Philosophize This! – Episode #243: Hamlet – William Shakespeare

Host: Stephen West
Date: December 27, 2025

Brief Overview

In this episode, Stephen West examines William Shakespeare's Hamlet through a deeply philosophical lens, focusing particularly on the interpretations of Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster from their book Stay Illusion: The Hamlet Doctrine. Rather than a conventional literary analysis, West encourages listeners to approach Hamlet as a text brimming with philosophical questions—about knowledge, action, surveillance, moral paralysis, and the meaning of love and tragedy.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Reading Hamlet Like a Philosopher

• Inspirational Approach: West presents the goal of reading Hamlet in a way that "shakes something up in people" (01:55), discouraging the generic “biscuit box Shakespeare” approach.
• Philosophical Challenge: What if we see Hamlet not just as a classic literature staple, but as a work that exposes and destabilizes our comfortable ideas about action, morality, and identity?

2. Plot Recap with Philosophical Framing

• Opening Events: The play starts with guards seeing a ghost that resembles the recently deceased king. They alert Hamlet, who learns the ghost claims to be his murdered father, urging Hamlet to seek revenge (05:30).
• Hamlet’s Predicament: Hamlet is paralyzed by doubt—not only about the ghost's reliability but about his own moral responsibility, and whether any action can be truly justified.

3. Traditional Reading: Hamlet and Renaissance Humanism

• Historical Context: Shakespeare is framed as working in the aftermath of the Middle Ages and the rise of Renaissance humanism, "painfully aware of the collision of ideas" (13:15).
• Moral Psychology: Hamlet’s indecision is portrayed as a symptom of living after the collapse of clear-cut medieval morality—now, individuals must “think our way to moral answers all on our own” (14:24).
• To Be or Not To Be: The iconic soliloquy is discussed as the emblem of existential second-guessing and internal conflict in the modern psyche.

4. Critchley & Webster’s Reading: The Hamlet Doctrine

• Nietzsche’s Influence: They draw on Nietzsche:

  "Knowledge kills action. Action requires the veil of illusion. It is this lesson which Hamlet teaches." —Nietzsche, quoted by host (17:45)

• The Anti-Oedipus:
  • Contrasting Hamlet’s paralyzing insight with Oedipus’ ignorant action:

  "Oedipus acts in ignorance; Hamlet knows too much to act." (21:40)

• Paralysis Through Knowledge:
  • Hamlet is not indecisive due to lack of will, but because he sees through all moral justifications, suspecting they are self-serving illusions.
  • He's trapped: unable to move forward, unable to accept or integrate traumatic knowledge, and unable to act because he knows any action is ultimately rationalized after the fact.

✦ Memorable Quote

• “Knowledge here has killed action. And action requires the veil of illusion. To Nietzsche, Hamlet is just someone who sees through this game we play with morality when it comes to every possible choice we make.” (18:19)

5. Surveillance and Self-Surveillance

• Elizabethan Context: The period is described as the genesis of the surveillance state, rife with espionage, censorship, and double agents (29:18).
• Philosophical Intensification: Critchley and Webster argue that:

  "Hamlet’s world is a globe defined by the omnipresence of espionage, of which his self-surveillance is but a mirror… arguably the drama of surveillance in a police state." (32:10)

• Link to Modernity:
  • The play’s atmosphere of spying mirrors modern digital surveillance and the neurotic self-monitoring it produces.

✦ Notable Quote

• “…if external surveillance like this produces a kind of neuroticism in people… how do all the varying forms of tracking and surveillance that we live immersed in every day affect people’s behavior in ways that aren’t obvious?” (34:20)

6. Ophelia as True Tragic Hero

• Plot Point: After Hamlet kills Polonius (Ophelia’s father), Ophelia is driven into madness and, soon after, drowns—possibly by suicide (43:00).
• Traditional Reading: Ophelia symbolizes innocence lost to the corruption of others.
• Critchley & Webster’s Radical Take:
  • Ophelia is akin to Antigone: a woman destroyed by the schemes of those around her, whose final act—her suicide—is the only expression left to her.

