To Be or Not to Be

By Brenton L. Delp

Avicenna, Shakespeare and the Modern Condition

Avicenna and Shakespeare do not belong to the same world, and that fact must be stated clearly at the outset if the connection between them is to be understood with proper historical force. Avicenna stands within a high medieval Islamic philosophical world in which metaphysics is still publicly alive as an exact science of being, necessity, causality, and divine intelligibility. Shakespeare stands within an early modern Christian world in which those older guarantees have not vanished altogether, but no longer bind with the same conceptual or existential fullness. The difference is decisive. Avicenna formulates the question of why finite beings exist in a civilization where the metaphysical “why” can still be answered with ontological rigor. Shakespeare gives voice to the inward burden of existence in a civilization where the question of being has become tragic, reflexive, and exposed. The connection between them is therefore neither direct influence nor accidental resemblance. It is historical and metaphysical. Avicenna articulates contingency as ontological dependence; Shakespeare dramatizes what contingency feels like once the old answer no longer gathers existence with the same public power.¹

To say that Avicenna belongs to another world is not merely to note chronology. It is to identify a different structure of intelligibility. In Avicenna’s world, philosophy still moves within a live horizon where God, necessity, intellect, cosmology, and ontology belong to one ordered field of thought. Aristotle has already been received, transformed, and refined. Neoplatonic verticality has already altered the older confidence of Greek cosmology. Theology and philosophy are not identical, but neither are they sealed off from one another by a modern wall. The question of being remains publicly serious. One may still ask, with full metaphysical force, why a finite thing exists at all, and one expects an answer framed in terms of essence, existence, causality, and the Necessary Existent.²

This is why Avicenna’s distinction between essence and existence matters so much. A finite thing’s essence tells us what it is; it does not explain why it is. One can know what a horse is without thereby knowing that any horse exists. One can think a human being, a tree, a star, or a city in terms of intelligible content, yet none of that content includes actual existence as part of its definition. Finite beings are therefore possible in themselves. Their essence does not compel their actuality.³ The world that Avicenna inhabits is one in which this question can still be made perfectly explicit: why do finite things, whose essences do not entail existence, exist at all? His answer is equally explicit. They exist because what is merely possible in itself must receive actuality from what is necessary in itself.⁴

This means that in Avicenna’s world contingency is not yet first an existential mood. It is an ontological condition. To be finite is to be dependent. A contingent being does not explain itself. Its “what” does not account for its “why”. The reason for its existence must therefore lie outside it. But Avicenna does not leave the matter at an endless chain of external causes. Such a chain would never answer the question, because each contingent cause would itself still require explanation. The series must terminate in the Necessary Existent, that which exists not by another but from itself, whose essence is existence, and from which all contingent actuality is derived.⁵ In other words, Avicenna’s world is one in which the “why” of being can still be answered upward. Contingency points beyond itself to necessity.

That answer belongs to a civilization still capable of treating ontology as a serious public labor. Even where life may be unstable, political power contested, and theology disputed, the metaphysical order itself remains a living horizon. God is not merely a private belief or moral postulate. Divine necessity is still the formal answer to the question of why finite beings are. The world may be contingent, but contingency is not yet sheer exposure. It is intelligible dependence. The finite does not explain itself, but it is not left abandoned to that fact. Its dependence is borne by a metaphysical architecture strong enough to gather it.⁶

Shakespeare’s world is markedly different. He stands not in the high medieval order of metaphysical confidence, but in early modern England, within a Christian civilization passing through confessional fracture, political anxiety, emerging inwardness, and the slow weakening of older public metaphysical security. This does not mean Shakespeare inhabits a secular age in the modern sense. He does not. His world still bears traces of providence, sin, judgment, afterlife, and moral seriousness. But those realities no longer gather existence with the same unquestioned conceptual stability that one finds in Avicenna’s philosophical universe. The issue is not that transcendence has vanished. It is that the old frameworks are less existentially immediate and less publicly self-evident. Thought has become more burdened. Conscience has become more interior. Being itself has become exposed to hesitation.⁷

That is why Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” must be read historically as well as dramatically. The line does not arise from nowhere, and it is not merely the timeless cry of a suffering individual. It belongs to a world in which the question of existence can no longer be held entirely within a stable ontological order. Hamlet is not asking Avicenna’s question in formal terms. He is not asking about the relation between essence and existence, nor about the modal distinction between the possible and the necessary. But he is living downstream from a long history in which being has become less securely housed in public metaphysical explanation and more intensely suffered within consciousness itself.⁸

This is what makes the connection between Avicenna and Shakespeare so powerful. Avicenna asks why finite beings exist if they do not contain the reason for their existence within themselves. Shakespeare asks what it means to endure existence once being is no longer quietly upheld by an unquestioned metaphysical “why.” The shift is not from philosophy to non-philosophy, but from ontology to tragic inwardness. Hamlet’s question is not “Why does a contingent being require a Necessary Existent?” It is “Is existence, under the burden of suffering and thought, preferable to non-existence?” The “why” has changed register.⁹

To put it differently, Avicenna’s world allows contingency to remain conceptually severe yet existentially contained. Shakespeare’s world no longer contains it in the same way. Contingency becomes conscious of itself. It is no longer only a feature of finite beings in relation to divine necessity. It becomes lived exposure. Hamlet does not simply occupy the category of the contingent; he suffers it. Existence itself becomes problematic. That is why “to be or not to be” is so much more than indecision. It is one of the great early modern moments in which being itself becomes questionable from within life.¹⁰

