Hamlet Concrescing
The Aesthetics of a
Radically Inward Soul
“All that matters is Hamlet’s consciousness of his own consciousness, infinite, unlimited, and at war with itself.”
— Harold Bloom, 2023
A seeing heart is Hamlet’s final identity, which is very different from the grief-filled, almost traumatized prince whom we encounter as the play opens. Shakespeare, the greatest master of representing changes in the soul, created the most mutable of all his protagonists in Hamlet. Each time that he overhears himself, Hamlet changes, and his radical inwardness continues to augment . Insofar as the history of Western consciousness features a perpetually growing inward self, Hamlet is the central figure of the consciousness.
- Harold Bloom, from the introduction to Bloom’s Notes, 1996
— Harold Bloom, 2023
A seeing heart is Hamlet’s final identity, which is very different from the grief-filled, almost traumatized prince whom we encounter as the play opens. Shakespeare, the greatest master of representing changes in the soul, created the most mutable of all his protagonists in Hamlet. Each time that he overhears himself, Hamlet changes, and his radical inwardness continues to augment . Insofar as the history of Western consciousness features a perpetually growing inward self, Hamlet is the central figure of the consciousness.
- Harold Bloom, from the introduction to Bloom’s Notes, 1996
A Radically Inward Soul
Process philosophers often speak of relationality—the idea that we are not self-contained substances but emerge from, and in response to, our relationships with the settled past and the not-yet-decided future. In many cases, the most important of these relationships are with other people, the natural world, imagined futures, and the heavens.
But they can also be relationships with ourselves: with our remembered pasts, our anticipated futures, and our evolving sense of identity. These internal relationships are dynamic. They shift over time as we reinterpret who we have been and who we might become, especially in light of choices we have made—and not made.
Witness Hamlet. His soliloquies are not merely moments of private reflection; they are relational events. He speaks not only to himself but to memory, to possibility, to the ghost of his father, to the imagined judgment of others, to the silence of God, and to death itself. Yet what makes Hamlet especially compelling—and uniquely tragic—is the radical inwardness of this process. His emerging self unfolds in a chamber of extreme interiority. He is not simply reacting to the world; he is digesting it, interrogating it, and confronting it within a space of profound self-awareness. His selfhood is not formed on the surface of action but forged in the depth of reflection.
Hamlet’s crisis is not just interpersonal or political; it is metaphysical and existential. His past presses into his present with unbearable force—his father’s murder, his mother’s swift remarriage, his own moral nausea. And his future is no stable horizon, but a vortex of imagined possibilities—none of them offering clarity or peace. He is suspended in a network of relations—internal and external, remembered and anticipated—and he is painfully aware that who he becomes depends on how he navigates these tensions.
In this way, Hamlet becomes one kind of a process-relational self: a radically inward kind. He does not forge his identity primarily through outward action or social roles, but through inward listening, inward wrestling, and inward speech. His deepest relations are not only with others, but with the echoing chambers of his own memory, imagination, and conscience. If the process-relational self is always a being-in-becoming, then Hamlet shows us what it means to become through solitude, through self-questioning, through sustained interior struggle.
His soliloquies, then, are not failures of decision but acts of composition—attempts to shape something meaningful out of internal contradiction. Whitehead speaks of triviality as a lack of coordination among contrasts, and narrowness as the absence of enriching complexity. Hamlet avoids both. His mind contains multitudes, and he does not seek to suppress the dissonance; he gives it form. His tragedy is not that he fails to act decisively, but that he feels and thinks so deeply that decisive action becomes morally and metaphysically fraught.
This is what gives him his particular kind of integrity. Not a settled wholeness or moral simplicity, but a willingness to live honestly with unresolved tensions. His integrity lies in the aesthetic task of holding complexity together in a way that is not trivial, not reductive, but charged with emotional and ethical depth. He does not resolve his contradictions; he dramatizes them. And in that dramatization, he becomes more fully himself.
Hamlet is not merely a victim of circumstance or a failed avenger. He is a man in process, a soul improvising its way through grief, betrayal, longing, doubt, and dread. His struggle is the struggle of any human being trying to live truthfully in a world of competing demands and inner divisions. And in that struggle, he reveals a deeper truth: that we are formed not only by our relationships with the world around us, but by our relationship with ourselves—with our own pasts, our imagined futures, our broken dreams, and our persistent search for meaning.
