"Damnéd Custom . . . Habits Devil": Shakespeare's Hamlet, Anti-Dualism, and the Early Modern Philosophy of Mind
Paul A. Cefalu
*While recent decades have shown remarkable advances in the philosophy of mind and our understanding of consciousness, most contributions coming from the analytic philosophical tradition have left the historical origins and development of the mind/body problem untended, taking for granted that the founding moment of the modern mind/body problem is that of Cartesian dualism. When theorists do make brief forays into pre-Cartesian, early modern mind/body theories, these explorations reveal just how little has been systematically said on the subject of early modern philosophical psychology. For instance, Hilary Putnam draws on C. S. Lewis's dated study of medieval and Renaissance literature, The Discarded Image (1964), to describe the difference between late medieval and mid-seventeenth-century theories of the mind/body relationship. Putnam writes, "In the earlier way of thinking, the mind was thought of as acting on the 'spirit' which in turn acted on 'matter' and spirit was not thought of as totally immaterial. 'Spirit' was just the in-between sort of stuff that the medieval philosophers' tendency to introduce in-betweens between any two adjacent terms in the series of kinds of being naturally led them to postulate."
1I will return to Putnam's account of the mind/matter problem later in this paper. What Putnam's reference to Lewis's cursory treatment of the pre-Cartesian theory of pneuma shows is simply the lack of any thorough account of the post-medieval, pre-Cartesian philosophy of mind. In discussions of the history of philosophical psychology, most philosophers leap from Aristotle's hylomorphic theory of the soul to seventeenth-century dualism, sometimes interposing a brief account of the Thomistic or Scotian theory of the soul and its relations to Cartesianism.
2 The editors of the Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Mind acknowledge the importance and neglect of any sustained account of the Renaissance precursors to the mind/body problem when they suggest, after a brief comment on the relevance to modern dualism of Pietro Pomponazzi's De immortalitate animae, that Cartesianism had its [End Page 399] progenitors both in the Platonic-Augustinian tradition and in Renaissance naturalism, and that "either way it emerges out of a rich and complex past, the study of which promises to yield historical and philosophical insights."
3 The one rigorous account we do have of Renaissance philosophical psychology is Richard Popkin's important work on skepticism, although Popkin is predominantly interested in the skeptical forerunners of Cartesianism and in a vibrant strain of early modern mitigated skepticism resembling modern-day pragmatism.
4In the following pages I do not attempt to offer a systematic account of Renaissance philosophical psychology. Rather I look briefly at some modern and pre-modern theories of the mind--those of Gilbert Ryle, Putnam, Augustine, Pomponazzi, and Jeremy Taylor--in order to suggest first that Renaissance philosophy and theology held theories of the mind that resemble modern-day anti-dualistic accounts of behaviorism and functionalism, and second that Shakespeare's Hamlet is implicated in this behaviorist-functionalist tradition rather than in the innatist tradition into which it has usually been placed. I argue that part of the reason that Hamlet's critics have assumed that Hamlet is preoccupied with inspecting the contents of his private self is that they have mistaken the obsession shown by Hamlet's peers in the play to "pluck out" Hamlet's "mystery" for what is usually described as Hamlet's own inner gaze.
5 Critics have conflated the third-person statements about Hamlet's mental states with Hamlet's first-person reports, reports which aim to understand the role of behavior, habit, and custom in knowing and acting, rather than to explore any Cartesian theater of the mind. I will suggest that for most of the play Hamlet is a radical Rylean behaviorist, inasmuch as he believes mental phenomena and predicates gain meaning only when they are identified in a one-to-one relationship with behavioral predicates, while at least some of the other characters in the play are functionalists, inasmuch as they associate mental events with innumerable subserving physical states and behavioral events.
What shapes Hamlet's behaviorism is the early modern assimilation of the Augustinian-Protestant theory of the ineradicability of vicious habits (consuetudines), which in its extreme English Calvinist strains mutated into a holistic theory of sin, according to which an inveterate evil habit was considered a sin unto itself, superadded to the individual sins which comprised the offending habit. Hamlet's understanding of the theological construal of habit helps to explain both his irresolution (his preoccupation with habits and patterns of sin rather than discrete sins allows him to submerge the murder of his father in his mind at key moments) and his sense that personal identity or subjective states are [End Page 400] identical with customary behavioral dispositions. Because he reifies and objectifies habits, Hamlet imagines persons to be constituted by behavior, custom, and dispositional states all the way down, so that they are unendowed with what Derek Parfit would describe as any further facts to their psychological identity, such as disembodied minds or thoughts.
6In the final section of the paper, drawing on a few suggestive passages in the play, I argue that although the term is infelicitous, a functionalist account of early modern subjectivity can provide a more adequate and less anachronistic mind/matter theory than recent accounts of inwardness in the Renaissance. Functionalism draws attention away from the geography and privacy of the mind, away from conceptions of the mind as an inner recess or infallible secret place, and toward the mediating role the mind plays in the teleological and biological economy of the individual. Because functionalism focuses attention on the roles minds play, rather than on where minds are in relation to bodies, brains, or the external world, it conceives of minds on the analogy of simple machines and mechanisms rather than inner substances or brain states. Minds are often described as flexible software programs rather than hardware or underlying substrates. Recent work has suggested that Aristotle's artifact model of the soul/body relation is conceived along functionalist lines to the extent that form and matter are contingently related. Toward the end of the paper, after a brief look at Pomponazzi's theory of the mind, I suggest that a functionalist understanding of early modern subjectivity, rather than a substantialist theory of personhood on the one hand or a post-modernist fragmented theory of subjectivity on the other, can help illuminate some of the aporias that have stalemated recent discussions of early modern philosophical psychology.
7In an exemplary innatist reading of Hamlet, A. P. Rossiter describes Hamlet as "the first modern man," and argues that the most important Renaissance philosophy connected with Hamlet "was the skepticism of Montaigne . . . which set men's minds to the discovery of what in this mutable world was enduring and stable, and whose method led to Descartes, whose method of doubt is the foundation of all our modern scientific theories about man."
8 Rossiter is not entirely clear on the relevance of Montaigne and Descartes to the play, but he sounds loosely Cartesian-dualist when he suggests that the play expresses a conflict between "mind-sense (the sense of our own being, in the mind) and the self-sense of ourselves as agents in a world of things outside the mind," and that the play's "dilemma is concerned with the mind's experiences of itself as a mind, supposed unitary, in contact with its experiences of a world perhaps also unitary, but certainly assumed to be other than the [End Page 401] mind experiencing it."
9 He sounds even more dualistic when he suggests that Hamlet is a "thing of mind and mechanism."
10Recent criticism has supported Rossiter's claims. Regarding Hamlet's letter to Ophelia, William Kerrigan writes, "The author of the letter . . . wants above all to be believed. He really loves; his oath can be trusted. The letter seeks to fuse these truths, but in laying doubts to rest Hamlet simultaneously, like Descartes with his cogito, raises them."
11 Employing a more post-modern vocabulary, Francis Barker argues that in telling his mother "But I have that within which passes show" (H, 1.2.85), Hamlet "asserts against the devices of the world an essential interiority . . . an I which, if it encounters the world in anything more than a quizzical and contemplative manner, must alienate itself into the environment which inevitably traduces the richness of its subject by its mute and resistant externality."
12 For Barker, though, Hamlet is still a "transitional," contradictory text, for while the play gestures toward a private place of subjectivity, "at the centre of Hamlet, in the interior of his mystery, there is in short, nothing."
13 Terry Eagleton, too, sees Hamlet as a symptomatically bourgeois-individualist text: "Hamlet is a radically transitional figure, strung out between a traditional social order to which he is marginal, and a future epoch of achieved bourgeois individualism."
14 Other critics have more freely celebrated these so-called "transitional" features of the play, particularly its preoccupation with inner worlds. For Lena Ashwell, Hamlet reveals that
Man is no longer the miserable worm of the old Catholicism or slave of the ancient Feudalism, but freed by the Renaissance, trying the newly-fledged wings, both wings of Reason, the intuitive and the intellectual, the deductive and the inductive, perceiving at last both the subjective and the objective, the worlds within as well as the worlds without.
15In some earlier, more radical interpretations, the objective and noumenal realm drops out entirely, and Hamlet is described as a radical skeptic. Santayana writes: "Had Hamlet tried to justify his temperament by expressing it in a philosophy, he would have been an idealist. He would have said that events were only occasions for exercising the spirit; they were nothing but imagined situations meant to elicit a certain play of mind."
16 Ivan Turgenev offers a less Berkeleyean, but no less radical account of Hamlet's skepticism: "Hamlet is, beyond all things else, analysis and egoism, skepticism personified. He lives only to himself. He is an egoist, and as such can have no faith in himself; for no man can have faith save in that which is outside self and above self."
