Chapter 12 - Sustaining Courage in the Humanities: The Example of Hamlet

Summary

In a discussion of the persistence of ‘heroic culture’ at the cusp of the European Middle Ages, Alasdair MacIntyre affirms the continuing importance of what he terms ‘the heroic table of the virtues’ in the medieval Aristotelian-infused virtue ethics tradition whose rise and fall he tracks in After Virtue:

[T]he moral standpoint of heroic society [was] a necessary starting-point for moral reflection within the tradition with which we are concerned. So the medieval order cannot reject the heroic table of the virtues. Loyalty to family and to friends, the courage required to sustain the household or a military expedition and a piety which accepts the moral limits and impositions of the cosmic order are central virtues, partially defined in terms of institutions such as the code of revenge in the sagas.

Hamlet looks back to the historical moment MacIntyre evokes, as the play is built from source material and a worldview drawn from pre-modern sagas (not least in its concern with ‘the code of revenge’) but also marks the transformation of this source material and worldview into the ethical universe of medieval Aristotelianism adverted to in the play by engagement with schools and schooling, including the kind of schooling that is accomplished at the University of Wittenberg, and by engagement with a discourse of the virtues and vices. And yet at the same time the play also looks back on all this from much later, during the seventeenth century when the neo-Aristotelian ethical project that MacIntyre celebrates is already marked as everywhere in full disintegration. Hamlet therefore occupies a unique ethical space – analogous to the position MacIntyre himself occupies – at the intersection of three ethical world-systems: the heroic age, the scholastic Middle Ages and the world of humanism.

In the midst of this ethical intersection, MacIntyre singles out the importance of ‘[l]oyalty to family and to friends, the courage required to sustain the household or a military expedition’ as a holdover from the heroic age and yet also as a cornerstone of the whole edifice of virtue ethics he describes in After Virtue. The kind of courage to which MacIntyre points here is not the courage of the classical Stoics – ‘valor’ or ‘fortitude’, the individual's ability to face danger or even defeat.