The contrast may be stated sharply. In Avicenna, the finite is contingent because its essence does not explain its existence. In Shakespeare, the finite is experienced as tragic because existence no longer comes already held together by a persuasive and living answer to why it must be endured. Avicenna still inhabits a world where contingency is answered by necessity. Shakespeare inhabits a world where contingency has entered consciousness as burden. This is not because Shakespeare has refuted Avicenna. It is because the historical world of metaphysical confidence has changed.¹¹

That historical change matters. Avicenna’s world still allows the question of being to be answered in the mode of demonstration. Shakespeare’s world shows what happens when the question of being has moved inward, where it is entangled with grief, revenge, conscience, delay, mortality, and fear of the unknown. Hamlet’s speech turns on that fear: “the dread of something after death,” the “undiscover’d country,” the “conscience” that “does make cowards of us all.”¹² This is no longer a world in which the “why” of existence rests securely in a publicly authoritative metaphysical frame. It is a world in which inwardness has become unstable, and being itself is felt as a question that cannot be cleanly resolved by inherited language alone.

There is also a deeper metaphysical continuity between them. Avicenna distinguishes what a thing is from why it is. Hamlet’s question enacts, in tragic form, the rupture between those two dimensions. Human life still has shape, role, language, relation, and obligation. One can still say what a prince, a son, an avenger, or a thinker is. But the “why it is” has become unstable under pressure. Being itself is no longer silently carried by role, order, or cosmos. It stands before itself as a problem. In that sense Hamlet lives the existential afterlife of a distinction Avicenna formulates ontologically.¹³

This is why the connection is not superficial. Avicenna belongs to a world in which metaphysics can still answer the question of why contingent beings are. Shakespeare belongs to a world in which that same question has become interior and tragic. The question has not vanished. It has migrated. What was once addressed in the language of necessity and causality is now suffered in the language of conscience, hesitation, sorrow, endurance, and possible non-being.¹⁴

One may therefore say that Avicenna and Shakespeare stand on opposite sides of a major historical threshold. Avicenna represents the high confidence of premodern metaphysics that finite existence, though contingent, is intelligible because grounded in divine necessity. Shakespeare represents the emerging early modern consciousness for which existence remains morally and spiritually serious, yet no longer gathered with the same ontological ease. Being is not denied; it is burdened. That burden is the real bridge between them.¹⁵

This is why Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” should not be treated merely as psychological crisis or literary beauty. It is also a civilizational symptom. It marks the point at which being has become inwardly exposed. The metaphysical “why” still hovers in the background, but it no longer stabilizes existence with full force. Instead, consciousness must bear the question. Hamlet does not ask as a scholastic philosopher, yet he stands in the afterlife of a world where such philosophy once held reality together. His speech gives tragic voice to the loosening of that hold.¹⁶

Seen in this light, Avicenna and Shakespeare illuminate one another. Avicenna shows the formal structure of contingency: finite beings do not explain their own existence. Shakespeare shows the experiential burden of contingency once that structure is no longer securely housed within a compelling public metaphysical order. Avicenna gives the ontological grammar; Shakespeare gives the tragic consciousness that follows when grammar no longer suffices to console or gather existence.¹⁷

The connection is therefore both historical and metaphysical. Historically, it marks the passage from a high medieval world of live metaphysical explanation to an early modern world of inwardly suffered exposure. Metaphysically, it marks the passage from contingency as ontological dependence to contingency as existential burden. Avicenna still answers why there is being. Shakespeare begins to ask whether being, once unshielded, is worth enduring.¹⁸

That difference is one of the great clues to modernity. When the old metaphysical “why” weakens, the human need for such a “why” does not disappear. It becomes internalized. Being becomes a task, a burden, an anguish, a question. In Avicenna, contingency ascends toward necessity. In Shakespeare, contingency descends into tragic consciousness. Between them lies one of the most important movements in Western history: the migration of metaphysical burden from ontology into the soul.¹⁹

Notes

1. Avicenna, The Metaphysics of The Healing, trans. Michael E. Marmura (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2005), I.5, VIII.1–4; William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2006), 3.1.56.
2. Avicenna, The Metaphysics of The Healing, I.1–2, I.5; Dimitri Gutas, Avicenna and the Aristotelian Tradition, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 233–55.
3. Avicenna, The Metaphysics of The Healing, I.5.
4. Avicenna, The Metaphysics of The Healing, VIII.1–4.
5. Avicenna, The Metaphysics of The Healing, VIII.1–4; Herbert A. Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, Creation and the Existence of God in Medieval Islamic and Jewish Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 281–320.
6. Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1952), 65–82.
7. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 205–43.
8. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1.56–88.
9. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1.56; Avicenna, The Metaphysics of The Healing, VIII.1–4.
10. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1.56–88.
11. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 111–43.
12. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1.77–82.
13. Avicenna, The Metaphysics of The Healing, I.5; Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1.56–88.
14. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 205–43; Taylor, Sources of the Self, 111–43.
15. Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, 281–320; Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1.56–88.
16. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1; Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 205–43.
17. Avicenna, The Metaphysics of The Healing, VIII.1–4; Taylor, Sources of the Self, 111–43.
18. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3.1.56–88; Davidson, Proofs for Eternity, 281–320.
19. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 143–76.