CHAPTER 4Losing the Name of Action Macbeth, Remorse, and Moral Agency

Losing the Name of Action

We can smell trouble at the beginning of act 1, scene 7, when Macbeth refers in his soliloquy to the imminent murder of Duncan as “it.” He surrounds his “it” by a conditional “if” and, more, a subjunctive “were”: “If it were done” (1.7.1).¹⁴ It is as if he imagines the future precipitously as the past, moreover a past in which a deed has been done with no apparent doer. In a few short words, he has removed himself from the picture. Against the contorted rhythm of Macbeth's obfuscations, Shakespeare sounds the beat of the deed: done, done, done, three times in one and a half lines. And then he adds another conditional “If,” followed by a string of complex evasions: Now the murder is an “assassination,” and he is imagining a world in which deeds have no consequences.¹⁵ Because this cannot be the world of human action Macbeth is denaturing himself, imagining he is more or less than human, and exiling himself from the shared meanings on which his words depend.

In her brilliant book, The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt discussed action as necessarily irreversible, unpredictable, and boundless. To do and to suffer are opposite sides of the same coin, she claims, and an act begins a story whose consequences are “boundless” and “unpredictable” and caught up in the reactions and responses of others. The meaning of an act is retrospective, and it “can reveal itself only when it has ended,” if then.¹⁶ That a deed once performed cannot be taken back is what tragedy focuses on: the irreversibility of action. So now in the nasty compactness of “surcease” (another evasion) and “success,” Macbeth tries to short-circuit the very logic of action (1.7.4). He is imagining a deed, “this blow” (1.7.4), that would be entirely sufficient to itself, bringing with it purely the consequences he desires. So the deed would be his alone to define, carved out of the world of the responses of others.¹⁷ And now Macbeth talks on emphasizing here: “that but this blow / Might be the be-all and end-all here” (1.7.4–5).¹⁸ The stunning coinage of “be-all and end-all” is a fantastical attempt to dislodge the inexorable temporal bond, the fully natural succession of act and consequence. That this is a crazy, cock-eyed impossibility is shown in the unstoppable spill over to the next line: “but here, upon this bank and shoal of time” (1.7.6). Macbeth is tutoring himself in the denial of his agency, in the avoidance of the very nature of the deed he is about to commit, and what that deed makes him. In separating his agency from the deed, in denying the nature of the deed he is committing, he is traducing the very nature of human action.

For Macbeth is denying some basic facts of human nature, facts not fixed by custom or convention, facts so obvious they might go unnoticed: “such as, for example, the fact that the realization of human intention requires action, that action requires movement, that movement involves consequences we had not intended, that our knowledge (and ignorance) of ourselves and of others depends upon the way our minds are expressed (and distorted) in word and deed and passion; that actions have histories.”¹⁹

A pronounced turn in this extraordinary soliloquy comes with the mind-stopping “But” in line 7: “But in these cases, / We still have judgment here” (1.7.7). “Even-handed justice” understands that we put to our own lips the chalice we poison with our evil deed. Macbeth enumerates the relations of trust he is in with Duncan—he is his kinsman, subject, and host. In this soliloquy, we see Macbeth at once both grammatically obscuring his future deed, evading a logic he knows, while also acknowledging the extent of the violation he contemplates. Tony Tanner points out that Macbeth embarks on the opposite trajectory of the tragic protagonist: His is a rushed and urgent dash from self-knowledge.²⁰

When we next see Macbeth speaking alone, we see him apparently in the grip of an apparition. Is the dagger he sees before him a “fatal vision” that is “sensible / To feeling” (2.1.36–37), or is it a dagger of the mind? Whatever it is the dagger is a “thou,” given personality, intimacy even; it is a thing that appears to solicit him and that he addresses as if it has agency. It is marshaling him along a path he is already traveling: “thou marshall’st me the way that I was going” (2.1.42). He does not need a marshal then to usher him on the path he was already traveling, but it is another self-canceling thought. The marshal is a companion, a guide, and it takes the edge off his agency, his responsibility to imagine himself directed in this way. He has just earlier instructed his servant to ask Lady Macbeth to strike a bell when his drink is ready. Now as Macbeth attempts to “screw his courage to the sticking place” (1.7.61) by summoning up Senecan images of horror, imminent rape, witchcraft, and depravity, the bell rings. Macbeth, I want to say, is turning his action into behavior: “I go, and it is done: the bell invites me” (2.1.62). Once again, he elides his agency in the act, imagining that he is drawn by the visionary dagger, instructed by the whole of nature, and finally summoned by the bell that invites him to heaven or hell. James Calderwood has brilliantly said of these lines: “The whole speech marvelously illustrates the workings of a self-protective consciousness as it projects its inner impulses to create a behaviouristic world to whose stimuli it can then respond.”²¹

This slip from action to behavior is important. For in representing his action as a response to a set of stimuli—the bell, the natural world, the dagger—he begins to think of them as causal. In so doing, he abandons the entire domain of responsibility, which is internally connected to human action, in which talk is properly of reasons, not causes.²² For we do not know what action has been done without understanding the intentions with which it was done, without an answer, potential or actual, to the question: “Why did you do that?” It is for this reason that Alisdair MacIntyre, building on Elizabeth Anscombe's work, has said that “the concept of an intelligible action is a more fundamental concept than that of an action as such.”²³

