The Eternal Rehearsal: Buridan’s Ass, Hamlet, Peter Pan and Modernity

Opinion

By Nandini Bhautoo

From Aristotelian times to the medieval literary landscape, there is an image which recurs across western thought. It is that of a creature who stands between two equal options and cannot move towards either choice. Aristotle imagined a man, equally hungry and thirsty, paralysed by symmetry.

The Middle Ages, impatient with abstractions, swapped the man for a donkey and let it starve. Buridan’s Ass is a famous philosophical paradox. It is the story of a donkey placed exactly midway between two identical bundles of hay. Unable to find any rational reason to choose one over the other, the ass starves to death.

“From Aristotelian times to the medieval literary landscape, there is an image which recurs across western thought. It is that of a creature who stands between two equal options and cannot move towards either choice. Aristotle imagined a man, equally hungry and thirsty, paralysed by symmetry. The Middle Ages, impatient with abstractions, swapped the man for a donkey and let it starve. Buridan’s Ass is a famous philosophical paradox. It is the story of a donkey placed exactly midway between two identical bundles of hay. Unable to find any rational reason to choose one over the other, the ass starves to death…”

The paradox is used to illustrate a problem in theories of rational choice and free will, with a good degree of satire in its mediaeval version, which apparently was a mediaeval meme before it became attributed to the mediaeval French philosopher Jean Buridan, who wrote on topics such as choice and motivation. So, Buridan’s Ass became the emblematic paradox about indecision and rationality

A few centuries later, Shakespeare gives a tragic twist to the paradox of indecision by upgrading the animal into a prince and calls it Hamlet. Same architecture, higher budget. Only the tone shifts. Aristotle is earnest. Buridan is mischievous. Shakespeare is tragic. The lesson remains rude and simple: reason, when perfectly balanced, cannot move life. Something irrational — will, desire, superstition, or a lucky hunch — must intervene.

Our age, however, believes it has solved the problem of choice. Welcome to the Kingdom of Choice. Menu stretches to infinity. Every identity has a dropdown. Somewhere out there is the correct door: the right career, the right partner, the right ideology, the right version of the self. Choose well and the future will applaud. Choose badly and — don’t worry — there will be a patch update or at least a TikTok to console you.

Ancient philosophy would regard this optimism with gentle contempt. In the Gita, in Stoicism, in Buddhism, in Aristotle’s ethics, no choice is absolute. Two doors labelled “Right” and “Wrong” often lead, over time, to remarkably similar landscapes. What distinguishes them is not cosmic accuracy but existential posture. To choose is not to escape consequence; it is to adopt it. Freedom is not exemption. It is ownership.

Modern culture, however, has perfected the art of choosing without choosing. Decisions become expressions, not commitments. If things go wrong, responsibility is politely outsourced — to systems, algorithms, parents, capitalism, or planets in retrograde. One can always rebrand. Thus, we choose endlessly while remaining inwardly untouched. We want doors without thresholds, decisions without destiny.

And here lies the fracture at the heart of modern rationality — the hairline crack we all ignore while scrolling, swiping, liking, and updating our résumés for the self who is forever in a state of becoming. Admit the emptiness at the core of things when willpower disappears, and the illusion collapses: all our clever optimization produces not freedom, but very sophisticated donkeys. The tragedy is invisible, except to the poor ass, which is already buffering between tabs.

Buridan’s ass has therefore not disappeared. It has evolved. It no longer dies between two bales of hay; it dies slowly between two TikToks, two job offers, two political choices, to go or no to go. It does not starve — it buffers, refreshes, refreshes again. Hamlet’s existential agony becomes a lifestyle subscription. Paralysis is no longer tragic; it is user-friendly.

Psychology calls this “Peter Pan syndrome.” Philosophy calls it metaphysical adolescence. To grow up is to accept that every real choice murders other possible selves. Modernity experiences this not as fate but as trauma. Better to remain “open,” “exploring,” “in process” — permanently in rehearsal, like an endless Zoom call with destiny.

Hence the public figure who, at eighty, still poses as the youthful revolutionary. History wrinkles; the selfie does not. He performs rebellion but never completes it. He denounces without concluding. He preserves innocence by never fully entering consequence. Ancient political thought — from Aristotle to the Mahabharata — understood rule as tragic: to govern is to choose without guarantees and to wound someone whatever you do. The eternal revolutionary avoids this by staying in the trailer of history, where nothing yet counts.

Literature has always known this. It has not merely recorded indecision; it has mocked it, dignified it, and anatomized it. From Sophocles to Shakespeare, from the Gita to Kafka, and from Dostoevsky to Beckett, narrative insists that incoherence is not a modern bug but a human feature. What is new is our refusal to digest it. Earlier cultures ritualized decisions through initiation, tragedy, and myth; ours soothes us with infinite options, push notifications, and the comforting lie that “there’s always a next choice.”

The ancient verdict remains stubbornly unsentimental: meaning begins where alternatives end. One does not become free by postponing decisions. One becomes free by inhabiting one.

Even a donkey, after all, must eventually step forward — or prove, with exemplary rationality, that perfection is indeed an excellent way for a legend to die.

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 16 January 2026