Hamlet, Bullshit, and Wittgenstein

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean different things.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

In Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness (2017), Rhodri Lewis had this to say of William Shakespeare’s most discussed character: “He is not concerned with what he says, but the way in which what he says makes him seem to himself and others.” Lewis also describes him as being “mired in bullshit, about himself and the world around him”.

Lewis’s argument is that Shakespeare consciously and designedly, sometime around 1599, created the character of Hamlet as a means of attacking the core of what we have come to call humanist moral philosophy. As an Elizabethan grammar school boy, Shakespeare would have had it impressed upon him, via Cicero, that to know one’s role within the public sphere was concomitant with knowing how to behave with honour and seemliness. Such behaviour enabled individuals to work in tandem with the aim of a societal greater good. Lewis maintains that by the time Shakespeare had written Hamlet, he had come to regard such a philosophy as inadequate, not only as a means of expressing the purpose, but also the experience of human existence.

The “vision of darkness” that Lewis refers to is the gaping hole that he believes Shakespeare saw as opening up between “two moral and cultural worldviews”—a dying sixteenth-century notion emanating from the ancients on one side of the precipice, and on the other, one more centred on investigations of the individual self.

Creating the Hamlet character required a rethink of what it is to be human. Lewis supposes that Shakespeare is telling us, through Hamlet, that in an investigation of human character, truth, falsehood and bullshit (since lying and bullshit, as we shall see, are fundamentally different) would by necessity, need to co-exist.

When Lewis uses the word bullshit, he does so with explicit reference to the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt. In his best-selling book On Bullshit (2005), Frankfurt emphasises that we must acknowledge from the outset that bullshit exists, that there is a lot of it and that we all contribute to it. Furthermore, the fact that it is so prevalent means, in his view, that we have been prone to take its existence for granted and that this has led to an unclear understanding of its exact nature.

To illustrate his thoughts, Frankfurt uses an anecdote involving the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. While at Cambridge University in the 1930s, Wittgenstein had visited Fania Pascal, the wife of the German literature scholar Roy Pascal. Recovering from a tonsillectomy, and asked by Wittgenstein about her progress, she remarked that she felt “just like a dog that has been run over”. Wittgenstein winced at this since, as he explained, she could have no idea of how a dog that had just been run over would feel. Wittgenstein was not accusing Pascal of falsehood, but rather, and perhaps more importantly, of being misrepresentative. As Frankfurt puts it: “The trouble with her statement is that it purports to convey something more than simply that she feels bad. Her characterisation of her feeling is too specific; it is excessively particular.”

Unconnected to a concern with the truth and emanating as it does from a desire to somehow be more interesting than the facts, her fault—in these terms—lies not so much in not getting her description right—my throat hurts and I feel poorly—but that she has endeavoured to go beyond the facts. This is what Frankfurt considers to be “the essence of bullshit”, “not that it is false but that it is phony”, and is as a consequence “without concern for the truth”. In other words, bullshitting is not lying:

The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth.

Or, as Oscar Wilde claimed in The Decay of Lying (1891), lying demands “the most careful study”. The bullshitter, Frankfurt suggests, has much more freedom: “His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point or intersecting it.” This freedom does not necessarily make the task of bull­shitting any easier:

But the mode of creativity upon which it relies is less analytical and less deliberative than that which is mobilised by lying. It is more expansive and independent, with more spacious opportunities for improvisation, colour, and imaginative play. This is less a matter of craft than art. Hence the familiar notion of the “bullshit artist”.

T.S. Eliot was uncomfortable with Hamlet, notably describing the play in 1919 as being not only “puzz­ling and disquieting as is none of the others” but also “dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible because it is in excess of the facts as they appear”.

What might Wittgenstein have made of this?

Though he had been familiar with Shakespeare’s plays since early childhood, and in adult life often attended performances of them, we know of only seven remarks he made pertaining to Shakespeare. None were intended for publication and nor were they accompanied by specific references to text or quotations. Indeed, no individual work is ever mentioned. For all of that, his comments, sparse as they are, resonate with anybody who has waded through the vastness of Shakespearean criticism and sometimes concluded that the exercise has often revealed more about the critics themselves than Shakespeare. Wittgenstein makes two important observations: first, that Shakespeare plays to his own rules, and second that the works, when viewed collectively, can only be described as something akin to a natural phenomenon. In the first place:

It is not as though S. portrayed types of people well and were in that respect telling the truth. He is not true to life. But he has such a skilled hand & such an individual brush stroke, that each of his characters looks significant, worth looking at.

