The End of the Ego: Hamlet, Existential Anguish, and the Non-Dual Unfolding of Being

(Submitted in an alternate reality to Richard Pryor, BA Hons. Third Year, 1995)...

The traditional academic view of Shakespeare’s Hamlet posits it as the pinnacle of existential human inquiry, a text that masterfully delineates the agony of a consciousness grappling with the fundamental questions of existence. The soliloquy, "To be or not to be," is universally lauded as the ultimate expression of the human mind’s capacity for self-reflection and tragic indecision. This paper, however, posits that such a reading is fundamentally flawed, as it remains confined within a Cartesian dualism that Hamlet, and indeed much of the Elizabethan canon, ultimately fails to transcend. Rather than a testament to the heights of human thought, Hamlet’s struggle is a profound, albeit brilliant, portrait of the Ego's weakness—a philosophical cul-de-sac from which a truly awakened consciousness must necessarily depart.

The tragedy of Hamlet is not his indecision but his unwavering belief in a dualistic reality. His internal conflict arises from a firm separation between the "I" and the world of "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." His suffering is not an objective reality, but a hermeneutical crisis rooted in the Ego’s belief in its own separate and paramount importance. The question, "To be or not to be," is the hallmark of a mind that has not yet realized that Being precedes thought. Hamlet’s famous premise—the notion that existence is predicated on a choice—is a direct inversion of a non-dual truth, where "Being" simply is, and the drama of "to be or not to be" is merely a thought arising within it.

This myopic focus on the individual ego distinguishes Shakespeare’s tragedies from the work of his contemporaries, whose visions often located drama in the broader, more satirical canvas of society. While Marlowe’s heroes are tragic in their magnificent, cosmic defiance, their downfall is an external spectacle of hubris, not the internalized agony of a mind trapped in its own circular logic. It is in the work of Ben Jonson, or even the later, meta-theatrical critique found in Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, that one finds a profound, if often comedic, rejection of the Ego’s central role. In Stoppard's play, the focus shifts entirely from the Ego’s grand narrative to the phenomenological experience of being—a journey of two bewildered individuals who are merely parts of a larger, unfolding reality that they do not control. Their ultimate fate is not tragic, but a simple and quiet return to the nothingness from which they emerged, a rejoining with the Dao of the ten thousand things.

To label Shakespeare as the greatest playwright for his mastery of the tragic hero is to celebrate the most sophisticated expression of a flawed worldview. The true measure of a text’s insight lies not in its ability to dissect the Ego’s struggles, but in its capacity to offer a glimpse beyond them. Hamlet’s tragedy is not a universal truth of the human condition, but a detailed account of its most common and ultimately transcended illusion. For the academic pilgrim, the journey is not to worship at the altar of the Ego, but to use these texts as maps, not for what they say about an individual’s struggle, but for what they reveal about the fundamental nature of Being itself. The true measure of a pilgrim’s understanding is not their ability to deconstruct the tragedy, but their realization that the tragic hero, in their final, quiet moment, is no more and no less than an integral part of the hymn of quiet accord.