In the first part of the second part (Prima Secundae) of his great Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas contemplates human actions “proper to man as man.” “Those actions are properly called human which proceed from a deliberate will. And if any other actions are found in man, they are called actions of a man, but not properly human actions, since they are not proper to a man as man” (1-2, q. 1, a. 1).²⁴ For Aquinas human actions simply are moral actions: In the human realm of deliberation, they are moral.²⁵ An action, according to Anscombe in her modern classic Intentions, is purposive: It is one that can be most naturally addressed by an answer to the question: “Why are you doing that?”²⁶ Notice that the claim is by no means that the intention controls the meaning of the action—as an editor, translator, and friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein's, Anscombe was hardly likely to make that blunder. Human action would be rather different were that to be the case: Intention is intrinsically linked to a sense of responsibility.²⁷ What follows from Aquinas's deeply Aristotelian understanding of action is that we are the deed's creature. What Macbeth is blinding himself to is the shaping role of the agent's deeds in forming and building his character. In denying the natural logic of man and woman and deed, Macbeth is denying his humanity.

The dagger marshals him, as if in a dream. Soon he will be melodramatically conjuring himself as Tarquin and pleading with the very earth not to respond to him. The path to murder in this play is to obscure responsiveness to the world and the world to you. Macbeth requires the earth's deafness—“Hear not my steps which way they walk” (2.1.57)—and the world's darkness—“Let not light see my black and deep desires” (1.4.51)—as a presage to his act. As he seeks the world's blindness and indifference, as he covets the darkness that he imagines will render his deeds invisible, the physical integrity of his person cracks up. His eye will wink at his hand (1.4.53). The invisibility to himself, which he covets, call it soul-blindness, will result not merely in a blackening out of self—“to know my deed ’twere best not know myself” (2.2.74)—but an intense isolation and self-deadening. It is a presage of the deadening that will come at the end of the play. There, surcease and success have reached a different accommodation; there, the succession of days, “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” (5.5.18), annihilates novelty. The evil man's world is a solipsistic world. He can “take things from others, but he can receive nothing from them.”²⁸

Were Macbeth able to do what he desires—to extricate his murder from all consequences save that of his own succession to the crown, to define the exact limits and contours of the act unilaterally—it would not be human action. In Shakespeare's understanding, he has to deny and avoid his humanity to perform actions that logically must have the consequences of human actions. Macbeth is beginning to have merely the illusion of sense, which is why his nihilism is the logical end point; he has stopped making any sense at all and has stupefied himself.

How does Macbeth stupefy himself? We witness this process immediately after as well as before the murder. When Macbeth describes how he could not say “Amen” when he overhears the prayers of the grooms as if they had seen him with his “hangman's hands” (2.2.28), Lady Macbeth responds: “These deeds must not be thought / After these ways; so, it will make us mad” (2.2.34–35). Macbeth, being afraid “to think what (he) ha(s) done,” must not think at all. (2.2.53). When he hears that Macduff has “fled to England,” he wishes entirely to eradicate any gap that might exist between the conception and execution of a deed, such that “The very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand. . . . Be it thought and done” (4.1.146–47). His wish is to eradicate thought altogether, to remove the very possibility that there could be a conceivable answer to the question: “Why are you doing that?” He renders himself thoughtless: This is the “sweet oblivious antidote” (5.3.43) that he ministers to himself.²⁹

Closely allied to his willful thoughtlessness, his self-stupefaction, is his desire for isolation. “We will keep ourself / Til suppertime alone” (3.1.42–43). “How now, my lord, why do you keep alone?” (3.2.9), asks Lady Macbeth, who has encouraged his oblivion, his thoughtlessness: “Things without all remedy/Should be without regard” (3.2.11–12). “What's done, is done” (3.2.13) and is hopeless to reassure, which is echoed in the harrowing, “what's done cannot be undone” now sounded as if from hell (5.1.67). “What's done,” what's effected (done) is not finished (done) but only the presage to further murderous deeds in a relentless pursuit of an end to the “torture of the mind” (3.2.22). For now, Macbeth tells her that “there shall be done / A deed of dreadful note” (3.2.43–44). (Again, his use of the passive tense averts his agency in the murders he has ordered.) To her inquiries about what is to “be done,” he asks not for her consultation, but for her applause after the fact: “Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck / Til though applaud the deed” (3.2.46–47). In his next address, “Come, seeling night,” I imagine him turning away from his wife: I imagine her on stage but no longer in his presence, so that in the penultimate line of the scene, his “hold thee still” might signal her attempt to move away from him in a silence in which the horror of their acts and her sense of his profound aloneness, and of her new irrelevance to him, is beginning to dawn. Then his “go with me” has to force a common exit at the very point at which they are no longer going anywhere together. Lady Macbeth is reduced to being a retrospective cheerleader for nameless, authorless deeds, deeds he will not and cannot now share. To share them—in prospect or retrospect—might be to name them. (And how, innocent of the knowledge, could she applaud the deed? Macbeth is removing any possibility of judgment and understanding from her ability to discern his action.) Once again, we see the separation of reason from will, the denaturing of action, and the concomitant destruction of intimacy and community. Wishing not to know his deed or himself, he can scarcely afford the risk of human company, the risk of being known by anyone else.³⁰ “Blood will have blood” (3.4.120) he says. He has now conceived himself as wading in a river of blood so deep that to continue across is all the same as to return, negating the point of action to a bloody and terrible sameness, to whose horror he is nonetheless deadened (3.4.134–35).³¹ His deeds “must be acted ere they may be scanned” (3.4.138).

