Hamlet: The Wisdom of Polonius

Hamlet: The Wisdom of Polonius

The disadvantage of the practical man's world is that it breaks down, and refuses to work, and then he finds out, at the cost of enormous distress and suffering, that he has been working on a theory all the time, but a wrong theory; and he wishes he had done a little more thinking before it was too late. Gradually it is becoming plain to a world which has always scoffed at the philosophers that a society run on the lines of Polonius, every man being true to himself or to his own class, will not in the long run work, but will infallibly explode, with hideous ruin and combustion, into chaos, and make way for a society which shall be less selfish.

In the play, Hamlet, by William Shakespeare, Polonius proclaims:

To thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

This is often cited as a fine example of the noble wisdom of our sublime bard, and so forth; whereas any one who looks carefully at these lines can see that if our sublime bard had nothing wiser than this to say about the conduct of life, the less we talk about his wisdom the better. As a matter of fact, of course, the lines are nonsense, and Shakespeare was well aware that they are nonsense; he puts them in the mouth of a garrulous old gentleman who spends most of his time talking nonsense. Hamlet himself - who obviously comes nearer than anybody else to speaking Shakespeare's own mind - calls Polonius a "tedious old fool," and it is plain that a tedious old fool is exactly what Shakespeare is trying to portray. The rest of the speech, of which these famous lines are the conclusion, is made up partly of bits of cheap and shallow worldly...

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...kind. To do that is to be a philosopher. There are not many philosophers;and the practical man is not sorry there are so few, for he is proud of belonging, as he says, to a world of practice, not of mere theory.

The disadvantage of the practical man's world is that it breaks down, and refuses to work, and then he finds out, at the cost of enormous distress and suffering, that he has been working on a theory all the time, but a wrong theory; and he wishes he had done a little more thinking before it was too late. Gradually it is becoming plain to a world which has always scoffed at the philosophers that a society run on the lines of Polonius, every man being true to himself or to his own class, will not in the long run work, but will infallibly explode, with hideous ruin and combustion, into chaos, and make way for a society which shall be less selfish.