Reason In Hamlet

Human being is polarized by reason and emotion. These two poles differ in all aspects, while both are gathered in man. Hamlet, the protagonist of Shakespeares greatest work, is the sample of this polarization.

The emphasis in Hamlet on the control or moderation of emotion by reason is so insistent that many critics have addressed it. A seminal study is undertaken by Lily Bess Campbell in Shakespeare 's Tragic Heroes, Slaves of Passion. John S. Wilks, in a masterful of examination of conscience, explores "the subsidence in Hamlet of virulent passion," and notes "his accession to a renewed temperance" achieved through "chastened self-control" (The Discourse of Reason: Justice and the Erroneous Conscience in Hamlet 139, 140). Shakespeare, thorough
The role of reason in provoking emotion appears most clearly in the Aristotelian-Thomist notion of sorrow, a passion which Aquinas generically defines as "pain ... which is caused by an interior apprehension" for act of mental awareness] (I-II, q. 35, a. 2, resp.). Aquinas distinguished two kinds of pain-outward and inward. The first is sensory; the second (which causes sorrow) is mental: "outward pain arises from an apprehension of sense, and especially of touch, while inward pain arises from an interior apprehension, of the imagination or of the reason" (I-II, q. 35, a. 7, resp.). Since outward pain is apprehended by the senses (a faculty which all animals possess), while inward pain is perceived by the mind (the distinguishing attribute of man), inward pain is more intense than outward: "inward pain surpasses outward pain ... because the apprehension of reason and imagination is of a higher order than the apprehension of the sense of touch" (I-II, q. 35, a. 7, resp.). That is, the greater intensity of inward pain, in comparison with outward pain, results from the fact that, unlike outward pain, inward pain is not a sensory, but a mental event. Construed as a feeling, inward pain is registered in the heart: "And I am sick at heart" (1.1.9). But it is equally appropriate to locate inward pain "in the mind" (3.1.57); for without thought (i.e. the operation of reason or imagination),
. . future misfortunes are feared, and fear of this kind is called anxiety" (I-II, q. 42, a. 4, resp.). Another name for this type of inward pain is perplexity: "anxiety which weighs on the mind, so as to make escape seem impossible ... is also called perplexity" (I-II, q. 35, a. 8, resp.). The first scene of Hamlet dramatizes a world charged with precisely this kind of anxiety or perplexity, with respect to "the omen coming on" ( 1.1126). Here, that which is unforeseeable pertains to "future misfortunes" (to requote Aquinas ' term), which are independent of the mind, and can be neither anticipated nor deflected by it. But the most celebrated expression in the play of anxiety or perplexity regarding the inability to escape future misfortunes is the "To be" soliloquy, which concerns the inward pain caused by apprehending the inevitability of "outrageous fortune" (3.1.58). In that soliloquy, anxiety or perplexity (in the Thomist sense of these terms) regarding future misfortunes in life is compounded by anxiety or perplexity regarding future misfortunes in death: "For in sleep of death what dreams may come"