How, it might be asked, do I reconcile my idea of Macbeth's self-stupefaction with his clear articulation of the trust he is violating? He knows that Duncan is his kinsman, his king, and his guest, that Duncan is a monarch of virtue, clear and pure in the execution of his office. He knows there will be judgment on him at the end of time; he knows that divine justice will “blow the horrid deed in every eye” (1.7.24). Such knowledge can only be disowned. But how?

Macbeth shows that suppressing or avoiding the capacity for articulating what we are doing gradually fuels self-deception. The play is a brilliant portrait of self-deception precisely because it shows the importance of naming actions. This “dead butcher” is an entirely unfitting portrait of the regicide for this very reason.³² This understanding of self-deception assumes that to become explicitly conscious of our actions requires the development of the skill of articulating (saying) what we are doing or experiencing. Herbert Fingarette calls this “spelling out some feature of the world we are engaged in.”³³ In avoiding these articulations, we avoid conscious awareness of what we are doing; we also avoid becoming conscious of our own avoidance. Macbeth is in possession of the criteria of right and wrong, but he avoids applying them (spelling it out). “This supernatural soliciting / Cannot be ill; cannot be good” is an example of the refusal of the application of criteria (1.3.132–33). It echoes the illusion of sense in “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” (1.1.9), and it shows why and how the weird sisters (imperfect speakers) work on his linguistic consciousness in ways that he only retrospectively understands.

The obscuring and self-darkening of Macbeth's mind is shown in his disowning of the criteria he already has; he avoids articulating what he is doing and naming his actions.³⁴ This is another reason for gratitude to Shakespeare's moral powers of articulation. Shakespeare has not lost the concept of action. How else can he keep its contours so firmly, so relentlessly before us? And how might they be recovered?

In this play, what is good, what is precious, what is of inestimable value is prior: It can be decreated, but it cannot altogether be destroyed.³⁵ Macbeth might be understood as negating his knowledge of the good in the hopeless task of eradicating his agency; if, however, he seeks to outrun reason, “the pauser,” the evil he does is importantly causeless.³⁶ His attempt to pass off “vaulting ambition” as the spur to action is entirely unconvincing. Even his wife radically qualifies his ambition: He is not without it (1.5.18), but she doubts he has the “illness” (evil) that might make his ambition effective.³⁷ When Macbeth images his “vaulting ambition,” he invokes it as a “spur” he needs as a rider on a horse, but in this somewhat confused metaphor, horse and rider “oer-leap” and fall (1.7.26–28). This seems like a man who needs the “sides of his intent” pricked; it is a kind of desperate hunting for a reason for an act he knows is utterly beyond the reach of justification. Dante understood this in the Inferno: We have lost the way; in the midst of our lives, we have missed the true path and we do not know how we lost it. ³⁸ So did Primo Levi: “Hier ist kein warum” (Here there is no why), says a guard to Levi as he grabs an icicle to soothe his parched lips.³⁹ The play entertains the idea that we enter hell not as a place of punishment but as “the condition to which the soul reduces itself by a stubborn determination to evil, and in which it suffers the torments of its own perversions.”⁴⁰ There is no glamour or self-sufficiency to the evil envisaged here.

Indeed, what makes best sense of Macbeth's act and the immediate and consequent eradication of a world that can be loved and valued, the relentless, dreary path to the poor player's empty sound and fury that signify nothing, is Augustine's picture of the evil will as “defective,” as fundamentally causeless. An evil will begins a nihilation. Evil is not, says Augustine, “a matter of efficiency, but of deficiency: the evil will itself is not effective, but defective.”⁴¹ He continues: “To try to discover the causes of such defection—deficient not efficient causes—is like trying to see darkness or to hear silence.” We are aware of darkness and silence by absence of perception. When we know things not by perception but rather by absence, we know them “in a sense,” but “not-knowing, so that they are not-knowing by being known—if that is a possible or intelligible statement.”⁴² Charles Matthewes suggests that Augustine's argument that evil is a “privatio boni,” a privation of a prior and real good “discerns a crucial clue for the ontological truth about evil, namely, that evil action is in itself not action at all.”⁴³ This is another way in which Macbeth “loses the name of action.”

Lady Macbeth's Cry

The recovery of the concept of deed and doer in the world of human action may come through remorse, whose characteristic voice is: “My God, what have I done?” It is Lady Macbeth's terrible cry, uttered while sleepwalking (which I can only now and forever hear in the shattering, soul-searching, soul-touching cry of Judi Dench).⁴⁴