17 [End Page 402]
It is difficult to know exactly which speeches the critics cited above have in mind when they offer their impressionistic inwardist readings of the play, but most contemporary discussions of Hamlet's supposed belief in a division between internal and external realms refer to Hamlet's first extended comment on the death of his father. During the opening ceremony, the Queen asks Hamlet, "Why seems it so particular with thee?" (H, 1.2.75) to which Hamlet responds,
Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not "seems." 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good Mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black, . . . . . That can denote me truly. These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play. But I have that within which passes show . . .
(H, 1.2.76-85)
For Katharine Eisaman Maus the passage shows a "hiatus between signs ('trappings and suits') and what they signify ('that within')."
18 For Anne Ferry the passage sets up an "organizing distinction" between "is" and "seems," and reflects the existence of an "inner life" or "real self."
19I would like to take a close look at this exchange, for while most commentators concentrate on Hamlet's response to his mother, they pass over the important dialogue that precedes the speech. There the Queen informs Hamlet that "Thou know'st 'tis common, all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity," to which Hamlet says, "Ay madam, it is common"; then the Queen asks him, "Why seems it so particular with thee?" to which Hamlet responds, "Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not 'seems'" (H, 1.2.72-76). What has happened between these lines is that the referent of "common" in Hamlet's comment is no longer equivalent to the referent of "particular" in the Queen's question. The "it" Hamlet describes as "common" clearly refers to the belief, which the Queen has just advanced, that "all that lives must die." But the Queen's comment can be understood in two sharply different ways. If she is using "it" as a pronoun for "all that lives must die," then her question can be paraphrased as, "Why, Hamlet, given the fact that all that lives must die, does your father's death seem to you to be a particular or exceptional occurence?" But if the Queen's use of "it" refers not to "all that lives must die," but rather to Hamlet's behavioral responses to his father's death and the entire ceremony and context, her question can be paraphrased much differently as, "It is common for most people to respond to death after a certain fashion, but your [End Page 403] behavior, Hamlet, seems particular, idiosyncratic. Why?" In the light of Hamlet's next comment ("Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not 'seems'") and his ensuing speech, the former paraphrase loses sense, for if the "it" refers throughout the exchange to a common or uncommon fact about death, then Hamlet's next remark ("it is. I know not 'seems'") would mean that his father's death is exceptional rather than seems exceptional, which is a statement about an external event, one which has little to do with Hamlet's preoccupation with how he himself "seems" relative to how he himself "is." The latter paraphrase is more meaningful, because it establishes that the "it" in the Queen's question refers to Hamlet's dejected condition and his behavioral response to his father's untimely death.
This detail may seem tedious, but it makes all the difference in correctly interpreting what follows, for when Hamlet describes this "it," or his behavior, as something that does not seem but is, he is not implying a necessary chasm between is and seems, or any hiatus between sign and signified, but rather suggesting that how he is is equivalent to how others think he seems, and that his particular behavior, which has been duly witnessed by the observing court, should not be construed as false seeming. But then how to account for Hamlet's next comment that custom and behavior cannot "denote" him "truly," that he has that "within which passeth show?" Hamlet begins the remark with, "'Tis not alone my inky cloak . . . That can denote me truly," which suggests, given the force of "alone," that he believes not that "being" is set rigidly against seeming, but that the two states supplement each other. He does not say that being is more true or valid than seeming; he says only that a person can be a certain way in addition to seeming a certain way. Maus passes over this important distinction in her brief comment on Hamlet's speech. She writes, "For Hamlet, the internal experience . . . surpasses the visible--its validity is unimpeachable. The exterior, by contrast, is partial, misleading, falsifiable, unsubstantial."
20 Maus recognizes in her use of "partial" the importance of "alone" in Hamlet's speech. She then equates "partial," however, with three adjectives similar in meaning to each other, but not at all implied by the more neutral-sounding "partial" itself. Hamlet suggests that his behavior is a partial record of his turmoil; he does not suggest that it is misleading, unsubstantial, or falsifiable.
More important, a distinction should be drawn when interpreting these lines between propositional attitudes and propositional objects and contents. A propositional attitude is an intentional stance or mode of apprehending the world, while the propositional object refers to [End Page 404] whatever particulars are intended by that attitude. While Hamlet is clearly drawing a distinction between a propositional attitude and an existential mode of being--"I act" and "I am"--he does not then claim that how he acts and how he is are not identical states. Hamlet's remarks suggest that there can always be a one-to-one or parallel connection between a certain behavioral event and a certain psychological event, even though acting and being would be two templates which comprehend the same event. How else can we reconcile Hamlet's suggestion just prior to the speech that his seeming behavior is, and his sense that seeming and being are two separate modes of experience? And, looking forward a bit, why would Hamlet ecstatically announce to Horatio on the subject of the King's guilt, "unkenneled" (H, 3.2.80) during the Mousetrap, that "we will both our judgements join in censure of his seeming" (H, 3.2.85-86) if he believes that seeming is usually nothing more than shamming?
If Hamlet is indeed suggesting that how he feels is remarkably different from how he acts, then we would have to assume that his dejection and "obstinate condolement" (H, 1.2.93) are disingenuous, which is at least intuitively false, given the "too, too sullied flesh" soliloquy (H, 1.2.129-59) which follows. What Hamlet does keep private is his suspicion about the murderer, but that suspicion is a psychological state experienced in addition to, or over and above, the dejected behavioral state, not the true internal version of the false external manner. Again, Hamlet's use of the particle "alone" justifies this distinction, for he says that he is more than what his behavior might suggest, and that more might be located within, although even here it is only incidentally true that what lies within is something different from the behavioral state. What all this suggests is that the force of "within" loses a lot of its radical bite (historically speaking), for if in many cases the within and the without are identical, and the within is something often just added to the without, then the mystery requires very little plucking in order to be discovered.
Before looking at what I take to be Hamlet's true obsession in the play, his theological understanding of habit (which contributes to his radical behaviorism, rather than radical innatism), it is worth noting that "to be or not to be" is not necessarily a speech about Hamlet's subjective world either. When Hamlet famously asks, "to be or not to be, that is the question, / Whether 'tis nobler . . ." (H, 3.1.57-58), the query is not specifically concerned with Hamlet's reversion to an inner state or essential interiority. Nor does it suggest that Hamlet's mind is a mirror to the world, subject to self-inspection. Hamlet's question is about his [End Page 405] existence as an object among other objects in the world. To question one's existence does not necessarily entail apprehending or exploring one's mysterious interiority, or even seeing oneself as an isolable subject, alienated from the objective realm. If Hamlet had immediately followed "'tis nobler" with "for any of us to . . .," the sense of his query would not have changed, although with this modification (as egregious as it is) it would be more clear that his question is not about subjectivity and the closed world of his ego, nor about any breach he intuits between external and internal reality. Ernst Tugendhat offers this gloss on the very un-Cartesian nature of the query:
It is a question that is obviously not theoretical. Someone who poses it is not asking whether something can be asserted, that is, whether it (he himself) is or is not, or more precisely, will or will not be. On the contrary, this question concerns the issue of whether the questioner says yes or no in a practical sense to the being that impends at every moment.
21I will return to more of Hamlet's inward-seeming speeches later, but here I want to consider the many third-person reports on the status of Hamlet's private thoughts, those which set out to investigate his hidden and secret mental geographies. The King advises Rosencranz and Guildenstern to observe Hamlet and
to gather So much as from occasion you may glean, Whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus, That, opened, lies within our remedy.
(H, 2.2.15-18)
Polonius later tells the King that he will "find / Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed / Within the center" (H, 2.2.157-58). Hamlet recognizes that Guildenstern is determined to draw out his inner convictions: "You would play upon me, you would / seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart / of my mystery" (H, 3.2.363-65). Ophelia describes Hamlet as the "observed of all observers" (H, 3.1.157). We should note that Hamlet, too, seeks to unfold the mystery of his peers' mental contents. He tells Guildenstern: "You were / sent for, and there is a kind of confession in your looks which / your modesties have not craft enough to color" (H, 2.2.279-81). And of course Hamlet is determined to "unkennel" Claudius's "occulted guilt" (H, 3.2.79-80).
Because, as I argue below, Hamlet is more clearly concerned in his monologues with habit and custom than he is with any private ghost in [End Page 406] the machine, I think that these third-person reports about Hamlet usually give the impression that he is preoccupied with his inner world. But while these passages suggest that everyone seeks the contents of everyone else's mind, they do not imply that anyone in particular seeks the contents of his or her own mind. Critics have perhaps been too ready to infer from Hamlet's sense that Guildenstern and the others attempt to access his mystery that 1) Hamlet himself believes he has a mystery to be accessed and 2) if he does, he reflects on that mystery or cares at all to interpret it. Ordinarily, in the history of the philosophy of mind, the problem of other minds follows naturally from the belief that mental states are incorrigible and accessible only to the subject of those states. These passages do not suggest that the problem of other minds is a consequence of incorrigible subjectivity, although they do raise the possibility (as I discuss later) that the problem of other minds is antecedent to the discovery of private states.
