Abstract
This article examines Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy in Hamlet not merely as a philosophical problem but as an artistic and poetic scene of existence. Hamlet’s inner monologue is less a choice between life and death than a dramatic expression of the human mind turning inward, multiplying questions upon itself. In light of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, Sartre’s notions of freedom and nothingness, and Camus’ philosophy of the absurd, the soliloquy is read as an aesthetic unfolding of the ontological tension between consciousness, fear, imagination, and action.
Introduction: The Mind as a Stage for the Question
Shakespeare’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy stages one of humanity’s simplest yet most profound questions. This question is not merely a choice between living or dying; it marks the moment in which the human mind transforms itself into a stage upon which existence is judged. Within this stage, Hamlet’s voice resonates simultaneously as subject and witness. For the first time, the human being externalizes existence and observes it as a problem.
Thus, the soliloquy is less a dramatic hesitation than an ontological intensification. Human beings sense the weight of being; life appears as a fate to be endured, while death remains uncertain, preserving its ambiguity as a possible escape.
The Burden of Being and the Experience of Thrownness
The pains enumerated by Hamlet iniquity, tyranny, humiliation, unrequited love, delayed justice are not merely personal but historical and universal. This list recalls the condition of being “thrown” into the world. As Heidegger’s concept of Geworfenheit suggests, the human being finds itself in a world not of its own choosing, yet is compelled to choose within it.
Being here is not a gift but a burden to be carried. Hamlet’s hesitation marks the breaking point of a consciousness that feels this weight. To live is not merely to persist, but to remain continuously exposed to suffering. Paradoxically, however, this suffering becomes the sole certainty of existence.
Nothingness and Death: Thresholds in the Poetics of the Unknown
Hamlet likens death to sleep, a suspension of consciousness and a resting of the body. Shakespeare’s genius lies in immediately undermining this metaphor: sleep brings dreams. At this moment, death ceases to be absolute nothingness and becomes a realm filled with unknown images.
According to Sartre, nothingness emerges from within human consciousness. The human being is liberated through thinking nothingness, yet simultaneously paralyzed by it. Hamlet’s fear is not of nonexistence itself, but of not knowing how existence might continue after death. Death is not an end but a transformation whose meaning remains indeterminate.
Thus, the metaphor of the “undiscovered country” represents not only a geographical unknown, but an ontological threshold where the meaning of being dissolves.
Suspended Will Between Consciousness and Action
One of the most striking aspects of the soliloquy is the destructive effect of thought upon action. Hamlet reflects on how conscience and reflection weaken resolve. Here, conscience functions less as a moral guide than as a consciousness dispersed by the infinity of possibilities.
As Sartre emphasizes, the human being is condemned to freedom; yet this freedom renders every action simultaneously possible and impossible. Hamlet’s inaction is not cowardice, but an ontological pause produced by excessive clarity of thought. The more one thinks, the less one moves.
The Soliloquy as Art: The Aestheticization of Suffering and Performance
Hamlet’s monologue reveals the primary ontological function of art: Art does not eliminate suffering; it gives it form. Once suffering acquires form, it is distilled into thought, and thought provides the “aesthetic distance” necessary for the individual to observe their own existence from the outside. By transforming a personal cry of despair into a universal grammar, Shakespeare allows human beings to witness their own being as if it were a work of art.
This aesthetic form, constructed by Hamlet through language, finds a visceral, bodily manifestation in the practice of Marina Abramović. While Hamlet aestheticizes suffering through a “thought-body,” Abramović transforms her “flesh body” into a living art object amidst profound silence.
The artist’s 1974 performance, Rhythm 0, serves as the ultimate physical realization of Hamlet’s endurance against the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” The 72 objects placed on a table ranging from innocent tools like a rose or a feather to lethal instruments like a knife and a loaded gun are the physical manifestations of the “inventory of cruelty” present in Hamlet’s mind. By standing motionless for six hours and surrendering her agency to the public, Abramović embodies the sheer weight of existence.