Lady Macbeth has conjured the stopping up of “th’access and passage to remorse” (1.5.44) so that the compunctious visitings of nature cannot shake her murderous purpose (1.5.43).⁴⁵ But we can only feel remorse over what has the power to haunt us, and Lady Macbeth will feel her remorse once the access and passage to it is unstopped, in the unremitting horror of her awakening yet somnambulant memory. There she will feel, as Emily Dickinson says in her brilliant poem, “Remorse”: “A Presence of Departed Acts— / At window—and at Door—.”⁴⁶ It is in remorse that the doer recognizes the one wronged in all his or her particularity, in the recognition of what she has done. Remorse is to be distinguished from shame in that the focus is unerringly concentrated on the reality of the one wronged, not in his or her general humanity but in precisely her or his uniqueness and irreplaceability. In remorse, one recognizes what one has become simultaneously with the particular reality of the other. This remorse is to be distinguished from regret because regret can be used for actions performed by others: Remorse is personal. You cannot feel it on my behalf, nor I on yours. Remorse makes central the agent in a way that mere regret does not. One regrets what happened: One feels remorse for what one has done. It is therefore internally connected to my actions as mine, which is internally connected to my responsibility in what I have done, a responsibility bound up with responsiveness to another. Raimond Gaita puts it this way: “A certain sense of her victim's individuality is internal to a murderer's understanding of the moral significance of what she did.” “That,” he says, “is part of what it is to be aware of the reality of another human being.”⁴⁷ Gaita is not saying that we feel remorse because we see that something is wrong. He is saying that our natural dispositions to remorse and to pity are one of the determinants of our concept of remorse and of what a human being is. Gaita makes the analogy to what he calls Wittgenstein's astonishingly radical remark that “pity is a form of conviction that someone is in pain.”⁴⁸ Pity, he suggests, is not a psychological state but, as he puts it, “normative [my italics] for the description of the forms of our indifference to the suffering of others.”⁴⁹ We know pity not epistemically but through our most basic responses in healing, binding, wounding, hurting, comforting, and crying, and in the fact that we look into someone's face when binding his wounds. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says, “if someone has a pain in his hand, then the hand does not say so (unless it writes it), and one does not comport the hand, but the sufferer: one looks into his eyes.”⁵⁰ In remorse, says, Gaita, in a parodic and piercing depiction of how remorse is characterized in Kantian traditions of moral philosophy, “He is not haunted by his principles; he is not haunted by the moral law; he is not haunted by the fact that he did what he ought not to have done . . .: he is haunted by the particular human being he has murdered.”⁵¹ Again, haunted is the right word. In Lady Macbeth's night-walking scene, the passages to remorse are utterly unstopped. She is haunted nightly by the old man who had so much blood in him, by the Thane of Fife's wife. She is haunted by them. It is a picture of the human not in general but this particular one, in his or her sole preciousness.

How is she haunted by her deeds? How then does her remorse bring in the reality of the other? It cannot quite be said that hers is a conscience awakening to what she has done. She is, after all, sleepwalking, yet her somnambulism shows the truth in her torment, and the difficulties that stand in the way of a consciously truthful acknowledgment, terrible as that might be. She is in hell, rather than purgatory, which offers us a despairing and permanent re-doing of the act, only now the words she says, “a little water clears us of this deed” (2.2.67), are ironized by the carelessness with which she said them then, with their irreversibility and their boundless echo in her poor tormented soul. “What's done cannot be undone” is an undiminished, unassuageable torment.⁵² In that thought, she can only now undo herself. For that undoing, announced by the off-stage cry of women, there can be no time: “She should have died hereafter” (5.5.17).⁵³

Remorse is one of the ways in which the concept of human action is recovered for it is in remorse that, bitingly, agonizingly, the contours of this terrible deed, the very significance of the act performed, reemerge in the particular harm done.⁵⁴ Gaita has said that remorse is a “disciplined remembrance of the moral significance of what we did.”⁵⁵ So the doer, the deed, and the one harmed come into focus all together, inextricably and mutually. Like Macbeth, Lady Macbeth has consistently evaded the fact of murder and regicide in her language: “He that's coming / Must be provided for” (1.5.66–67) is a terrible, barely submerged vision of the hospitable accommodations usually made for a guest, and a guest moreover of royal stature, but it too is fundamentally evasive and avoidant.⁵⁶ Like Macbeth, she too conjures the night to blind herself and God himself to the nature of her action (1.5.50–54). Haunted by the old man, the Thane of Fife's wife, and by Banquo, she haunts her own life, too. Gaita says this: “The terrible recognition of what we have become is the necessary condition of the recognition of the evil we have done.”⁵⁷ Remorse brings a terrible understanding of yourself and your action and, with it, a searing sense of the reality of another person in the harm you have done them. It involves a self no longer carving out its self-definition, a project of its will, but rather an understanding that your actions are involved with the life of others, subject to their say in them, and an understanding that those actions define you. You are, inevitably, the deed's creature, the deed is not your creature.

There is no time to mourn Lady Macbeth, for Macbeth has abolished time. This is what happens when the “ignorant present” is disdained for the “future in the instant” (1.5.57–58).⁵⁸ He assimilated himself to a timeless will, a will that has anesthetized its reasons and rationales and has replaced them with causes it experiences as compulsions, extrinsic to his will. To refuse remorse, as Rowan Williams has said, is to “refuse to think what it is to be a subject changing according to processes and interactions outside my own will.”⁵⁹ Macbeth shows us that picture of the will as murderous. The stopping and unstopping of remorse are Shakespeare's way of retrieving the very concept of human action from a murderous will (Macbeth's) and from a picture of the will that is deadly and bound up with violence.⁶⁰