It is also worth noting that there is nothing specifically Cartesian and dualistic in any of the dialogue quoted above. To recognize that inward states exist is a necessary but not sufficient condition for Cartesianism. Cartesianism fundamentally posits two different substances, non-extended spiritual mind, and extended bodily matter, which is governed by mechanical laws. Because Descartes had separated minds from bodies, much of later seventeenth-century philosophy was devoted to explaining the interaction between the two substances in terms of parallelism or occasionalism and divine intervention. After Descartes had separated mind from body, a radical rather than a methodological skepticism ensued, since the contents of one's own mind were now introspectible and private, while the contents of another's mind were more opaque. It would be a misinterpretation of any of the passages mentioned so far to argue that they anticipate this kind of radical dualism.
I would like to turn now to Hamlet's early comments to Horatio and to a consideration of the nature of custom in order to establish what I think is idiosyncratic about Hamlet's world-view. After explaining to Horatio that Denmark's revel-filled customs are more "honored in the breach than the observance" (H, 1.4.16) because they shame Denmark in the view of other nations, Hamlet suggests that custom
takes From our achievements, though performed at height, The pith and marrow of our attribute. So, oft it chances in particular men, That for some vicious mole of nature in them, [End Page 407] . . . . . By their o'ergrowth of some complexion, . . . . . Or by some habit that too much o'erleavens The form of plausive manners, that these men, . . . . . Shall in the general censure take corruption From that particular fault.
(H, 1.4.20-36)
In this extended simile, Hamlet draws a comparison between the acquired custom or tradition which has besmeared Denmark's reputation and the inner, inherited defect that, having been manifested and become habitual, is accounted by third-person reports as the defining feature of a particular individual. In the full analogy, Hamlet is suggesting that imprudent custom is to the pith and marrow of Denmark's "attribute" as some single defect or "complexion" is to an individual's otherwise virtuous character.
Hamlet's logic is perplexing: he compares an acquired tradition or custom with a behavioral disposition which is unequivocally described as a permanent and inherited defect of nature. For Hamlet's standpoint to make sense he must be making one of two tacit assumptions: either acquired tradition and custom are like inner defect because they are both ineradicable and unchangeable, or inner defect is not really an inherited quality but is rather like custom and tradition, which would be "more honored in the breach than in the observance." Since Hamlet describes the "vicious mole" (H, 1.4.24) as "nature's livery" (H, 1.4.32), an unchosen "origin" (H, 1.4.26), it seems to be the former rather than the latter connection that holds the analogy together. What the speech establishes, I think, is Hamlet's preoccupation with habit, custom, and behavioral traits, particularly his sense that habits can overburden to such an extent that they become objectified, naturalized deformities which are potentially ineradicable.
Hamlet's revulsion at habit and custom is more evident during the closet scene, after he mistakenly kills Polonius and then vilifies his mother for her untimely liaison with Claudius. Here Hamlet advises his mother to stop wringing her hands because he will wring her heart, "If it be made of penetrable stuff, / If damnéd custom have not brazed it so / That it be proof and bulwark against sense" (H, 3.4.37-39). He then importunes her to confess herself to heaven, for otherwise she will "spread the compost on the weeds / To make them ranker"(H, 3.4.158-59), and finally exclaims, [End Page 408]
Assume a virtue, if you have it not. That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat, Of habits devil, is angel yet in this, . . . . . Refrain tonight, And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence; the next more easy; For use almost can change the stamp of nature . . .
(H, 3.4.167-75)
Why is Hamlet so unwavering in his belief that the Queen and his uncle have acquired a stable disposition toward evil? Why is he is so sure of their inclination toward habitual sin, beyond his knowledge of the one fateful act? His moralizing is generic rather than specific, since his belief that one unrepented sin is enough to "spread the compost on the weeds / To make them ranker" is expressed as a belief or a hypothesis rather than an inference based on evidence. Beyond the simple fact of their cohabitation since the murder, how have the Queen and Claudius shown evidence of the kind of steady degeneration toward evil that Hamlet presupposes throughout his expostulation to his mother?
Hamlet's effusions on habit and custom can be more readily understood if we consider that he is echoing a conventional Augustinian obsession with habit or consuetudo, which is taken up in the seventeenth century by writers and theologians such as William Perkins, Jeremy Taylor, and Richard Baxter. A brief detour into the Augustinian tradition will show the relevance of this historical and theological context.
Throughout the Manichaean controversy, when he was "more Pelagian than Pelagius," Augustine found it difficult to reconcile his notion of absolute self-determination with his belief that compulsory evil could bind the human will.
22 He eventually began to explain the nature of evil in psychological terms, invoking consuetudo, or habit, to explain the permanence of habitual, repetitive evil in the soul of the impenitent sinner. For the older Augustine, habitual sin, ultimately ineradicable, stubbornly insinuated itself into the inner life of the sinner until it became second nature. For Augustine's opponent Pelagius, in contrast, habits were insidious but not intractable, and the sinner could shed internalized evil by means of baptism, conversion, and ascetic discipline. In his "Commentary" on Romans 7:17-18 Pelagius writes: "Before [sin] became a habit, therefore I did it willingly. . . . It lives as a guest and as one thing in another, not as one single thing; in other words, as an accidental quality, not a natural one."
23 For Pelagius, a sinful habit could [End Page 409] arraign the will, but only as "some threadbare outer garment," always subject to disabusal.
24 Peter Brown sums up the main lines of the controversy:
for Augustine, habit established itself in profound, unconscious layers of the personality: it worked, he thought, like the tendencies of the reformed drunkard toward alcoholism; it betrayed itself--as it would betray itself for Freud--even by so innocent a phenomenon as a slip of the tongue. . . . for Pelagius, by contrast . . . habit remained essentially external to the personality: it was a rust, a rust that could be rubbed off.
25In the Confessions, Augustine describes the force of habit as a permanent chain or addiction: "My enemy held my will in his power and from it he had made a chain and shackled me. For my will was perverse and lust had grown from it, and when I gave in to lust habit was born, and when I did not resist habit it became a necessity."
26 He describes his divided will as a "disease of the mind, which does not wholly rise to the heights where it is lifted by the truth, because it is weighed down by habit."
27 In his discussion of the irreversibility of habit in Libero Arbitrio he suggests that "even when we see what is right and will to do it, we cannot do it because of the resistance of carnal habit, which develops almost naturally because of the unruliness of our mortal inheritance."
28Writing in the early decades of the seventeenth century, William Ames remarks that customary sins, "old through daily multiplication, beget an evil habit."
29 Thomas Goodwin describes the process of sinful habituation as a mysterious transformation: "every sin in us, by a miraculous multiplication, inclines our nature more to every sin than it was before."
30 William Perkins defines sin as "a want or absence of goodnesse" which "when received into the nature of man . . . continues and abides in the nerves and faculties thereof, and so causes the name of a habit."
31 In his commentary on Galatians, Perkins expounds upon the insidiousness of sinful habituation, drawing no fundamental distinction between the enormity of a single sin and many smaller sins:
we are admonished to take heed of every sinne for there is no sinne so small but hath his waight, and such a waight, as will presse downe to the bottomlesse pit . . . and though some bee greater than other, and sinke a man deeper into condemnation, yet many small sinnes will as easily condemn, as a few great, like as sands, though but small in quantity, yet being many in numbers, will as soone sinke the ship, as if it were laden with the greatest burden.
32 [End Page 410]
The theological focus on the relationship between habit and sin reaches an apotheosis later in the seventeenth century, with Jeremy Taylor's Unum Necessarium (1655). Taylor sounds Hamlet-like when he describes sin as infectious and overspreading, as something which, if not immediately repented of, can easily transmute into vicious habit. For Taylor, a habit is a sin unto itself, "a proper guiltiness of its own," added to the individual sins which comprise the composite sinful habit:
For every man is bound to repent instantly of every known sin; he sins anew if he does not, though he add no more of the same actions to his heap. But it is much worse if he sins on; not only because he sins oftener, but because if he contracts a custom or habit of sin, he superadds a state of evil to himself, distinct from the guilt of all those single actions which made the habit.
33Richard Baxter expresses a similar concern that vicious habits are more corrupting than discrete, sinful acts: "The great duties and the great sins are those of the heart. There is the root of good and evil. . . . The inward habit of sin is a second nature: and a sinful nature is worse than a sinful act."