In this light, Hamlet’s story is not only a tragedy. It is an invitation: to attend to the inward life with honesty, to refuse easy harmonies, and to seek, in the very act of becoming, a kind of beauty born from contradiction.
But they can also be relationships with ourselves: with our remembered pasts, our anticipated futures, and our evolving sense of identity. These internal relationships are dynamic. They shift over time as we reinterpret who we have been and who we might become, especially in light of choices we have made—and not made.
Witness Hamlet. His soliloquies are not merely moments of private reflection; they are relational events. He speaks not only to himself but to memory, to possibility, to the ghost of his father, to the imagined judgment of others, to the silence of God, and to death itself. Yet what makes Hamlet especially compelling—and uniquely tragic—is the radical inwardness of this process. His emerging self unfolds in a chamber of extreme interiority. He is not simply reacting to the world; he is digesting it, interrogating it, and confronting it within a space of profound self-awareness. His selfhood is not formed on the surface of action but forged in the depth of reflection.
Hamlet’s crisis is not just interpersonal or political; it is metaphysical and existential. His past presses into his present with unbearable force—his father’s murder, his mother’s swift remarriage, his own moral nausea. And his future is no stable horizon, but a vortex of imagined possibilities—none of them offering clarity or peace. He is suspended in a network of relations—internal and external, remembered and anticipated—and he is painfully aware that who he becomes depends on how he navigates these tensions.
In this way, Hamlet becomes one kind of a process-relational self: a radically inward kind. He does not forge his identity primarily through outward action or social roles, but through inward listening, inward wrestling, and inward speech. His deepest relations are not only with others, but with the echoing chambers of his own memory, imagination, and conscience. If the process-relational self is always a being-in-becoming, then Hamlet shows us what it means to become through solitude, through self-questioning, through sustained interior struggle.
His soliloquies, then, are not failures of decision but acts of composition—attempts to shape something meaningful out of internal contradiction. Whitehead speaks of triviality as a lack of coordination among contrasts, and narrowness as the absence of enriching complexity. Hamlet avoids both. His mind contains multitudes, and he does not seek to suppress the dissonance; he gives it form. His tragedy is not that he fails to act decisively, but that he feels and thinks so deeply that decisive action becomes morally and metaphysically fraught.
This is what gives him his particular kind of integrity. Not a settled wholeness or moral simplicity, but a willingness to live honestly with unresolved tensions. His integrity lies in the aesthetic task of holding complexity together in a way that is not trivial, not reductive, but charged with emotional and ethical depth. He does not resolve his contradictions; he dramatizes them. And in that dramatization, he becomes more fully himself.
Hamlet is not merely a victim of circumstance or a failed avenger. He is a man in process, a soul improvising its way through grief, betrayal, longing, doubt, and dread. His struggle is the struggle of any human being trying to live truthfully in a world of competing demands and inner divisions. And in that struggle, he reveals a deeper truth: that we are formed not only by our relationships with the world around us, but by our relationship with ourselves—with our own pasts, our imagined futures, our broken dreams, and our persistent search for meaning.
In this light, Hamlet’s story is not only a tragedy. It is an invitation: to attend to the inward life with honesty, to refuse easy harmonies, and to seek, in the very act of becoming, a kind of beauty born from contradiction.
Hamlet's Soliloquies
Hamlet gives seven soliloquies in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. These soliloquies are windows into his inner life—his doubts, fears, anger, and philosophical reflections. They chart the evolution of Hamlet’s inner world and serve as essential material for your discussion of the aesthetics of integrity, as they reflect the effort to harmonize wide and narrow contrasts without collapse into triviality.
Here's a list of them in order of appearance:
These soliloquies chart the evolution of Hamlet’s inner world and serve as essential material for your discussion of the aesthetics of integrity, as they reflect the effort to harmonize wide and narrow contrasts without collapse into triviality.
Hamlet's Complexity
“The complexity of human motive, the entwinement of its threads, is infinite.”
So writes Whitehead in Adventures of Ideas in the passage above, reflecting on the desire for fame. In his philosophy, a motive is also called a subjective aim—the goal toward which a person strives in seeking some form of satisfaction. His point is that our motives are rarely simple or pure, even if, at a conscious level, we believe they are.