Losing Our Concepts

In charting the internal relations between the concepts of action, evil, and remorse in Macbeth, as well as the danger of losing the name of human action; in recovering it again in the disciplined remembrance of past deeds, in which remembrances the doer perceives himself painfully as the evil doer he has become by virtue of his deeds; and in charting the play's contours in these respects, I wish to allude to the notion of conceptual amnesia. This chapter's title, “Losing the Name of Action,” comes, of course, from Hamlet. It comes at the end of the most famous soliloquy of all in that play, “To be or not to be.”⁶¹ We might describe at least part of this soliloquy as Hamlet trying to force himself to be more like Macbeth, as he entertains the idea that conscience makes cowards of us, turning awry enterprises of great pith and moment so that they lose the name of action (so that they are impossible to act on, so that they cannot properly be called actions). That play too is an astonishing exploration of action—who authors an act or seeks to do so, how action escapes intention, how death supersedes all revenging plots in the face of which, finally, only readiness is all. I have borrowed the phrase “losing the name of action” for the title of this chapter to suggest the work of conceptual amnesia. This idea is central to Thomas Pfau's book Minding the Modern, and it may also be said to have its roots in Iris Murdoch's pithy and brilliant essay “Against Dryness.” It is also beautifully elaborated in the work of Cora Diamond, and especially in her important essay “Losing Your Concepts,” which, as I mentioned in my introduction, is a powerful inspiration for this book.⁶² In “Against Dryness,” Murdoch says: “We have suffered a general loss of concepts, the loss of a moral and political vocabulary. . . . We no longer see man against a background of values, of realities, which transcend him. We picture man as a brave naked will surrounded by an easily comprehended empirical world.”⁶³

Both Diamond and Niklas Forsberg distinguish the ways in which concepts can be lost. They can be lost historically—things change in such a way that we no longer understand certain ways of life; they can be lost philosophically, as Wittgenstein argues when, for example, he shows how our conceptions of inner life have been radically misconstrued.⁶⁴ For Murdoch, conceptual loss involves our loss of conceptual realities, ones that derive from a conflict between ourselves and the pictures of the good life we strive to emulate. We strive to become the naked choosing wills pictured in our moral philosophy.⁶⁵ Murdoch wanted us to see that moral agency and our reasons for action were not properly conceived solely in terms of choice, that often choice is irrelevant (because someone cannot conceive a choice in which others might so conceive it, or because the very formulation of something as a choice is already morally degrading).⁶⁶ Furthermore, as Forsberg has shown, the conception of human freedom as choice, the picture of the naked will in a supermarket of options, strips us of our reality and makes our attempts at self-understanding merely “regional.”⁶⁷ The picture of the human as a naked will makes it hard to see, and easy to forget the intricacy of the connections between conceptions of action, remorse, evil, and the central way in which our modes of describing and misdescribing what we do are bound up with our self-understanding.

The phrase “losing the name of action” names Macbeth's conceptual amnesia. Macbeth has worked hard to stupefy himself, to dull himself to the concept of action. By imagining deeds without succession (a deep pun in the play), he is both denaturing the shared sense of what an action comes to, its reality, and at the same time, he is losing his self-understanding in one and the same thought. (We tend to lose an understanding of the world and an understanding of ourselves together.) If he were to know his deed it were best then, not to know himself: Right there is an acknowledgment of the horror of regicide and murder. But he cannot know his deed without knowing himself, that is, without understanding what his action entails. Shakespeare shows us the very process of conceptual amnesia in Macbeth's mind, just as he shows how he loses his grip on self, world, and action.

My brief exploration of remorse in relation to Macbeth has shown that it, too, is internally connected to questions of the nature of a deed in the light of the doer and the one harmed. With the concept of remorse, then, comes the concept of evil. When concepts of the will are desiccated, so too are concepts of evil. “Is there something in our experience that can . . . teach us what evil is? There is, I believe. It is remorse.”⁶⁸ Macbeth has been called “Shakespeare's most profound and mature vision of evil.”⁶⁹

In his brilliant chapter “Evil Done and Evil Suffered,” in Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, Gaita suggests that moral philosophy has separated out evil done from evil suffered. He shows us how problematic certain conceptions of evil are in moral philosophy by virtue of a powerful thought experiment, the kind of experiment that Murdoch might have had in mind in her essay “Against Dryness,” in which she contemplates the shortfalls of contemporary moral philosophy in her time. Gaita takes the example of the kind used by consequentialists: What if you could save ten people by shooting one? He claims that those who think that it is obvious that one should be shot to save ten have no sense of evil done or evil suffered. He imagines the response of someone who is saved by shooting one among the ten. I will give a short excerpt from his rich account:

If he dies, then I will live, because he died, and because there are nine others with me. Each of the nine others will be able to say the same. Yet when he is dead, will I be able to console myself by saying that he died for one tenth of me? Though you think you must kill him not for me or for any of the others taken individually but for all of us taken together, when he is dead, each of us must accept the fact that insofar as he was murdered for our sake, he died for us singly and undividedly. Each of us is implicated in the evil of his murder.