  "Webster and Critchley call her death a sort of love act, that her madness and her death become a kind of heroic truth… because they expose what the world has worked so hard to reduce her to." (52:20)

• Theme of Nothingness/Nihilism: The play is "about nothing" in a profound sense: nothingness infects the characters, their choices, and the outcome.

✦ Notable Quote

• “…her madness and her death become a kind of heroic truth in the play because they expose what the world has worked so hard to reduce her to… nothing.” (52:35)

7. Love, Vulnerability, and Hell

• Dostoevsky Quoted:

  "Hell is the inability to love." (54:28)

  • For Hamlet, this is the existential trap: he cannot love because he cannot risk vulnerability, relying instead on endless intellectualization.
• Ophelia’s Inverse:
  • She is forced into vulnerability and ultimately acts—tragically, but authentically—through love.
  • Her story protests the “broken way of living” that prevails in the court (58:12).

8. The Climax: Poison and Death

• Summary of Final Events:
  • Claudius sends Hamlet away with orders for his execution. Hamlet rewrites the orders to execute his betrayers instead and returns.
  • The play ends with near-total annihilation—every principal character except Horatio dies (01:01:00).

9. The Danger of Knowledge

• Knowledge as Ruin:

  “…sometimes the knowledge we most need is the very knowledge that ruins us the most at an existential level and at the level of identity. This is certainly true of Hamlet in the play. When he receives the knowledge about his father from the ghost, it ruins him.” (01:03:00)

• Wider Themes:
  • Each Shakespearean tragedy can be seen as revealing a different trap of knowledge: rhetoric, ideology, and—here—over-analysis.

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Hamlet’s paralysis:

  “Hamlet is someone who's paralyzed. All this… can’t be metabolized… gets transformed through his behavior… into shame, self-loathing, melancholy… Hamlet starts to lash out at all the people around him.” (24:35)

• On the omnipresence of surveillance:

  “What if surveillance is… a structural condition of the play itself, something crucial to… how everything comes to pass?” (33:45)

• On Ophelia’s death:

  “Critchley and Webster call her death a sort of love act, that her madness and her death become a kind of heroic truth in the play…” (52:20)

• On love and vulnerability:

  “Hell is the inability to love.” — Dostoevsky, via Critchley & Webster (54:28)
  “To spend your whole life endlessly thinking up in your own head, needing a rational explanation for everything, just because you're scared… There is one word to describe that sort of life that fits here. Hell.” (55:00)

• On knowledge as ruin:

  “The knowledge we most need is the very knowledge that ruins us the most at an existential level and at the level of identity.” (01:03:00)

Timestamps for Important Segments

• 01:55 – Framing the episode: “reading Hamlet like a philosopher”
• 05:30 – Plot begins: The ghost and Hamlet’s dilemma
• 13:15 – Traditional reading: historical and philosophical context
• 17:45 – Nietzsche’s view: “Knowledge kills action… Hamlet teaches this”
• 21:40 – Hamlet as anti-Oedipus
• 32:10 – Surveillance as a philosophical theme
• 43:00 – Ophelia’s unraveling and death
• 52:20 – Critchley & Webster on Ophelia’s “love act” and the play’s nihilism
• 54:28 – “Hell is the inability to love”
• 01:01:00 – The play’s conclusion and mass death
• 01:03:00 – Final meditation on knowledge and existential peril

Conclusion

Stephen West’s exploration of Hamlet transcends standard literary critique—he uses Hamlet as a launching pad to discuss profound philosophical dilemmas: How does knowledge paralyze action? Is surveillance—of self and others—inescapable? What does it mean to lose the capacity for love? Drawing on Critchley, Webster, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Lacan, West presents Hamlet as a tragedy not just of a Danish prince, but of the modern, self-aware individual, burdened by knowing too much and unable to act or love freely. Ophelia, in this powerful reading, emerges as the play’s true tragic hero—destroyed, yet capable of meaningfully expressing love through her final act.

This episode challenges listeners to see classic literature not just as a relic, but as a living question about our own existential quandaries and societal conditions.