We may think we are seeking the good, while also craving approval from others. We may believe we’re acting out of compassion, while also trying to ease our own discomfort in the face of another’s suffering. We may claim to pursue truth for its own sake, while also longing for control or a sense of superiority.
Few characters dramatize this inner complexity more vividly than Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark. Tasked by his father’s ghost to avenge a murder, Hamlet does not leap into action. Instead, he hesitates, reflects, spirals. His inner world is a tangle of competing aims: love and loathing, loyalty and revulsion, grief and rage, doubt and desire.
At times, Hamlet speaks like a prophet of justice. At others, he is paralyzed by existential despair. He stages a play to “catch the conscience of the king,” but also to delay the weight of choice. He loves Ophelia, then wounds her. He condemns deceit, while weaving plots of his own. His motives are never settled—they are layered, evolving, unresolved.
In Whitehead’s terms, Hamlet is not a fixed character but a concrescing self: a moment-by-moment subject of his own life, shaped by past experiences, present tensions, and possible futures. And changing every time he 'hears himself,' says Harold Bloom. Each scene presents him with a field of subjective aims—some noble, some fearful, some contradictory—and he must integrate or navigate them as best he can. He is not indecisive because he lacks morality, but because he is too full of it: saturated with questions, lures, memories, and meanings that resist simplification.
What Whitehead calls the complexity of human motive reveals the depth of the self as a process: not a static ego, but a becoming entity whose aims are continually reshaped by its relationships and its past. To acknowledge this complexity is not to abandon integrity or self-understanding; it is to deepen them. The very act of recognizing the entangled nature of our motives can be part of the journey toward greater honesty, humility, and alignment with the deepest lures toward goodness and peace that the universe—or God—makes available.
Integrity, then, does not mean the absence of competing motives. It means acknowledging them honestly, resisting the temptation to pretend purity, and being faithful to what feels, in that moment, most responsive to the lure of the good. It means living with the unresolved, and letting the deeper lure of the divine keep shaping the next moment, and the next.
As Hamlet himself says, “What a piece of work is man... infinite in faculty.” What Whitehead helps us see is that the self, like Hamlet, is always mid-sentence—still concrescing, still becoming.
The Aesthetics of Integrity
In Hamlet, we are not offered a portrait of moral simplicity or unbroken resolve. We are offered something subtler, more human, and more difficult: a portrait of integrity amid emotional and existential complexity. Hamlet’s inner life is a site of competing motives, unresolved tensions, and shifting subjective aims. Yet it is precisely this condition—of feeling deeply, thinking reflexively, and refusing to settle for tidy resolutions—that gives the character his moral and aesthetic force.
From a Whiteheadian perspective, integrity is not the absence of inner conflict. It is the ability to sustain awareness of conflicting feelings and aims, to be honest about them, and to form contrasts among them that are not trivial or narrow, but instead harmonized into something of depth and meaning.
Whitehead defines triviality as a lack of coordination among elements in experience—a situation in which contrasts are present but incompatible, and thus incapable of reinforcing or deepening one another. On the other hand, narrowness arises when experience is overly restricted, drawing only from a limited set of elements, excluding wider contrasts that might enrich the moment. Integrity, then, lies in avoiding both extremes. It involves a kind of aesthetic achievement: a coordination of feeling-tones and purposes that are not reductive or simplistic, but are shaped into something with depth, scope, and form—what Whitehead would call harmony.
To live with integrity, as Hamlet at times does, is to undergo a process of aesthetic composition: shaping one’s experience into something that resonates with truth, goodness, and beauty, even if painfully so. It means refusing to suppress the darker or more contradictory aspects of oneself, while also not allowing them to fracture the self into incoherence. It means holding the tensions long enough for something new—a deeper sense of self, or a clearer ethical stance—to emerge.
In this light, Hamlet’s soliloquies are not only philosophical reflections; they are acts of aesthetic integration. They are attempts to transform inner dissonance into forms of speech that carry emotional and moral weight. They offer no easy resolutions, but they are not trivial. They draw from a wide palette of feeling, but they are not scattered. They are, in Whitehead’s terms, harmonies of contrasts—difficult, painful, beautiful—and as such, they model a kind of integrity that is deeply human and ethically compelling.