There are ten of us but we do not make “a ten.” . . . If you must count let it be like this: one, one, one . . ., and when there is no more “one” to be said, content yourself with that and resist the temptation to say, “And they total ten whereas there is only one over there.⁷⁰

Gaita is trying to get at the failure to perceive the individuality of each man in the utilitarian counting, at the artificial separation of evil done and evil suffered, at the focus of morality on the question of “what ought to be done” exclusively, and at the moral idiocy of choice in certain examples. He sees these thought experiments as disregarding “the ways in which people for the sake of whom we do evil are morally implicated in what we do.”⁷¹ “My example,” he suggests, “shows that the most important philosophical question is not ‘What ought to be done?’ The most important question is how to characterise the situation and to capture the evil in it.”⁷² Gaita's superbly perceptive writing has enabled us to see the situation posed by the consequentialists in a different light. The situation now comes under a new description and renders absurd the strict parameters as it is conceived in the moral philosopher's dilemma, parameters that entirely dissolve reality. For in imagining and protecting the surveying eye/I, viewing a range of options in a world of possibilities, the real dimensions of self and world are vanishing from view.⁷³ Gaita's point—and it is surely Shakespeare's point, too, in Macbeth—is that what we do, our actions, come under myriad descriptions, and these descriptions define us because they articulate the positions we are prepared to take and what we hold ourselves responsible for.⁷⁴ Gaita consistently helps us to see the inadequacies of the idea that moral agency involves a world of facts and attitudes we might take toward them. As Lars Hertzberg has said in a lucid commentary on Gaita's work: “As I read him, he considers the question of what I take to be the case and the way I respond to it to be inseparable aspects of the situation.”⁷⁵ This is how vision, not choice, is a central dimension of moral agency, and it is why the way we see the world is as revelatory of us as of the world we see, respond to, and describe in everyday life and in fiction.⁷⁶ In remorse, the deed, the doer, and what is done are realized together in a biting, retrospective recognition. That is why seeing the shape of evil and the shape of love are coterminous, and that is also why remorse is an encounter with “the reality of the ethical.”⁷⁷

The play, as a whole, does not share in the nihilism it exposes in its central protagonist, but rather it sees that pointlessness, that signification of precisely nothing, that tale only of sound, fury, and idiocy, as the logical end of the extinction of action. This is achieved precisely not in a moralistic way but through our pity in what Macbeth has become.⁷⁸ Interpretations of the play that see some generalized existential statement about the emptiness of life in Macbeth's “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” have failed to motivate the words in Macbeth's mouth. Why is he saying precisely this right now? The immediate cue is his wife's death in the midst of a forthcoming battle, in which there is no time at all to mourn her or even register her loss: She should have died at a better time. Macbeth's imagination always leaps over the present to find the future in the instant and to imagine another time that is not this one. He imagines through the relentlessly growing pile of corpses his own “perfection.” Each imagined death—Banquo, Fleance, Macduff, Macduff's children (fill in the blanks, the structure is the same)—is an obstacle to him being “perfect” and “safe.” “To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus,” he muses (3.1.47). The death of Banquo and his son Fleance, for example, will make him “perfect” (3.1.109). When he hears the news that Fleance has escaped he says, “I had else been perfect” (3.4.19). Each person is there only as an obstacle to the perfect (complete, entire) accomplishment of his wishes. But the mounting deaths cannot get him what he wants, which is to live as if he had not killed them all with the crown joyfully and triumphantly on his head. What he wants is an illusion: The telos of his actions is not possible. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” is the life drained of significance, but it is drained of that significance by him, his moral identity utterly shorn. Tomorrow cannot be separated from the history of todays that have led to it.

Under some dominant ideas of action, we imagine that feeling pity for someone would mean that we are slackening our sense of what it is they have actually done, perhaps because we can think of holding someone responsible only in terms of blame. But Macbeth helps us to see that it might precisely be by virtue of our pity that we might hold Macbeth responsible for all that he has done and that we might also pity the creature he has become. Our pity might be part of the very fabric of our moral imagination.⁷⁹

What we need, Murdoch suggests, against simplistic ideas of freedom of the will, and the will's agency in action, is a “renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons.”⁸⁰ She finds literature to be a good home for the exploration of concepts, where vision is enlarged.⁸¹ Seeing what is “most precious to us” is a task I see at the heart of Shakespeare's late tragedies. There what is precious is realized only through a recognition of loss.

The Thane of Fife Had a Wife: What Is Most Precious to Me

I take the phrase “most precious to me” from Macduff's response to Malcolm when he has received the news of his wife and children's death (4.3.226). I want to dwell on this response to show how the play continually refines and holds open to view not how to choose between different actions—“what ought to be done?” (cry like a woman or fight like a man?)—but rather to reveal a sense, a vision (in Murdoch's terms) of what is precious to us. Macduff's response helps us see that moral judgment is about the apprehension of a world apt for valuing, rather than a choice between different values.⁸² To explore Macduff's response, we need to appreciate what it is a response to.

