Evil and Understanding: Some Thoughts on Raskolnikov and Macbeth 

                                              Jon Finch as Macbeth in Roman Polanski's film

Understanding Macbeth and understanding an act of mine. if we truly understood that an action was evil, we couldn't do it. That counter-intuitive thought becomes more plausible in the light of remorse.  Of course, we could say to ourselves that murder is evil, and still commit murder, as Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov does in Crime and Punishment.   But a man like Raskolnikov doesn't really know the evil he contemplates until he suffers from the pained recognition of guilt – remorse. “Oh my God, what have I done!” uttered in horrified recognition shows that the remorseful person has understood the evil done; and with such an understanding he never would have been able to do the evil in the first place. His understanding of what he has done comes with an understanding of the reality of human beings as creatures who can be wronged in such ways. To understand the meaning of an act is always to understand something about reality. Through the pain of a lucid remorse a deep aspect of the real world and the human spirit is revealed.

      Macbeth's remorse, however, had a different character due to the clarity and honesty of his foreknowledge of the evil he contemplated. Unlike Raskolnikov, for example, Macbeth renounced pseudo-philosophical justifications or rationalizations. He possessed an understanding of what was involved before his crime that is usually only granted to the evil-doer after the crime if he suffers remorse. Macbeth's murder of Duncan is “premeditated” in the deepest sense possible: He cannot say “Oh my God, what have I done!” in horrified recognition: his courage and truthfulness ensured that he did (terrifyingly) understand precisely what he proposed to do. To understand the evil of murder is just to recoil in horror over the temptation to do it – or to suffer remorse after having done it.  Macbeth does both.

      What further makes Macbeth tragic is that – in a grand way – his fall into the worst evil at the same time precludes final condemnation on our part. To be possessed by deep desires and tempted to realize such desires through evil is a common human fate.  Macbeth's deep desire to be King as well as to overcome the limitations of the human condition (cf. Lear) in fulfilling it reflects his high social standing, his exceptional valor, and his sublime imagination. But this very combination destroys the distance between temptation and action that characterizes Hamlet, for example, and I suppose most of us as well.         

        The sense in which Macbeth was indeed blind and acted in ignorance is so universal that few of us can resist the attraction to identify with him in spite of the hideousness of his crimes.  Macbeth knew he was losing his soul for the sake of his deep desires; he knew the horror of this loss, knew that, when the time came, the horror would be beyond what he could imagine, even if he trusted his courage to endure it.  But what he did mistakenly hope was that the moment, that present at least, when his deep desires were fulfilled, would be glorious.  The glorious present of fulfillment was to be the prize for which damnation is the price – a price only the most valorous could contemplate. That was his trap.

       But the prize and the price are not incommensurable – the Good (or morality) is absolute and can't be weighed against other goods. “Damnation” just means evil can never be a price for anything desired.  The very idea that there is a prize (deep desires) to be traded for Macbeth's “precious jewel” turns out to be an illusion that Macbeth only sees in the end, in utter despair.  Through his sublime imagination Macbeth tries to seal off the present moment of fulfillment – always deferred until after the next crime: as though he could imagine that only the present were real and enjoyable, not care about the past evil or the future despair. But the present cannot be isolated from the past or the future in the play's moral universe. Only gradually does it dawn on him that the prize was a chimera. Having grasped finally the emptiness of the prize, Macbeth “heroically” accepted the final despair that was always the inevitable consequence of evil done. Not only his insight into the evil he did but, at the end, the illusory nature of the enjoyment of the desires for which it was done (here the point of the witches equivocation) complete the revelation of truth. – In a purely private, middle-class way, this is the story of a betrayal of mine: understanding life through literature; understanding literature through life.

 

 

Macbeth cannot pray. I cannot imagine Macbeth praying given the irreversible nature of what he did. Repentance seems impossible. It is as though he married Hell while still in earthly life. Having grasped finally the emptiness of the prize, Macbeth “heroically” accepted the despair that was always the inevitable consequence of evil done. Not only his insight into the evil he did but, at the end, the illusory nature of the enjoyment of the desires for which it was done (here the point of the witches’ equivocation) complete the revelation of truth. Yet even in the face of Hell (the final meaningless of the “sound and fury” soliloquy), Macbeth refuses to repent due not just to the very “courage” that stood in such tension with his conscience, but because the essence of the act, its sublimity, is just that it precluded repentance. Having committed himself in full knowledge of the evil, he would seem false and cowardly in his own eyes to wish all undone at the point when he must pay the price. Or rather: to repent would be to concede that his act lacked all heroic or tragic stature – ‘oh, sorry, I didn’t really mean it’; that his understanding of his act did not manifest who he was, did not disclose a man whose courage put him beyond good and evil, but merely an ambitious man driven shabby justification for a power grab, spurred on by the supernatural assurance of success.

        Compare me: to deny the sublime dimension to my Eros for woman A would mean my betrayal of woman B was just a piece of shabbiness for the sake of all-too-human but reprehensible lust of an aging man for a younger (unstable) woman. There is a structural similarity to Macbeth’s inability to repent. I can repent almost everything, but I cannot think my Eros for A was less than real and profound (as it indeed felt) without at the same time the judgment being forced upon me – ‘you are utterly contemptible’. Contemptible means: better not to have existed, a drag on the universe. 

     There seem to be two Hells: one for those who wish they had never been born; another for those who, to become what they mistakenly imagine they really are, violate the meaning of their lives, of human life. I do believe deep wishes, even deep needs are sometimes in conflict with the real meaning of our lives, and that there is something tragic in this – but that might be a piece of opportunism. Macbeth is a sacred text because it has the power to reveal the depths of the human spirit.

. . .

The sound and fury soliloquy is still the best statement of what Hell is that I have read, the clearest revelation of Hell as final meaningless, as the utter absence of love. It is the end goal of all evil. It is what every evil deed tends towards and embodies, though outside of Shakespeare hardly anyone can look at this truth so clearly (why did Tolstoy hate Shakespeare?). This comes as a response to the news of Lady Macbeth's death and his inability to register any grief at all:

                            Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

                            Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

                            To the last syllable of recorded time;

                            And all our yesterdays have lighted fools       

                            The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!         

                            Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

                            That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

                            And then is heard no more. It is a tale

                            Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

                            Signifying nothing.

I have no idea how to think about Heaven and Hell ontologically. But I do know they are symbols of the human spirit, Heaven at one end, signifying affirmation, love, joy, love of beauty, creative joy, quiet appreciate of the goodness that is at least part of life; at the other end Hell, final despair, the loss of the capacity, even the desire to love and be loved, the inability to care about anything, utter meaninglessness projected from the emptiness and cold of the lost soul onto all of Creation.  Nihilists don't undertake an impartial metaphysical investigation of existence and rationally conclude on the basis of evidence that existence is meaningless, human life a mistake. Rather they carry that meaningless around with them and project it onto existence, make any investigation prove this felt thesis that reflects the state of their souls.