34The seventeenth-century obsession with the relations of habit to sin (and particularly the theological nicety that a vicious habit is a sin unto itself, added to the individual sins which make up the habit) supports a kind of theological holism which suggests that the evil sum is different from and worse than its evil parts. If we believe that Hamlet has assimilated this Augustinian understanding of the intractability of consuetudo, we can perhaps more readily understand his famous delay.
35 Since Hamlet has internalized the logic of consuetudo, the force and specificity of the "original," unpardonable sin, the murder of his father, becomes submerged under a higher-order preoccupation with the newly objectified sinful habit he ascribes to his mother and uncle. Hamlet is more offended by the idea of imperturbable sin as a theological abstraction than by the inaugural, corrupted act, and this perhaps explains why he expends so much energy convincing his mother to forswear his uncle's bed and practice abstinence ("for use almost can change the stamp of nature") rather than focusing on the founding sinful act. The insidious logic with which Hamlet warns his mother seems to be apprehended by the Queen, for she will later intuit the force of Hamlet's admonition, or at least the theological commonplace that sins beget more sins: "To my sick soul, as sin's true nature is, / Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss" (H, 4.5.17-18). E. K. Chambers is one of many critics who have noted Hamlet's preoccupation with [End Page 411] universals: "the interest of the universal, not of the particular, is always dominant with Hamlet; not his mother's sin but the frailty of woman, is his natural theme."
36 Chambers seems to have only half understood Hamlet's view on the relationship between parts and wholes--it is not that the nature of women supersedes a concern with the nature of sin, but that the nature of sinful habits outweighs a concern with the nature of sinful acts.
It is a curious phenomenon that critics have frequently used the term habit to describe Hamlet's so-called habit of thinking without discussing Hamlet's thinking about habit.
37 A. C. Bradley writes that it is Hamlet's one-sided nature, "strengthened by habit . . . and years of speculative action" which explains his irresolution.
38 J. C. Bucknill writes that for Hamlet "the habit of putting desires into action had never been formed."
39 Hazlitt writes that Hamlet's "habitual principles of action are unhinged. . . ."
40 Dr. Maudsley writes that Hamlet's "reflective indecision" is a stage an individual undergoes before he can acquire "by exercise a habit of willing."
41 Rev. C. E. Moberly writes that "Hamlet's grief is increased by his mental habit of seeing all that goes on around him under the form of reflection."
42 This critical preoccupation with Hamlet's habits would be explainable if each critic were responding to a few of Hamlet's clear patterns of behavior or durable characteristics, but there is no governing logic which connects all the different points about all of Hamlet's supposedly different habits. In fact, there is another equally forceful school, call it the Brecht school, which argues that Hamlet plays too many contradictory roles in the play, that he suffers a "personality diffusion"--a critical stance not easily compatible with one that finds in Hamlet limitless habitual thought-patterns.
43 Given that the term habit is spoken as many times as it is in the play, and given the historical context I have outlined, one begins to think that the critical heritage has confused Hamlet's views on habit with Hamlet's habits. This may be worth more than academic speculation, for if one exaggerates Hamlet's so-called multitude of paralyzing habits of mind, one too easily and too uncritically explains away his delay, which I have suggested can be understood partly as a consequence of his over-sensitivity to the philosophy of habitual sin.
Hamlet's revulsion at habit does not manifest itself only in his theologically-inspired utterances on consuetudo. The causal nexus between his understanding of habit and his irresolution can be more clearly discerned if we consider the consequences that Hamlet's abhorrence of habit has on his manner of receiving and interpreting the revenge-mandate from his father. After the Ghost has decreed that [End Page 412] Hamlet remember him, Hamlet decides to empty his mind of all the extraneous and potentially interfering data he has collected during his thirty years:
Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmixed with baser matter.
(H, 1.5.98-105)
According to these lines, Hamlet appears to be squarely within the innatist tradition. Upon contemplating the revenge-mandate, he seems to advert to a private and subjective mental realm, the "book and volume of his brain." But insofar as we define a subjective realm (as Hamlet's critics traditionally have) as an impenetrable hidden region, set apart from the seemingness of external conduct, Hamlet is not necessarily invoking a subjective realm when he invokes his "brain." He is merely saying that his brain is usually the place which stores memories, knowledge, and associations between impressions and events, and that the command to revenge, this new and unexpected event, can be more easily understood and acted upon if it is separated from all the other acquired images and associations in his brain. Hamlet does not separate his mind from the world; he separates old and new information within his mind. What his brain consists of, where it is located, whether it is connected to psychological events or his body, and whether it is continuous with the objective world are not at issue in this monologue. While Hamlet clearly wants to keep the revenge-mandate a secret from his peers (excepting Horatio), he is more concerned with keeping it separate from all his other thoughts.
The problem here is that Hamlet has underestimated the importance of memory and association to understanding and action. In Marjorie Garber's psychoanalytic reading of the play, Hamlet's memory of his father and his father's command leads to endless repetition and hence impedes effective action.
44 But Hamlet's avowal to remember the injunction halts action because, as a number of early modern philosophers argued, memory enables action through association with other memories. It is not that Hamlet does not act because he remembers and repeats the mandate in his mind, but that the substance of the mandate is rendered less meaningful outside of any prior mental associations and [End Page 413] images of what constitutes an act of revenge. Associationism as a systematic empiricist doctrine is usually connected with Locke and David Hartley, but the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were equally preoccupied with a form of associationism, having been influenced by Aristotle's views on memory and hexis in De Anima and the Parva Naturalia.
Aristotle writes that "recollection occurs inasmuch as one experience naturally succeeds another . . . when we are recollecting we keep stimulating certain earlier experiences until we have stimulated one which the one in question is wont to succeed."
45 Juan Luis Vives, commenting on Aristotle's theory of memory, suggests that recollection occurs "by steps, from cause to effect; from the latter to instrument; through the part to the whole; from this situation to person."
46 In The Treatise of Man, Descartes writes that "the recollection of one thing can be excited by that of another which was imprinted in the memory at the same time."
47 In Human Nature, Hobbes, in an effort to relate all mental content to sense-experience, introduces the term "discursion" to describe the processes by which ideas succeed one another as conceptions in the mind:
the cause of the coherence or consequence of one conception to another, is their first coherence or consequence at that time when they are produced by sense: as for example, from St. Andrew the mind runneth to St. Peter, because their names are read together. . . . When a man hath so often observed like antecedents to be followed by like consequents, that whensoever he seeth the antecedent, he looketh again for the consequent.
48Hamlet breaks all of these associative rules, for when he lodges the commandment "all alone" in his memory, "unmixed" with any prior conceptions or "baser matter," he disassociates revenge from anything with which he is personally familiar, and from any customary outlets through which he might pursue justice. He is quite unlike his dramatic forebear, Hieronimo of The Spanish Tragedy, who determines, however ineffectively, to make his revenge-mandate both publicly resolvable (by making recourse to public law) and privately familiar (by associating Horatio and revenge with signs and tokens, such as the bloody handkerchief he carries with him, and Bel-Imperia's admonishing letter). Hamlet has associated the revenge-mandate solely with the ghost and the ghost solely with the revenge-mandate, so that when confronted with either one he recalls the other, in a binding tautological association that contributes to his paralysis. Thus he cannot check the truthfulness [End Page 414] of the ghost's commandment against his own intuitions and knowledge, and he resorts to external verification and behavioral reports, much as the other characters rely on his behavior to infer his mental contents. This partly explains why he is motivated by exemplary conduct, by the impassioned player who invokes Hecuba and by Fortinbras's feats in war. What Hamlet neglects to consider in his relentless assault on habit is that fixed dispositions and virtuous habits are as indispensable as vicious habits are potentially ineradicable. Hamlet takes Montaigne's admonition that "habituation puts to sleep the eye of our judgement" too far.
49 For Hamlet, de-habituation puts to sleep his eye of judgment.
In this context, one of the many reasons that Laertes is a clean foil to Hamlet is that he recognizes the indispensable role habit and custom play in promoting understanding and directing action. Unlike Hamlet, Laertes is self-reliant, suspicious not of his own acquired traits and knowledge about given events, but of third-person reports and verificationism. Upon learning of Laertes's single-minded course to avenge the murder of his father, Claudius worries that Laertes is
in secret come from France, Feeds on his wonder, keeps himself in clouds, And wants not buzzers to infect his ear With pestilent speeches of his father's death . . .
(H, 4.5.89-92)
Whereas Hamlet counsels others and himself on the perils of custom and habit, Laertes's charisma threatens to replace older customs with newer ones. The Messenger remarks to Claudius that
The rabble call him lord, And, as the world were now but to begin, Antiquity forgot, custom not known, The ratifiers and props of every word, They cry, "Choose we! Laertes shall be king!"