As the performance progressed, the events unfolded like a manifestation of the chaotic disintegration within Hamlet’s psyche. What began with gentle gestures, the touch of a feather, the scent of a rose rapidly descended into a collective savagery that mirrored the “dark dreams” of Hamlet’s restless sleep. Her clothes were shredded with razor blades, her skin was cut, and the atmosphere grew heavy with the palpable threat of the void. The climax of this existential ordeal arrived when a loaded gun was pressed against her temple, the cold steel representing the final threshold of “not being.”
Here, an aesthetic displacement occurs:
- While Hamlet is mentally exposed to the “pangs of dispriz’d love” and “the oppressor’s wrong,” Abramović renders her physical body the concrete target of this “outrageous fortune.”
- Hamlet’s internal “dreams” of death become Abramović’s external reality as the dark impulses of the audience (humanity) are awakened by her stillness.
However, in both instances, the moment suffering becomes a “performance,” the subject gains a form of sovereignty over their own pain. Hamlet’s words are as sharp as Abramović’s silence is formal. When pain acquires form on a stage or within a performance space, we reach that distanced vantage point from which Hamlet observes Yorick’s skull: existence, despite all its horror, becomes “observable.”
Abramović’s later work, The Artist is Present (2010), represents the final spatialization of Hamlet’s soliloquy. Sitting in a chair for weeks on end, doing nothing, converts the agony of Hamlet’s inability to act into a state of “active waiting” and high art.
“To do nothing is the most difficult thing to do. When you do nothing, time and being take hold of you in all their nakedness.” — Marina Abramović
Ultimately, both Hamlet’s monologue and Abramović’s inaction create a mirror in which humanity can observe its own state of “being unable to be.” Art, in this sense, is not an escape, but a tool of distance that renders the crushing weight of existence bearable.
Figure 1: Marina Abramović, Rhythm 0 (1974)
A harrowing manifestation of Hamlet’s ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.’ In this performance, Abramović surrenders her agency to the public, enduring six hours of escalating vulnerability. The loaded gun pressed against her temple serves as the ultimate physical threshold of ‘not being,’ transforming existential dread into a palpable, visceral art form.
Hamlet’s Hesitation as a Collective Experience: Contemporary Humans, Action, and Suspended Existence
In Shakespeare’s text, Hamlet’s hesitation appears as the dramatic expression of an individual crisis of consciousness. In the contemporary world, however, this hesitation transcends the individual and becomes a collective mode of existence. Modern humans are no longer singular Hamlets; hesitation has spread across everyday life, normalized and rendered nearly invisible.
For contemporary subjects, the question “to be or not to be” no longer refers directly to life and death. Instead, it resonates within the ambiguous threshold between acting and suspending action, participating and withdrawing, appearing and disappearing. Hamlet’s momentary pause becomes a continuous condition of modern existence.
Psychologically, this collective hesitation manifests as decision fatigue, procrastination, and emotional numbness. Constant information flow, perpetual evaluation, and performance pressure weaken the capacity for action. Humans now confront not the arrows of fate, but the multiplicity of possibilities generated by their own minds. This multiplicity postpones action rather than enabling it.
In this context, “not being able to act” is not a failure but a structural consequence of contemporary existence. The human being does not cease to exist, but holds existence in a state of potentiality. Hamlet’s fear of the unknown is transformed into a strategy of avoiding uncertainty. Inaction thus becomes not passive absence, but a protective mode of being.
Representations of Collective Hesitation in Contemporary Art
Contemporary art renders this collective hesitation visible, most often through the body. In performance art, prolonged stillness, repetitive gestures, and unfinished actions produce a temporal experience in which decision is suspended. The body ceases to function as an acting subject and becomes a surface that bears the weight of time.
In sculpture and installation, the body is frequently fragmented, diminished, or represented through absence. Empty garments, hollowed forms, and dispersed bodily traces materialize the distanced relationship contemporary humans maintain with their own existence. In these representations, the body no longer occupies the center of being but becomes a marker of absence and suspension.
