Hamlet’s Problem – Mind-Body Dualism and Hamlet’s Disconnection

In her seminal philosophical treatise, Meditations, Renee Descartes asserted that man is made up of two entities, mind and body, spirit and matter. The main concept underlying Descartes’ mind-body dualism is that the physical/sensory world is a poor reflection of the true spiritual world. Although Descartes is credited with the first systematic account of this relationship, first in De homine and later in his Meditations, the underlying idea of ​​mind-body dualism goes back much further. An emerging fifth-century Greek philosophy viewed the soul as clearly separate from its physical counterpart. The soul was considered the source of moral qualities such as temperance and justice (Lorenz).

Plato, like Descartes, was considered a dualist in the sense that he believed that man was composed of two uniquely separate entities, the body and the soul. To this day, dualism remains one of the recurring themes in modern philosophy, and although it predates Descartes’s Meditations by roughly forty years, it is significantly evident in Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” Shakespeare, however, takes these proto-philosophical concepts one step further. Shakespeare’s protagonist will experience a “disconnection” between these entities that will result in a stagnation of physical will and moral justice. This disconnection of mind and body will become the source of Hamlet’s internal conflict, as well as his inaction in the play.

Peter Cennamo believes that Shakespeare’s Hamlet undergoes a catharsis throughout the text. He is transformed from a grieving son to an agent of Heaven’s supreme justice, as one who exists and functions above the realm of human morality to cleanse Denmark and bring it to a state of purity and perfection. The purity to which Hamlet aspires is obtained through his acts of arrogance and is finally achieved by his death, at the moment when he sheds the “death coil”. Shakespeare draws on both Hellenistic and Cartesian dualistic philosophies, but also weaves together a strong conflict between mind and body in Hamlet. Hamlet must usurp the physical and fallible part of himself to achieve the purity, the perfection that he ultimately seeks. Thus, Hamlet, once incapable of action, morphs throughout the text into a self-proclaimed agent of Heaven’s justice.