I recently have read Hamlet and Macbeth by William Shakespeare. I really enjoyed reading them, especially now that I can understand them better than I did the previous year. But there is one very important thing I noticed. Earlier in our philosophy unit we discussed a long list that included Communitarianism, Nihilism, and much more. Though there is one that I thought was really interesting. After reading Hamlet I decided to do research on Existentialism. And what I found was that Jean- Paul Sarte and others, who adopted Existentialism led an exact reference to one of Hamlet's speeches by Shakespeare. I looked this up to see if this has been discussed and it has, but I still think it's very interesting.
Anyway, the speech I'm talking about, that of course it extremely famous is the "To be or not to be" speech. The thought that humans choices are all from themselves demonstrates itself in this speech. As Hamlet struggles with the decision to kill his uncle but feels burdened by the fact that he was chosen for the murder. So basically Hamlet must make a decision that was forced onto him. Being the idea of Existentialism is that we make our own choice and it's always us, never a higher being (God). So perhaps great Existentialists like Sarte might have adapted this meaning into their thoughts.
I just thought it was a cool comparison and coincidence that we were studying it and I was reading Hamlet at the same time.
No comments:
Post a Comment