Death
In the graveyard scene, Hamlet’s encounter with Yorick’s skull is a moment of stark, bodily concrescence—where memory, mortality, affection, and existential dread converge. Holding the skull of the jester he once loved, Hamlet is forced into a confrontation with the insistent particularity of death—not abstract death, but this death, this skull, once filled with laughter and voice. It is a collapse of past joy and present decay into a single, jarring image. The skull is not merely a memento mori; it is a lure for feeling that draws Hamlet into a reflection on the fate of all identity, collapsing distinctions between king and clown. Here, the war within Hamlet quiets into somber amazement: not over what to do, but over what we are. In Whiteheadian terms, this moment is a prehension of the perishing of value—Yorick’s life now reduced to silent bone—and a painful integration of that fact into Hamlet’s becoming.
Hamlet gives seven soliloquies in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. These soliloquies are windows into his inner life—his doubts, fears, anger, and philosophical reflections. They chart the evolution of Hamlet’s inner world and serve as essential material for your discussion of the aesthetics of integrity, as they reflect the effort to harmonize wide and narrow contrasts without collapse into triviality.
Here's a list of them in order of appearance:
- “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt” (Act 1, Scene 2)
— Hamlet expresses his grief and despair over his father’s death and his mother’s quick remarriage. - “O, all you host of heaven! O earth! what else?” (Act 1, Scene 5)
— After the Ghost tells Hamlet about the murder, he reacts with a vow to remember and avenge. - “what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” (Act 2, Scene 2)
— Hamlet berates himself for inaction and is inspired by the visiting actors to set a trap with the play. - “To be, or not to be: that is the question” (Act 3, Scene 1)
— The most famous soliloquy, contemplating suicide and the nature of suffering and existence. - “’Tis now the very witching time of night” (Act 3, Scene 2)
— Hamlet prepares himself for a confrontation with his mother and is overtaken by dark resolve. - “Now might I do it pat, now he is praying” (Act 3, Scene 3)
— Hamlet debates whether to kill Claudius while he prays, deciding to wait for a more “damning” moment. - “How all occasions do inform against me” (Act 4, Scene 4)
— After hearing of Fortinbras’ action, Hamlet reflects on his own delay and resolves to act decisively.
These soliloquies chart the evolution of Hamlet’s inner world and serve as essential material for your discussion of the aesthetics of integrity, as they reflect the effort to harmonize wide and narrow contrasts without collapse into triviality.
Hamlet's Complexity
“The complexity of human motive, the entwinement of its threads, is infinite.”
So writes Whitehead in Adventures of Ideas in the passage above, reflecting on the desire for fame. In his philosophy, a motive is also called a subjective aim—the goal toward which a person strives in seeking some form of satisfaction. His point is that our motives are rarely simple or pure, even if, at a conscious level, we believe they are.
We may think we are seeking the good, while also craving approval from others. We may believe we’re acting out of compassion, while also trying to ease our own discomfort in the face of another’s suffering. We may claim to pursue truth for its own sake, while also longing for control or a sense of superiority.
Few characters dramatize this inner complexity more vividly than Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark. Tasked by his father’s ghost to avenge a murder, Hamlet does not leap into action. Instead, he hesitates, reflects, spirals. His inner world is a tangle of competing aims: love and loathing, loyalty and revulsion, grief and rage, doubt and desire.
At times, Hamlet speaks like a prophet of justice. At others, he is paralyzed by existential despair. He stages a play to “catch the conscience of the king,” but also to delay the weight of choice. He loves Ophelia, then wounds her. He condemns deceit, while weaving plots of his own. His motives are never settled—they are layered, evolving, unresolved.
In Whitehead’s terms, Hamlet is not a fixed character but a concrescing self: a moment-by-moment subject of his own life, shaped by past experiences, present tensions, and possible futures. And changing every time he 'hears himself,' says Harold Bloom. Each scene presents him with a field of subjective aims—some noble, some fearful, some contradictory—and he must integrate or navigate them as best he can. He is not indecisive because he lacks morality, but because he is too full of it: saturated with questions, lures, memories, and meanings that resist simplification.
What Whitehead calls the complexity of human motive reveals the depth of the self as a process: not a static ego, but a becoming entity whose aims are continually reshaped by its relationships and its past. To acknowledge this complexity is not to abandon integrity or self-understanding; it is to deepen them. The very act of recognizing the entangled nature of our motives can be part of the journey toward greater honesty, humility, and alignment with the deepest lures toward goodness and peace that the universe—or God—makes available.