(H, 4.5.105-9)
Nor does Laertes deny the integral role custom plays in properly venting emotional states. Upon learning of Ophelia's death, Laertes remarks,
Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, And therefore I forbid my tears. But yet It is our trick; nature her custom holds, Let shame say what it will. When these are gone, The woman will be out.
(H, 4.7.186-90) [End Page 415]
Given Laertes's obedience to custom and Hamlet's abhorrence of it, it is fitting that the moment at which Laertes most inspires Hamlet, and Hamlet most identifies with Laertes, occurs during the graveyard scene, when Laertes uncharacteristically overthrows custom and leaps into Ophelia's grave. Hamlet will later remark about Laertes that the "bravery of his grief did put me / Into a tow'ring passion" (H, 5.2.79-80).
I have argued thus far that Hamlet should not be described as a symptomatic Cartesian, and that he is more preoccupied with worldly habits than with inner landscapes. His views on habit are un-modern for another reason, though, which a brief detour into rational-choice theory and its exaltation of habits can illuminate. Descartes and Pascal both argue that reason and habits function in dialectical relationship: a rational calculus is first employed to direct action and belief, and then reason abdicates its directive power to the blind but effective workings of habit. Pascal writes,
How few things can be demonstrated. Proofs only convince the mind. Habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed. . . . Who ever proved that it will dawn tomorrow, and that we shall die? It is then habit that convinces us and makes us so many Christians. . . . We resort to habit once the mind has seen where the truth lies, in order to steep and stain ourselves in that belief which constantly eludes us.
50Descartes argues that the passions can be restructured and rechanneled by the rational formation of habits: "although the movements (both of the gland and of the spirits and brain) which represent certain objects to the soul are naturally joined to the movements which produce certain passions in it, yet through habit the former can be separated from the latter and joined to others which are very different."
51 For Descartes, the control of the passions follows from the formation of new and corrective habits, which themselves follow from the light of reason. As Jon Elster describes these rational choices:
Anyone can do anything; the smallest amounts of will-power suffice for the most extraordinary feats of self-control, given an understanding of the psychological mechanism by which habits are formed and changed. Hexis in Aristotle, custom in Pascal and habit in Descartes are all seen as the end result of non-habitual actions.
52According to the Cartesian and Pascalian rational-choice scenario, the rational agent pre-commits belief and conduct based on a logical and rational means-end calculus (for instance Pascal's famous wager), after which point habits serve to maintain and carry out the originary [End Page 416] decision to believe or act. Rational-choice theory can help as a heuristic device to explain Hamlet's dilemma, for Hamlet is a patently un-modern, un-strategic rational chooser. Hamlet claims a number of times that he is bereft of a level of passion sufficient to thrust him into action (in the "O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!" monologue [H, 2.2.550-606], for example). From a rational-choice vantage point, Hamlet's problem is not that he lacks the passion to act, but that he has not weighed the costs and benefits of executing the revenge which would both rouse and direct the ensuing passions. Unlike Ulysses, who binds himself to the mast in anticipation of the beguiling Sirens, or Pascal, who stands to gain infinitely and lose negligibly by believing in God, Hamlet performs no effective calculating because, once having been chosen as his father's instrument of revenge, he abdicates the belief that he has a choice to make: "O curséd spite / That ever I was born to set it right!" (H, 1.5.197-98). For Pascal and Descartes, the subjective agent is provided with the freedom to apply reason as a binding strategy; once the agent has pre-committed, habit is introduced as the executor of reason's dictates. Hamlet is indeed a rational chooser, and there is always "method in his madness," but he does not apply rational choice under the right circumstances: he applies reason in a number of cases (what is the "To be or not to be" speech if not an internal rational-choice monologue?) but not in the one case which most requires pre-commitment based on a cost-benefit analysis--the decision to kill Claudius, to exact revenge. Each post-ghost moment for Hamlet is the repetition of an overcompensating rational-choice dialogue, in spite of the fact that every moment, except for the first moment, should be controlled by habit. Descartes and Pascal proportion a maximum of habit to a minimum of reason. Hamlet proportions a maximum of reason to a minimum of habit. Why Hamlet is unable to apply a cost-benefit procedure to the ghost's command is a question for another kind of paper: it can be explained, perhaps, from a psychoanalytic standpoint or from the standpoint of the history of patriarchy or the sociology of revenge.
We have seen thus far that Hamlet is resolutely Augustinian in his beliefs about the refractory nature of customary sin and habitual conduct, which perhaps contributes to his miscalculated decision to unburden himself of all memories and dispositional attitudes--contributes, that is, to his less theologically conditioned suspicion of habit. But if on the one hand he believes habits are pernicious for the reasons he adduces--their role in the naturalization of sin, their obtrusive and empirical nature--he seems on the other hand as convinced as his peers that inveterate behavioral patterns are infallible clues to one's private [End Page 417] attitudes and intentions. There appears to be, if not a contradiction, at least an inconsistency between his suspicion of the nature of habits on the one hand and his servility to them on the other (the latter suggested in his belief that one can infer from observables another's intentions and mental states, for instance, the conscience of the king). In my view, Hamlet truly does not believe he can infer mental contents from behavioral manifestations. During those moments when he interprets his peers' actions and intuits their psychological states he perceives the world as a radical behaviorist would, as something along the lines of Gilbert Ryle's influential anti-dualistic account of behaviorism. And I think Hamlet's radical behaviorism is not anachronistic but logically follows from his extreme Augustinianism.
A radical behaviorist is someone who believes that mental predicates are simply descriptions of physical behavior, that mental states, understood as individuated private spaces which cause action, do not exist. In The Concept of Mind, Gilbert Ryle argues that all mental happenings are reducible to their physical manifestations, that the belief in unwitnessable mental events is based on a category mistake (for instance, the mistaken sense one might have that a university is some further entity added to the particular buildings which comprise our ordinary understanding of what "university" signifies). For Ryle, the Cartesian category mistake assumes that "mental processes are causes and effects, but different sorts of causes and effects from bodily movements."
53 Although the mind belongs to the same category as bodies, these "spectral machines" are not necessarily governed by rigid mechanical hypotheses.
54 Faced with the difficulty of explaining mental states that are not overtly expressible as behavioral dispositions, Ryle suggests that psychological statements are not accounts of mental happenings but hypothetical reports; that is, to say "I feel pain" entails expressing pain in a certain manner given a particular context and stimulus. And in his attempt to discredit the notion that acts are caused by certain motives located in the mind, Ryle famously suggests that "to explain an inner act as done from a certain motive is not analogous to saying that the glass broke, because a stone hit it, but to the quite different type of statement that the glass broke, when the stone hit it, because the glass was brittle."
55 For Ryle, to discover another's motives for actions is simply "to form an inductive, law-like proposition, analogous to the explanation of reactions and actions by reflexes and habits, or to the explanation of the fracture of the glass by reference to its brittleness."
56Ryle's counter-intuitive analytical behaviorism has frequently been criticized because it fails to account for sense-experiences or "qualia" [End Page 418] (color perceptions, for example--the kinds of sense-data that seem to exist without a behavioral component). In order to counter the commonsense objection to radical behaviorism--that we ordinarily assume mental events can occur without showing themselves--Ryle introduced his notion of dispositional properties, and argued that a subject's so-called mental experience in the absence of corresponding behavioral manifestation is simply a disposition to behave given the adequate stimulus: "To possess a dispositional property is not to be in a particular state, or to undergo a particular change; it is to be bound or liable to be in a particular state, or to undergo a particular change, when a particular condition is realized."
57 It is easy to miss the subtlety in Ryle's theory of dispositional property. A disposition to behave in a particular way should not be associated with a particular mental state. Dispositions are not states at all until they are actualized by certain conditions, and then they become behavioral states.
It is not difficult to imagine the problems a radical behaviorist would meet when interpreting another's behavior. If mental predicates are identical in a one-to-one relationship with behavioral predicates then how can we account for or recognize disingenuous behavior or unexpressed beliefs? Not all radical behaviorists are as sophisticated as Ryle, who was able to marshal a number of clever counter-arguments to these obvious objections. If we return to the play, we see that Hamlet struggles with these kinds of questions when he deliberates whether or not to murder Claudius while the latter is at prayer. Contemplating the murder, Hamlet thinks,
And how his audit stands who knows save heaven? But in our circumstance and course of thought 'Tis heavy with him. And am I then revenged, To take him in the purging of his soul, When he is fit and seasoned for his passage?
(H, 3.3.82-86)
If we read this alongside the previously discussed passage in which Hamlet unqualifiedly condemns his mother and Claudius for both the murder of his father and their cohabitation, we should ask on what basis Hamlet even contemplates the idea that Claudius could purge his own soul through prayer.