And second, and more effusively:

Shakespeare & the dream. A dream is quite false, absurd, cobbled together from different sources, & yet completely true: it makes, in its unique assemblage, a distinct impression … If Shakespeare is as great as he is said to be, then it must be possible to say of him: it’s all false, it makes no sense—& yet it’s all true according to its own laws. One could also say: if Shakespeare is great, he can only be so in the entire corpus of his dramas, which create their own language and their own world. For he is entirely unrealistic (like a dream).

If it is the case, as William Hazlitt famously wrote in 1817, that it is “we who are Hamlet” then Wittgenstein himself was perhaps Hamlet in extremis. Biographers tell of an individual held captive by philosophical dilemmas that Wittgenstein described as “painful contradictions”. These rendered him unable to cope with everyday life until he had arrived at what he felt were satisfactory solutions to the thoughts perplexing him. Marjorie Perloff describes Wittgenstein as “the ultimate … outsider, the changeling who never stops reinventing himself”. His one-time mentor Bertrand Russell spoke to Ottoline Morrell of a young man who was “terribly persistent, hardly lets one get a word in, and is generally considered a bore”. And again, “His disposition is that of the artist, intuitive and moody.” He was “always gloomy, pacing up and down, waking out of a dream when one speaks to him”.

In 1913, while attempting to dissuade Wittgenstein from a plan to live in isolation in Norway for two years, Russell’s concerns were scoffed at with a Hamlet-like contrariness. Russell wrote: “I said it would be dark, & he said he hated daylight. I said it would be lonely, & he said he prostituted his mind talking to intelligent people. I said he was mad & he said God preserve him from sanity. (God certainly will.)”

Once in Norway, he told Russell: “My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed.” Later, while in service during the Great War, he asks: “Might it not be better to perish unhappily in this hopeless struggle against the external world? But such a life is senseless. But why not leave a senseless life? Is it unworthy?” And further deliberates: “When my conscience upsets my equilibrium, then I am not in agreement with Something. But what is this? Is it the world? Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.”

Having survived the war, Wittgenstein confessed to a friend, the architect Paul Engelmann:

In fact I am in a state of mind that is terrible to me. I have been through it several times before: it is the state of not being able to get over a particular fact. It is a pitiable state, I know. But there is only one remedy that I can see, and that is of course to come to terms with that fact. But this is just like what happens when a man who can’t swim has fallen into the water and flails about with his hands and feet and feels that he cannot keep his head above water. That is the position I am in now. I know that to kill oneself is always a dirty thing to do. Surely one cannot will one’s own destruction, and anybody who has visualised what is in practice involved in the act of suicide knows that suicide is always a rushing of one’s own defences. But nothing is worse than to be forced to take oneself by surprise. Of course it boils down to the fact that I have no faith!

Much later, in his 1930 Cambridge University lectures, he observed: “we get to the boundary of language, which stops us from asking further questions. We don’t get to the bottom of things, but reach a point where we can go no further, where we cannot ask further questions.” And a persistent theme throughout his 1936 lectures was the defence of what we might call “an ordinary view of the world”, that is, a perception of the world unhampered by philosophical doubts:

We have the feeling that the ordinary man … does not really understand what he is talking about. I see something queer about perception and he talks about it as if it were not queer at all. Should we say he knows what he is talking about or not? You can say both. Suppose people are playing chess. I see queer problems when I look into the rules and scrutinise them. But Smith and Brown play chess with no difficulty. Do they understand the game? Well, they play it.

Towards the end of his life, Hamlet concludes that he has spent too much time thinking about his dilemma and that he needs now to be more like Wittgenstein’s Smith and Brown.

In 1945, six years before his own death, in a letter to a fellow philosopher, Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein expressed similar sentiments to those—if Rhodri Lewis is right—that were alluded to by Shakespeare some 350 years earlier:

You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about “certainty”, “probability”, “perception”, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people’s lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s most important.

A difficult task indeed. No bullshit.

Barry Gillard lives in Geelong.