In Michael Boyd's 2012 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Macbeth at Stratford-upon-Avon, the moral center of the play is the murder of Lady Macduff's children at the castle in Fife.⁸³ This scene was sometimes cut in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century productions. It has also often been produced historically in a highly sentimental fashion (the boy is too sweet and banal understandings of femininity—weak not wise—get in the way of Lady Macduff's clear-sighted understanding of her betrayal, isolation, and abandonment), which corrupts the lucidity with which the scene was written. We encounter the courage of a young boy standing in for his father toward a wife and mother, abandoned by her great warrior husband who will redeem the land. Only no such redemption is yet at hand. This is what it is to live in the Scotland of Macbeth. We know that Macbeth's Scotland is a land ruled by and through fear. Fear pervades the atmosphere of the play from the inception of the murder. There is the fear of discovery, of course: “I am afraid they have awaked,” says Lady Macbeth of the grooms as she awaits her husband (2.2.10). “I am afraid to think of what I have done,” says Macbeth, when he realizes he needs to return to the scene of the crime with the daggers that he has mistakenly carried with him (2.2.53). For a while, Macbeth will find that every noise “appals” him (2.2.59). Feeling fear, Macbeth becomes the major instigator of fear in others: Malcolm and Donalbain flee immediately. Macduff also departs from Scotland. Macbeth “fears” the existence of Banquo and his sons as those who will wrench “unlineally” the throne from his occupation (3.1.55). Macbeth must “scorch the snake” and kill it to assuage his fear and sleeplessness (3.2.18–20). But he fears everyone: He keeps a “servant fee’d” in every house and exists in the tyrant's dire world of trustlessness and panic, both fearing and engendering fear (3.4.131). The terrible scene in Fife minutely shows fear's voracious infectiousness and terror, spreading from the tyrant to encompass the whole country, destroying trust.

The exchange with Ross and Lady Macduff at the beginning of this scene is vital. In the preceding scene, we saw Macbeth in dismay at the news of Macduff's flight, declaring that he will “surprise” Macduff's castle in Fife and seize his lands, and “give to th’edge of the sword / His wife, his babes and all unfortunate souls / That trace him in his line” (4.1.149–52). The firstlings of his heart will be the firstlings of his hand, in a relentless outpacing of thought—“be it thought and done” (4.1.146–48).

In the next scene, we move to Fife, and Lady Macduff is being brought the news from Ross that Macduff has fled the land. Her first question is to ask what had her husband done that he should flee? She thinks his flight is madness, that he has become a traitor (to her and his children) by virtue of his fears: “When our actions do not / Our fears do make us traitors” (4.2.2–3). To this Ross tries out the idea that she does not know whether it was wisdom or fear. Lady Macduff replies that it cannot be wisdom to “leave his wife; to leave his babes, / His mansions, and his titles in a place / From whence himself does fly?” (4.2.6–8). For her, this is a sign that he cannot love them, for even the wren fights against the owl to protect the young ones in her nest: “All is the fear, nothing is the love” (4.2.12). This is a description apt for the denaturing of Scotland. Ross offers again the thought that Macduff is “noble, wise, and judicious”, and “best knows / The fits of the season” (4.2.16–17). But he admits that the times are cruel “when we are traitors / And do not know ourselves, yet know not what we fear, / But float upon a wild and violent sea / Each way and none” (4.2.20–22). Not enough credence is usually given to Lady Macduff's apprehension of what wisdom might come to, against the initially bland, superficial, and false consolations of Ross. And then Ross, too, leaves. A messenger comes in warning her to flee. But he too departs. It is left to her son to be the man. And he is, in this striking staging, the best man in the play, his actions and vision the least corrupted, his heart the purest. The scene anatomizes the effect of fear and how liable it is to make us traitors even when we do not know what we fear, floating “each way” and therefore “none”, that is to say, with no way or direction. To draw out the depth of Macduff's response to their slaughter, this scene needs to be free of condescension and needs to be as clear-sighted as Lady Macduff is within it.

Macduff's response to the slaughter of his entire family and household insists on the responsibility of responsiveness.⁸⁴ In Polly Findlay's remarkably quick-moving production at the Barbican in 2018, Edward Bennett as Macduff holds an agonizingly long pause after Ross has delivered the news that his castle has been surprised and his wife and children “savagely slaughtered” (4.3.206). This long silence prompts and motivates Malcolm's outburst “Merciful heaven. . . . Give sorrow words” (4.3. 208–10). Bennett maintains the great weight of bewilderment and grief in his slow repetitions: “My children too? . . . My wife killed too? . . . All my pretty ones? . . . did you say all? . . . All? . . . All my pretty chickens, and their dam / At one fell swoop?” (4.3.212, 4.3.214, 4.3.218–20). The slow trajectory of Bennett's performance in the rapid, hurtling movement of the play, the play in which Macbeth has sought to obliterate time is startlingly effective. He is told by Malcolm that he must dispute it like a man.⁸⁵ To Malcolm's morally feeble, instrumental words, “Be comforted. / Let's make us medicines of our great revenge” (4.3.217), he finds it enough to comment: “He has no children” (4.3.219), a line I take here to be about Malcolm rather than Macbeth. And then:

I shall do so

But I must also feel it as a man:

I cannot but remember such things were

That were most precious to me.

(4.3.224)

All Malcolm can think of is turning Macduff into the instrument of revenge against Macbeth, converting grief to anger (4.3.231–32). Macduff is reminded of all that is precious in the world, the remembrance of which, the recovery of which, is what he thought he was fighting for, although he now realizes that he might have forgotten this. Macbeth has destroyed what is precious to him; he has destroyed what he cares about and values, and so it is what is precious, what is valued that is enlarged and put before us to care about. The horror felt in Macduff's response is intrinsically linked to his sense of what is precious, just as violation is linked to the intrinsically and irreplaceably valuable. As Diamond has said, there is no “grammar of value in general.” We see value as alive in a human life when we see what responsiveness to that value might be, and what failures in such responsiveness comes to.⁸⁶ The horror now deadened in Macbeth is utterly alive in Macduff's response. The pause stops the hurtling speed of the play, its drive to thoughtlessness in the actions of Macbeth. Macbeth will eventually know that he has destroyed the things he can no longer look to have—honor, love, and troops of friends (5.3.24–25).