What seems to stay Hamlet's hand here is his sense that Claudius's act of praying might lead, if not to absolution, at least to a relish of salvation. Hamlet's critics have often found Hamlet's deferral readily explainable, even predictable, given Hamlet's appreciation of the prayer-context and [End Page 419] the possibility of Claudius's salvation. Bradley describes the reason that Hamlet pauses as a pretext, but one associated with a "perfectly genuine" feeling which any God-fearing Elizabethan would understand.
58 Yet Hamlet's pause seems to haunt Wilson, who after agreeing with Bradley's impressionistic interpretation, writes, "After all there had been 'no relish of salvation' in the King's act of prayer; Hamlet need not have hesitated, even on his own showing."
59 It is not clear what Wilson's final stand is on the propriety of Hamlet's reasoning, but Wilson clearly is not as comfortable as Bradley with the assumption that any Elizabethan would have found Hamlet's pause unremarkable. Laertes seems to have no problem imagining cutting Hamlet's "throat i' the church" (H, 4.7.127), and Claudius avers that "No place, indeed should murder sanctuarize" (H, 4.7.128). While these outbursts do not prove that Hamlet's deferral was uncustomary, they do suggest that for Hamlet to discharge his duty under the circumstances would not have been unthinkable. It seems that Hamlet misunderstands what Claudius and any abiding sixteenth- and seventeenth-century believer would have known quite well: if inner purity and intention, and the expectation of an elicitation of grace are not availing, then no external act or prayer or confession can remove the sinful taint. Thus Claudius, just before he kneels and Hamlet enters, after reflecting that "My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent" (H, 3.3.40), asks,
But, O, what form of prayer Can serve my turn? "Forgive me my foul murder"? That cannot be, since I am still possessed Of those effects for which I did the murder: My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen. May one be pardoned and retain th'offense?
(H, 3.3.51-56)
Claudius also worries (after Hamlet has departed) that "Words without thoughts never to heaven go" (H, 3.3.98). Hamlet has not overheard these words, but why should he need to hear them in order to settle any doubt he might have regarding Claudius's repentance? Hamlet's belief that Claudius is perhaps "fit and seasoned for passage" is inconsistent with all the other evidence he has collected up until this point, and clearly inconsistent with Claudius's understanding of his own guilt. What blinds Hamlet to the unredeemed state of Claudius's soul is his inability to imagine Claudius's mental state and inner convictions without inferring those mental contents from the conventionalized act of prayer. Hamlet seems to think, as any behaviorist would, that there is [End Page 420] no spectral machine inside Claudius, motivating his action and harboring certain unexpressed thoughts and passions. While Hamlet does not completely ignore the possibility that Claudius is unrepentant in spite of prayer, he clearly defers action on the basis of the weight he gives to Claudius's ritualistic conduct, rather than on any intuition he has about Claudius's relative integrity or baseness. It is as if the theological warrants for Hamlet's obsessions with customary behavior have inadvertently warranted his disbelief in the separateness and force of mental contents beyond their behavioral realizations.
Hamlet's dilemma is that when he is self-regarding he discerns no habits of his own but when he is other-regarding he discerns only habits and the behavior of those around him. I have introduced Ryle's theory of dispositional behavior as a framework because his is the most systematic and influential account provided by the analytic tradition (which I have loosely been referring to throughout this essay). But while Ryle's theory makes Hamlet's behaviorism more understandable, it does not imply that Hamlet is an adherent of a radical, idiosyncratic, or modernist etiology, since radical behaviorism can follow from an extreme or exaggerated internalization of the theological precedents I have already mentioned. If we return to the Augustinian context, we can see that the Augustinian theory of consuetudo can lead, in its extreme versions, to the kind of behaviorism I have been attributing to Hamlet. In spite of his insistence that even the most unreflective habits stem from the sinner's dispositional will, Augustine conceives of sinful habits as so completely overmastering and intractable that they begin to resemble objectifications of evil, embodiments of what were once conscious, controllable actions. The objectification of habit makes consuetudo such a naturalized form of evil that it recalls the Manichaeanism it aims to subvert. Of course, the habit is still a product of the individual will of the unregenerate sinner, rather than the creation of any evil demiurge, but the reification of habit relocates the figure of the gnostic-type creator within the impenitent's soul. As such, Augustine's anti-Pelagianism often looks like a reversion to his earlier Manichaeanism.
An extreme reading of this account of the naturalization of habit might easily suggest that individuals are composed of habits all the way down, that selves or minds do not exist apart from patterns of conduct which have been internalized and naturalized through customary action. This view of the centrality of habits to personal identity has a long tradition associated with it, both pre-modern and modern. For instance, Étienne Gilson describes the Thomistic theory of the habitus in the following manner: [End Page 421]
If the habits of a being draw it close to the ideal type toward which it is tending, they are good habits. If, on the contrary, they draw it away from this ideal, they are bad habits. . . . Habits are not only qualities and accidents, but they are the qualities and accidents which lie closest to the nature of a thing, and which come closest to entering into its essence and integrating themselves into its definition.
60For Aquinas, the essence of a "thing" consists in its habits.
Jeremy Taylor is so obsessed with ranging virtuous habits against vicious habits that one wonders whether it is possible to imagine a subject posited without or aside from its acquired virtuous or corrupt dispositions: "For till habits supervene, we are of a middle constitution . . . divided between good and evil."
61 In the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards writes that "Tis this [Divine Establishment] that must account for the continuance of any such thing, anywhere, as consciousness of acts are past; and for the continuance of all habits, either good or bad: and on this depends everything that can belong to personal identity."
62 Since Lars Engle has recently drawn attention to the pragmatic features of Shakespeare's plays, it is also worth noting that John Dewey, in his rigorous anti-absolutizing, anti-Freudian pragmatic account of habit and conduct in Human Nature and Conduct, argues that habits exert a hold upon people because "we are the habit."
63 "[A]ll habits," Dewey writes, are demands for certain kinds of activity; and they constitute the self. In any intelligible sense of the word will, they are will."
64Like these theologians and philosophers who construe habits as the "essence of the thing," integral to "personal identity" and "constitutive" of the self, and who assert that the subject is always infected or graced with a set of virtuous or vicious habits, and thus suspended in a "middle constitution" until habits supervene, Hamlet too identifies habits and dispositions with subjective states. Now it is true that for Augustine, Aquinas, Ames, and other theologians habits refer not simply to hardened, external manners, but to inner states, spiritual infusions, or inheritances of original sin. Donne realizes the distinction when he puts this question to God: "When thou bidst me to put off the old man, dost thou mean not only my old habits of actual sin, but the oldest of all, original sin? When thou bidst me purge out the leaven, dost thou mean not only the sourness of mine own ill contracted customs, but the innate tincture of sin imprinted by nature?"
65 Ames, concerned more specifically with the importance of waging virtue against vicious habits, writes that "virtue is a condition or habit by which the will is inclined to do well. The virtuous habitus does not confirm a perfect constitution of mind, but rather a general state of mind of various degrees of perfection."
66 [End Page 422] Describing the indelible impression the Holy Ghost left in his memory after conversion, Lancelot Andrewes writes, "So in vigour, as His vigour is not brunts only or starts, impetus, but habitus, that it holdeth out habit-wise . . . leaving an impression, such an one as iron red-hot leaving in vessels of wood."
67 Descartes recognizes the instrumentality of inner habits when he describes virtues as "ingrained habits or dispositions (habitudes) in the soul."
68What makes Hamlet's construal of the theology of habit so narrow is precisely his failure to distinguish between acquired habits and innate or mental habits. It is striking to consider that out of his repeated uses of the term "habit," not once does Hamlet describe habits as inherited sinful defects, spiritual infusions, or, as Richard Hooker and others describe the sacraments, "habits of faith."
69 According to Hamlet's narrow understanding of the theological tradition, habits are identified with external visages (the "habit" of his father "as he lived" [H, 3.4.141]); consequences of lust ("that monster, custom . . . Of habits devil" [H, 3.4.168-69]); and social custom or personal conduct (Osric's "habit of encounter" [H, 5.2.189], the "habit that too much o'erleavens / The form of plausive manners" [H, 1.4. 29-30], and "foregone all custom of exercises" [H, 2.2.297-98]). Surely if Hamlet were a card-carrying idealist, Protestant affective individualist, or Cartesian dualist, he would make some reference to disembodied habits of mind and their distinction from patterned overt actions.
Bearing in mind Hamlet's relation to the traditions I have been outlining, we can speculate about the nature of the stimulus which would be required to motivate Hamlet to discharge the ghost's injunction. What critics and perhaps Hamlet himself mistakenly presuppose is that Hamlet needs to assume the right frame of mind in order to effectively act, even though, behavioristically considered, the required causal connection operates in reverse: the effective "mental" state will follow from the proper behavioral disposition or behavioral act. This sounds like a logical contradiction, as it suggests that in order for Hamlet to act he needs first to have acted, but the relationship between mental and behavioral happenings can be distributed between two or more persons. For Hamlet to acquire the right mental state and conviction requires that he at least witness another's revenge-act; since he identifies behavioral events with mental events, witnessing another's act would provide him simultaneously with both an example of the behavior and an example of the requisite mental state. Hamlet simply needs a precedent.
