To be or not to be is the fundamental philosophical question. It is not only a question of suicide. It is to mediate being, to choose an actual existence. It is to remove oneself from becoming, from the flux of perpetual becoming which has always been non-being. Non-being is as close to a primordial nothingness as anything related to annihilation. Becoming is only non-being in the sense that to be and to become cannot be simultaneously manifest. Hamlet knows what is when it is, understanding too well the mutual and reciprocal epistemological dilemmas inherent from competing a priori and a posteriori schema in acquiring knowledge, testing knowledge, determining the limits of knowledge and what is knowable.
In order to be, one must choose being in direct opposite tension with becoming. One does resist the will of one’s plural nature. One must not resist this plural nature by artificially imposing a self to the psychic displacement of every other self that seeks its due on the stage of the many selves Self. There is harmony that comes out of this seeming chaos of selves. This harmonic Self is not achieved by imposing one self among many to be the one and only. This harmony is achieved by conducting a symphonic coalescence of all of the selves in a Self of many selves macro-cosmic to all exterior being. It is only by being and becoming mutually, sometimes simultaneously, other times successively, yet other times causally.
To be or not to be in the sense that not to be is to become, as it has elsewhere been articulated, is the limits–the beginning and the end–of all existing. One is and one becomes mutually and perpetually. Why then does it puzzle us to work out Hamlet’s most fundamental question, fixing on the idea that the only thing it could be about is suicide–and it might even be about suicide in another way where to exclude, preclude, deny the existence of the many selves self is a form of internal suicide.
To be or not to be is both to be and to become a many selves Self.
The Falling Leaf Review 