Integrity, then, does not mean the absence of competing motives. It means acknowledging them honestly, resisting the temptation to pretend purity, and being faithful to what feels, in that moment, most responsive to the lure of the good. It means living with the unresolved, and letting the deeper lure of the divine keep shaping the next moment, and the next.
As Hamlet himself says, “What a piece of work is man... infinite in faculty.” What Whitehead helps us see is that the self, like Hamlet, is always mid-sentence—still concrescing, still becoming.
The Aesthetics of Integrity
In Hamlet, we are not offered a portrait of moral simplicity or unbroken resolve. We are offered something subtler, more human, and more difficult: a portrait of integrity amid emotional and existential complexity. Hamlet’s inner life is a site of competing motives, unresolved tensions, and shifting subjective aims. Yet it is precisely this condition—of feeling deeply, thinking reflexively, and refusing to settle for tidy resolutions—that gives the character his moral and aesthetic force.
From a Whiteheadian perspective, integrity is not the absence of inner conflict. It is the ability to sustain awareness of conflicting feelings and aims, to be honest about them, and to form contrasts among them that are not trivial or narrow, but instead harmonized into something of depth and meaning.
Whitehead defines triviality as a lack of coordination among elements in experience—a situation in which contrasts are present but incompatible, and thus incapable of reinforcing or deepening one another. On the other hand, narrowness arises when experience is overly restricted, drawing only from a limited set of elements, excluding wider contrasts that might enrich the moment. Integrity, then, lies in avoiding both extremes. It involves a kind of aesthetic achievement: a coordination of feeling-tones and purposes that are not reductive or simplistic, but are shaped into something with depth, scope, and form—what Whitehead would call harmony.
To live with integrity, as Hamlet at times does, is to undergo a process of aesthetic composition: shaping one’s experience into something that resonates with truth, goodness, and beauty, even if painfully so. It means refusing to suppress the darker or more contradictory aspects of oneself, while also not allowing them to fracture the self into incoherence. It means holding the tensions long enough for something new—a deeper sense of self, or a clearer ethical stance—to emerge.
In this light, Hamlet’s soliloquies are not only philosophical reflections; they are acts of aesthetic integration. They are attempts to transform inner dissonance into forms of speech that carry emotional and moral weight. They offer no easy resolutions, but they are not trivial. They draw from a wide palette of feeling, but they are not scattered. They are, in Whitehead’s terms, harmonies of contrasts—difficult, painful, beautiful—and as such, they model a kind of integrity that is deeply human and ethically compelling.
Death
In the graveyard scene, Hamlet’s encounter with Yorick’s skull is a moment of stark, bodily concrescence—where memory, mortality, affection, and existential dread converge. Holding the skull of the jester he once loved, Hamlet is forced into a confrontation with the insistent particularity of death—not abstract death, but this death, this skull, once filled with laughter and voice. It is a collapse of past joy and present decay into a single, jarring image. The skull is not merely a memento mori; it is a lure for feeling that draws Hamlet into a reflection on the fate of all identity, collapsing distinctions between king and clown. Here, the war within Hamlet quiets into somber amazement: not over what to do, but over what we are. In Whiteheadian terms, this moment is a prehension of the perishing of value—Yorick’s life now reduced to silent bone—and a painful integration of that fact into Hamlet’s becoming.
Hamlet: A Scholarly Discussion
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Shakespeare's best known, most quoted and longest play, written c1599 - 1602 and rewritten throughout his lifetime. It is the story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, encouraged by his father's ghost to take revenge on his uncle who murdered him, and is set at the court of Elsinore. In soliloquies, the Prince reveals his inner self to the audience while concealing his thoughts from all at the Danish court, who presume him insane. Shakespeare gives him lines such as 'to be or not to be,' 'alas, poor Yorick,' and 'frailty thy name is woman', which are known even to those who have never seen or read the play. And Hamlet has become the defining role for actors, men and women, who want to show their mastery of Shakespeare's work. With Sir Jonathan Bate, Provost of Worcester College, University of Oxford; Carol Rutter, Professor of Shakespeare and Performance Studies at the University of Warwick and Sonia Massai, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at King's College London, Producer: Simon Tillotson.