There is ample evidence in the play, of course, that suggests Hamlet is motivated or at least inspired by the exemplary conduct of his peers. [End Page 423] Upon learning of Fortinbras's ability to rouse his country to arms, Hamlet ruminates, "Examples gross as earth exhort me: / Witness this army of such mass and charge, / Led by a delicate and tender prince" (H, 4.4.47-49). Not Fortinbras, however, but Laertes has the potential to stir Hamlet to action, given their parallel roles in the play. Following the confrontation between the two during the graveyard scene, Hamlet tells Horatio that "to Laertes I forgot myself, / For by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his" (H, 5.2.76-78). But if Laertes is the character who provides Hamlet with the stimulus to action, Hamlet himself is the object of Laertes's revenge-act: given the logic of Hamlet's behaviorism--that the example of revenge is a necessary condition for Hamlet's motivation--the paradoxical implication is that for Hamlet to realize the ghost's command, Laertes must prosecute his own self-appointed duty, even though the achievement of the latter action would obviously preclude the achievement of the former. The murders unfold fittingly, for the point at which Laertes furnishes Hamlet with Hamlet's much-needed revenge-precedent--the moment Laertes wounds him--is followed by his successful wounding of Claudius.
Thus far I have been focusing on Hamlet's behaviorism and its relationship to the theological construal of the role of habit in sinful conduct. I would like to draw attention to one important passage in the play which suggests a different, but no less counter-intuitive, understanding of the mental-behavioral transaction, describable along the lines of a functionalist theory of thought. Functionalism refers to the most widely accepted theory of mind/body interactionism, introduced by Hilary Putnam in the 1960s as an alternative to crude behaviorism and identity theories (which suggest that mental states are equivalent to physical states, that a certain pain can be identified with certain brain states). Functionalists believe that identity theories are species- and biologically-chauvinist, for it is possible for two individuals with different physiologies to experience similar mental events. For functionalists, the mind mediates stimuli and responses as a function would coordinate the relationship between inputs and outputs in any given system. Minds are compared to computer programs or software rather than structural states or computer hardware, since different structural configurations can produce identical psychologically functional states. William Lycan writes that "what matters is function, not functionary; program, not realizing stuff; software, not hardware; role, not occupant."
70Although functionalism is a contemporary mind/body theory, relying on analogues to machine-states and computer programs to explain mental types, recent debates have suggested that Aristotle's hylomorphic [End Page 424] theory of form/content is conceived along functionalist lines. Defenders of Aristotelian functionalism suggest that for Aristotle the relationship between the shape (form) and bronze (matter) which produces a certain artifact (for instance, a statue) is a contingent relation, for the matter might have been transformed into a different shape and the shape realized within a different content, just as psychological states do not require for their realization a particular material base.
71 If Aristotle's theory of form and matter is accepted as a functionalist theory, then it seems likely that Renaissance Aristotelian theories of the mind/body relation are potentially describable as functionalist (as I suggest below), and that Hamlet might be implicated in a functionalist tradition in addition to the behaviorist tradition I have been discussing.
Consider the description the Gentleman offers of Ophelia's opaque behavior displayed in front of an unspecified crowd. I quote the passage nearly in full, as it is suggestive of the difference between Hamlet's perception of behavior and his peers':
She . . . hems, and beats her heart, Spurns enviously at straws, speaks things in doubt That carry but half sense. Her speech is nothing, Yet the unshapéd use of it doth move The hearers to collection; they yawn at it, And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts, Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them, Indeed would make one think there might be thought . . .
(H, 4.5.4-12)
This passage's commentary on behaviorism is remarkably different from the kind of behaviorism evidenced by Hamlet. Rather than suggest that mental predicates are logically equivalent to behavioral acts or dispositions, the passage suggests that multiple psychological states can be associated with one or more sets of overt actions. Each on-looker is able to infer Ophelia's mental state based on his or her own introspectible mental state, and each person's mental state is naturally different from every other person's mental state. Each on-looker believes that a causal nexus exists between Ophelia's unobservable interior and her dispositions, although each can only understand that causal relationship by imagining the kind of inner turmoil he or she would need to undergo in order to produce the kind of wayward behavior Ophelia manifests. Furthermore, what is missing in this passage is any determination on the part of either the Gentleman or the crowd to define the nature of Ophelia's illness, to locate the immediate causes or origins of her [End Page 425] conduct (by origins I mean not the series of prior events which have contributed to Ophelia's condition, but the "location" of her condition in her mind or body, the immediate causative factors). I stress that what the on-lookers experience is not simply characterizable as empathy. What domesticates Ophelia's behavior and makes it interpretable is the common recognition that her behavior, call it x, functions to vent a certain passion, call it y. While an on-looker cannot understand Ophelia's particular x and y, he can understand his own private equivalents to x and y, based on a common understanding of the way x and y relate and on the function they serve.
If we turn to the graveyard scene in the play, we can see how Hamlet's understanding of the mind/matter transaction is sharply different from that conveyed in the Gentleman's description of Ophelia (which itself is a modification of Putnam's account, since it is not concerned with brain states, but simply the causal nexus between thoughts and actions). After remarking on the deteriorated condition of Yorick's skull, Hamlet exclaims to Horatio,
To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Al- exander till 'a find it stopping a bunghole? . . . . . to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it. As thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexan- der returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer barrel?
(H, 5.1.203-12)
The first thing to note about this speech is that it is radically un-Cartesian: neglecting to mention any irreducible, immaterial, or disembodied human soul or spirit, Hamlet suggests that radically transformed monistic substance can be put to a variety of perfunctory and menial uses, most of which are defections from the function the substance as human constitution had originally performed.
But what is most interesting about these lines is that while a functionalist would suggest that there is no specifiable substance required to maintain a particular function or psychological state, Hamlet suggests that there is no one function to which human substance can be put, that the difference between Alexander functioning as a statesman and Alexander functioning as a beer-barrel stop is simply a difference in degree and not in kind. Hamlet seems not to realize that what enables [End Page 426] human beings to function in particular capacities is the mediating role their minds play in connecting the internal and external world, regardless of how minds are constituted. The important point is that Hamlet doesn't misapprehend what a mind is as much as what a mind does. What he misunderstands is that the goals and ends of the beer-barrel plug do not include the goals and ends of persons, inasmuch as the achievement of specifically human ends requires psychological states which include human-specific attributes like sensory-capacities, propositional attitudes and emotional states. Hamlet's non-functional understanding of mental states follows logically from his radical behaviorism, for without any strong belief in the existence of unrealized psychological attitudes, there exists for him no clear causal nexus among physical, mental, and behavioral happenings.
A more detailed discussion of Renaissance functionalism is beyond our range here, but a closer analysis of some other texts might reveal that early modern theories of the mind and subjective states were often conceived not solely in terms of their privacy, secretness, or inaccessibility, nor in terms of their distinction from bodies, behavior, or the outer world, but simply in terms of their use and contingent relationship with various physical states. It might reveal that minds are, as Martha Nussbaum and Hilary Putnam have suggested, "compositionally plastic," understandable on the basis of their life-function for the subject.
72 To take one example: Pietro Pomponazzi, who is usually considered a forerunner of Descartes (since he rejected Averroes's belief in a world-soul or agent-intellect in favor of a belief in the existence of subjective thought), sounds loosely functionalist in this passage from De immortalitate animae:
knowing is not located in any particular part of the body but in the whole body taken categorematically. For it is not located in any particular part, since then the intellect would be organic, and would either not know all forms, or, if it did, it would, like the cogitative soul, know them only as singulars and not as universals. Wherefore just as the intellect is in the whole body, so also is knowing.
73When Pomponazzi writes that knowing is defined in the body, he offers a relationistic or holistic understanding of thinking. To say that "knowing is in the whole body" is not to say that the body knows, or that knowing occurs within, but that knowing is the sum total of all the interactions and functions inhering between form and matter that are integral to the biological economy of the individual. Now this in itself does not make Pomponazzi a hard functionalist, but his position logically entails an [End Page 427] anti-reductive account of cognition along hard functionalist lines, because once he commits knowing to the body, given the basic Aristotelian belief that matter is constantly changing, it would follow that knowing does not require an unchanging material substrate.
Another early modern text which invites consideration along functionalist lines is Donne's Of the Progress of the Soul: "her pure and eloquent blood / Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, / That one might almost say, her body thought."