Macbeth puts before us an anatomy of evil whose contours can come clear only because of remorse, and the subsequent revelation of the shape of harm. In so doing, it shows us what is at stake in the concept of human action, but also what gets lost by dry versions of what it is that human beings do, dry versions of the so-called dilemmas before them.⁸⁷ When deracinated pictures of the will in modern moral philosophy are sovereign, they will miss the kind of violence and danger revealed in this play; they will be blind to the very analysis of deracination it depicts in the mind of its central murderer.

The Responsibility of Responsiveness

Being human is aspiring to being human, says Cavell: “Since it is not aspiring to being the only human, it is an aspiration on behalf of others as well.”⁸⁸ The concept of the human, human action, remorse, and pity are thus internally related.

The chapter epigraph is from Czeslaw Milosz's poem, “One More Day.” After the first line “Comprehension of good and evil is given in the running of the blood,” the poem continues:

In a child's nestling close to its mother, she is security and warmth,

In night fears when we are small, in dread of the beast's fangs and in the terror of dark rooms,

In youthful infatuations where childhood delight finds completion.

Milosz wants to draw our attention to the natural patterns of response without which our moral notions would be incomprehensible. “Should we discredit the idea for its modest origins?” he asks. The poem lovingly mulls over the naturalness of these responses. The security a child finds is related to the warmth of her mother's body, just as her fears may be a response to the unknown and fancied darkness of a devouring space, like Jane Eyre in the red room. Or ponder, suggests Milosz, our unreasoned desires toward the people to whose beauty we respond, or to the fabulous gratuity of birdsong, the presence of light, and the architecture of a tree. In Milosz's poem, this responsiveness is related to our moral sense: We learn that “good is an ally of being,” as “the mirror of evil is nothing” . . . According to the nature of our bodies, of our language.” Our natural responsiveness helps to form and forge the fabric of relationships through which we acknowledge one another as proper objects of care and concern.⁸⁹

In the continuation of the speech analyzed earlier in this chapter (“If ’twere done when ’tis done”), Macbeth introduces a most astonishing image of Pity as a “naked newborn babe.” Imagining an inescapable doomsday judgment, he envisages a heavenly response to Duncan's “taking-off.” At the day of judgment, Duncan's virtues will plead for him, and “pity, like a naked new born babe, / Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubin, horsed / Upon the sightless couriers of the air, / Shall blow the deed in every eye, / That tears shall drown the wind” (1.7.21–25). Pity is the babe who will witness and judge because it is the naturalness of pity and its irreducible claim on us that is in “the running of the blood.” Pity is naked, and newborn, a wholly dependent creature, inviting and making needful our loving concern for its survival. Pity as the newborn babe reminds us of the helpless beginnings we share; the babe, however, is our implacable judge. It “blows the deed in every eye”: The tears of the pitying drown the wind.⁹⁰

Pity is, as Wittgenstein puts it, a “form of conviction,” a form of acknowledgment of another's suffering, and our feelings of pity have a normative claim on us. It is the lack of pity for suffering that demands explanation. That is why, after Macbeth's invocation of the babe, Macbeth announces to his wife that “we will proceed no further in this business” (1.7.31). It is also why Lady Macbeth has to so distort and twist the concept of manhood and courage and the appropriate objects of fear as in the fully obvious idea that it is proper to fear harm to a baby but not to use harm to a child as exemplary of her courage.

Macbeth has not rendered himself inhuman. But only a human being can behave inhumanly. This is why being human is not a given. “Being human is the power to grant being human.”⁹¹ “What gives us so much as the idea that human beings think, can feel?”⁹² Nothing, because it is not an idea. “I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.”⁹³ Our responsibilities are intrinsically, internally bound up with our responsiveness to each other.⁹⁴

Before we reject the human, before we imagine we are posthuman, we should know what it means to cherish and acknowledge our humanity.

We sometimes call on each other to treat each other as human beings. We seem to need reminders. We say, for example, that the way she humiliated him was inhuman, or that the rapist sat on her to tie up his shoelaces after he raped her as if she was interchangeable with a log or a bench. Is there any other way to treat each other except as human?⁹⁵ Surely we—and not the rapist either—do not need reminders of the difference between a log and a woman?⁹⁶ Such phrases are rather a call to justice, a plea that she will fall into the realm of justice as a stone or a log does not. They are a shamed acknowledgment that it is precisely in the realm of the human that people treat each other with a cruelty likely to madden us if we contemplate it too surely.

It is perhaps too comforting a thought to imagine that tragedy is about our finiteness, about what we cannot know or do. If we see it that way, we can avoid our irreducible, inevitable responsibility in adopting an attitude toward each other's souls. If we follow Cavell's logic, of the embeddedness of knowledge in acknowledgment and response, then the idea of our finitude as limit might come as a relief from the perpetual burden of having to read each other, and having to express ourselves, of having to draw the connections we draw between body and soul.

Shakespeare's moral achievement in Macbeth is to bring into view our irreducible role in seeing each other as human, as a task, not a given. Criticism is making a work of art available to just response.⁹⁷ If we justly respond to Shakespearean tragedy, can it help the humanities, help us, be humane?