state to achieve, requiring both a knowledge of a complex world and the knowledge of oneself, that most difficult form of practical and theoretical wisdom.