In fashion design, collective hesitation manifests through the disappearance of the body within the silhouette. Voluminous forms, obscuring layers, and sculptural structures transform clothing into autonomous entities while relegating the body to the background. Here, “being” is expressed not through bodily visibility, but through bodily withdrawal. Fashion thus shifts from celebrating the body to aestheticizing its absence.
An aesthetic manifestation of bodily withdrawal designed by Neslihan Haciomeroglu
This silhouette embodies the ‘collective hesitation’ discussed in Section 6, where the body is relegated to the background behind voluminous layers, transforming clothing into an autonomous entity of suspension.
Art, Inaction, and Quiet Resistance
Within contemporary art, Hamlet’s hesitation is reinterpreted not as weakness but as a critical strategy. In a world that demands constant productivity, visibility, and performance, the contemporary body develops resistance through inaction.
In this sense, inaction is not passivity but a conscious or intuitive form of opposition. By withdrawing from action, the body creates space for thought. Hamlet’s silence on stage expands in contemporary art to encompass space, time, and clothing. Art does not offer solutions here; instead, it renders visible the suspended condition of existence.
Between “Being” and “Not Being Able to Be”:
The Place of Human Psychology and Its Artistic Reflections
The question “to be or not to be” does not operate in human psychology as a simple opposition between existence and nonexistence. On a deeper level, it expresses the tense relationship the subject maintains with its own unrealized potentials. Human beings often live under the weight of what they have failed to become; unfulfilled desires, postponed decisions, and suspended identities silently shape the self.
Psychologically, “not being able to be” is not a pathological deficiency, but a natural consequence of reflective existence. As the human being becomes aware of multiple possibilities, it can no longer settle into a single, fixed identity. This awareness produces an internal division: on one side, a self that desires action; on the other, a consciousness that retreats under the pressure of possible outcomes. Hamlet’s conflict can be read as an early and dramatic representation of this division.
Independent of Freudian repression or Lacanian lack, Hamlet’s hesitation anticipates the anxiety structures described by modern psychology. Yet here, anxiety is not an individual disorder, but an inevitable byproduct of thinking itself. The more the human being reflects, the more possibilities emerge and each possibility carries with it the weight of another form of “not being able to be.”
From this perspective, “not being able to be” signals not failure, but the depth of consciousness. Hamlet’s psychological tension is a resistance to being reduced to a single act or decision. He does not choose inaction; he suspends meaning.
Art becomes the primary space in which this psychological suspension is made visible. Erased faces in painting, fragmented bodies in sculpture, unfinished gestures in performance all translate the divided relationship between the subject and the self into aesthetic form. Art renders the condition of “not being able to be” visible, shareable, and thinkable.
Thus, the absence or fragmentation of the body in contemporary art is not merely a formal strategy, but the expression of a psychological state. The body ceases to function as a stable center of subjectivity and becomes a space continuously deferred by consciousness. “Being” shifts from bodily certainty to mental potentiality.
Hamlet’s hesitation thereby transcends individual tragedy and becomes a universal psychological condition: the human being both desires to be and fears the consequences of being. This tension constitutes the fundamental psychological structure of the contemporary subject.
Conclusion: The Artistic Memory of Collective Hesitation
The question “to be or not to be” has evolved from an individual inner voice into a collective consciousness. Hamlet’s hesitation persists within contemporary actions, bodies, and artistic representations.
Modern humans are neither fully present nor entirely absent; they experience existence as suspended. Art, performance, and fashion give form to this suspension, producing a memory of contemporary existence. Shakespeare’s soliloquy remains relevant because humanity’s relationship with hesitation has not disappeared; it has merely changed form.
This article has sought to read the collective hesitation of contemporary humans through art and the body, beginning with Hamlet’s individual tragedy. In the contemporary context, “to be or not to be” becomes the question of whether to act or to remain within suspended potentiality.
It was so interesting, Thanks for the article.