Shakespeare References in Determinism And Freedom In The Age Of Modern Science

This book, which was edited by Sidney Hook, features the thoughts of several philosophers and teachers on the subject of determinism. And it includes a couple of Shakespeare references. The first comes in the book’s first chapter, “The Case For Determinism,” written by Brand Blanshard. Blanshard writes, “‘The quarto and folio editions of mankind’ can follow the argument with fewer lapses than most of us; in the texts of the greatest of all dramas, we are told, there was seldom a blot or erasure; but Ben Jonson added, and no doubt rightly, that there ought to have been a thousand” (p. 28). Here Blanshard refers to Shakespeare’s works, and also to Ben Jonson’s famous line, regarding the idea that Shakespeare never blotted out a line: “Would he had blotted a thousand.” Then John Hospers in “What Means This Freedom?” refers to Hamlet. Hospers writes: “Premeditation, especially when it is so exaggerated as to issue in no action at all, can be the result of neurotic disturbance or what we sometimes call an emotional ‘block,’ which the person inherits from long-past situations. In Hamlet’s revenge on his uncle (I use this example because it is familiar to all of us), there was no lack, but rather a surfeit, of premeditation; his actions were so exquisitely premeditated as to make Freud and Dr. Ernest James look more closely to find out what lay behind them. The very premeditation camouflaged unconscious motives of which Hamlet himself was not aware. I think this is an important point, since it seems that the courts often assume that premeditation is a criterion of responsibility. If failure to kill his uncle had been considered a crime, every court in the land would have convicted Hamlet” (p. 128). Then, a bit later, Hospers writes: “The reasons may be rationalizations camouflaging unconscious motives of which the agent knows nothing. Hamlet gave many reasons for not doing what he felt it was his duty to do: the time was not right, his uncle’s soul might go to heaven, etc. His various ‘reasons’ contradicted one another, and if an overpowering compulsion had not been present, the highly intellectual Hamlet would not have been taken in for a moment by these rationalizations. The real reason, the Oedipal conflict that made his uncle’s crime the accomplishment of his own deepest desire, binding their fates into one and paralyzing him into inaction, was unconscious and of course unknown to him” (p. 129).

Determinism And Freedom In The Age Of Modern Science was published in 1958. The First Collier Books Edition was published in 1961.