74 By placing thought in the body in this Pomponazzi-like way, Donne has privileged neither mind nor body, for in his egalitarian conception of his lady's body, "though the elements and humours were / In her, one could not say, this governs there" (P, 291.135-36). Part of the reason Donne refuses to distinguish minds from bodies or internal from external states in these lines is that he believes that what confers on thought and selfhood its uniqueness is its function or "use," even though he cannot determine what this function is: "What hope have we to know ourselves, when we / Know not the least things, which for our use be?" (P, 294.279-80). For Donne, an understanding of thoughts and minds follows from an understanding not of their place, privacy, or incorrigibility, but simply of the contingent ways in which they function in relation to bodies and the external world.
I hope to have at least suggested that this sort of mind/body relationship appears in Hamlet. What this paper has less provisionally argued is that there is no sufficient evidence that Hamlet anticipates Cartesian dualism or any of the varying innatist or idealist philosophies critics have traditionally attributed to it. Nor is the play suggestive of a "transitional" and hence fragmented subjectivity or of a "nothingness" which Hamlet finds when he gazes inward. Hamlet inherits a widely-held Augustinian-Protestant preoccupation with the tortured relationship among habit, sin, and action. If there is any incredible objective correlative operating in the play, it describes Hamlet's over-indulgence in, and misconstrual of, this tradition, which recognized the utility of retaining virtuous patterns of conduct as correctives to customary sin.
Lafayette College
Notes
* I would like to thank Anna Siomopoulos and Richard Strier for helpful comments on this essay.
1. Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), 76-77.
2. See Richard Rorty, Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), chap. 1; Martin Carrier and Jurgen Mittelstrass, Mind, Brain, Behavior: The Mind/Body Problem and the Philosophy of Psychology (Berlin: Walter de Gruyer, 1995); and Erik Ostenfeld, Ancient Greek Psychology and the Modern Mind/Body Debate (Denmark: Aarhus Univ. Press, 1987). For a brief discussion of the Renaissance philosophy of mind in historical context see Heinz Heimsoeth, The Six Great Themes of Western Metaphysics and The End of the Middle Ages, trans. Ramon J. Betanzos (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1994), 110-51.
3. Blackwell's Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, ed. Samuel Guttenplan (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1994), 337.
4. Richard H. Popkin, History of Skepticism From Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979).
5. William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1604), ed. David Bevington (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), 3.2.364-65. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by act, scene, and line numbers, and abbreviated H.
6. For Parfit's radical conception of personhood as successive selves see Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
7. For some recent accounts of Renaissance inwardness and subjectivity, see Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995); Anne Ferry, The "Inward" Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1983); Joel Fineman, The Subjectivity Effect in the Western Literary Tradition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991); Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), particularly chap. 2; and Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985).
8. A. P. Rossiter, Angel With Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1961), 187.
9. Rossiter, 172.
10. Rossiter, 185.
11. William Kerrigan, Hamlet's Perfection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991), 65.
12. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body (London: Methuen and Co., 1984), 36.
13. Barker, 37.
14. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (London: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1986), 74.
15. Lena Ashwell, "Reflexions from Shakespeare" (1923), in Readings on the Character of Hamlet, ed. Claude C. H. Williamson (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1950), 423.
16. George Santayana, "Obiter Scripta" (1936), in Readings, 639.
17. Ivan Turgenev, quoted in L. C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes and An Approach to Hamlet (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1959), 198.
18. Maus, 1.
19. Ferry, 6.
20. Maus, 4.
21. Ernst Tugendhat, Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination, trans. Paul Stern (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 27.
22. See Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967), 148.
23. Pelagius's Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, trans. Theodore de Bruyn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 103-4.
24. Brown, Augustine of Hippo, 170.
25. Brown, "Pelagius and His Supporters: Aims and Environment," Journal of Theological Studies, n. s., 19, no. 1 (1968): 104.
26. St. Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Penguin, 1961), 164.
27. St. Augustine, Confessions, 172.
28. St. Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1993), 106.
29. William Ames, The Marrow of Theology (1642), trans. John D. Eusden (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1968), 123.
30. Thomas Goodwin, The Aggravation of Sinne (1637), in The Works of Thomas Goodwin, ed. John C. Miller and Robert Halley, 12 vols. (Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1864), 4:158.
31. William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (1608), in Works, vol. 2, ed. T. Pickering (London: John Legatt, 1631), 3.
32. Perkins, A Commentarie or Exposition Upon the Five First Chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians (1604), in Works, 2:376.
33. Jeremy Taylor, Unum Necessarium (1655), in The Whole Works of the Right Reverend Jeremy Taylor, 10 vols. (London: Longman, 1861), 7:152.
34. Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (1678), in The Practical Works of The Reverend Richard Baxter, ed. William Orme, 23 vols. (London: James Duncan, 1830), 2:531.
35. I am assuming that Shakespeare had been sorting through these Augustinian theological niceties in advance of the full-scale preoccupation with sinful habituation that begins in the early decades of the seventeenth century. But given the Augustinian background on the subject of sinful habituation, I would describe Shakespeare as precocious but certainly not prophetic in his handling of the nuances of the theology of habit before the subject exercises the imagination of post-Elizabethan English Calvinists.
36. Sir Edmund K. Chambers, "Hamlet" (1894), in Readings, 189.
37. For one notable exception see Dean Frye, "Custom and Utterance in Hamlet," in Literature and Ethics, ed. Gary Wihl and David Williams (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1988).
38. A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (London: MacMillan & Co., 1965), 85.
39. J. C. Bucknill, The Mad Folk of Shakespeare (1867), in Readings, 114.
40. William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespeare's Plays (1818), in Readings, 48.
41. Dr. Maudsley, "Body and Mind" (1875), in Readings, 135.
42. Rev. C. E. Moberly, "Introduction to Hamlet" (1873), in Readings, 123.
43. Wylie Sypher, The Ethic of Time Structures of Experience in Shakespeare (New York: Seabury Press, 1976), 69. For a discussion of Hamlet's role-playing see David Leverenz, "The Woman in Hamlet: An Interpersonal View," in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murray M. Schwarz and Coppelia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980).
44. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers (New York: Methuen, 1987).
45. Aristotle, from De memoria et reminiscentia, chap. 2, quoted in Howard C. Warren, A History of Association Psychology (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1921), 25.
46. Juan Luis Vives, from Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima (1555), quoted in Warren, 31.
47. René Descartes, Treatise of Man (1662), trans. Thomas Steel Hall (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), 90.
48. Thomas Hobbes, Human Nature and De Corpore Politico (1650; Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994), 17.
49. Michel de Montaigne, "Of Custom, and That We Should Not Easily Change a Law Received" (1595), in The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, ed. and trans. Jacob Zeitlin, 3 vols. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1934), 1:95.
50. Pascal, from Pensées (1670), quoted in Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990), 48.
51. Descartes, from The Passions of The Soul (1649), quoted in Vance G. Morgan, Foundations of Cartesian Ethics (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994), 168.
52. Jon Elster, Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press), 56.
53. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1949), 19.
54. Ryle, 20.
55. Ryle, 87.
56. Ryle, 90.
57. Ryle, 43. For an informative discussion of Ryle's theory of dispositional properties see D. M. Armstrong, "The Nature of Mind," in Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, ed. Ned Block (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), vol. 1.
58. Bradley, quoted in John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1935), 245.
59. Wilson, 246.
60. Étienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: Octagon Books, 1983), 256.
61. Taylor, 166.
62. Jonathan Edwards, Original Sin (1758), in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, ed. Clyde A. Holbrook, 17 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), 3:405.
63. Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993); John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct: An Introduction to Social Psychology (New York: The Modern Library, 1922), 24.
64. Dewey, 24-25.
65. John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624; Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1959), 149.
66. Ames, 224.
67. Lancelot Andrewes, from Ninety-Six Sermons (1606), quoted in Jonathan F. S. Post, Henry Vaughan: The Unfolding Vision (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982), 79.
68. Descartes, from The Passions of The Soul, quoted in John Cottingham, "Partiality and the Virtues," in How Should One Live? Essays on the Virtues, ed. Roger Crisp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 71.
69. Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V (1597), in The Works, ed. John Keble, 3 vols. (1888; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 2:309-11, 392-93.
70. William G. Lycan, Consciousness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 38.
71. See S. Marc Cohen, "Hylomorphism and Functionalism," in Essays on Aristotle's De Anima, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
72. Nussbaum and Putnam, "Changing Aristotle's Mind," in Essays on Aristotle's De Anima, 33.
73. Pietro Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae (1516), trans. William Henry Hay II, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1948), 334.
74. Donne, "Of the Progress of the Soul" (1612), in The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (London: Penguin Books, 1971), 294, lines 244-46. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text by page and line numbers and abbreviated P.
