Essay: Macbeth and Hamlet

Indo-European Men during the Transvaluation of Values

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Hamlet and Macbeth form a dyad: they are about two men of uncommon excellence who both do and do not want to rule because they are trapped by the yoke of Christianity on “paganism” i.e. Indo-European aristocracy. The two plays are about the same problem, but examined from opposite perspectives.

Macbeth is as much attached to glory as Hamlet is detached from what is his own. Their disproportionality is captured in the detail that neither of them have children. Neither of them are properly embedded in their societies. Both dwell in an intermediary place between Christianity (hoping for a happy Resurrection) and “paganism” (undying fame for Macbeth, the life of the sage for Hamlet). In both plays, Norway is invoked as the color of the heroic world. They both witness a supernatural element that is witnessed by others, which catalyzes the action of the plot. These cathodes of the Ghost and the Sisters are not mere representations of their interiority, but dramatic emanations that the playwright uses to teach the reader about “the way things are.”

They are not the same play. Macbeth is perfectly obscure to himself. His discourse on the “bloody instructions” that his action will serve as perfectly reveals how his kingship will unfold, but his reasoned speech finds no recipient in the hardened spirit that will yet be troubled by bad conscience. His lack of self-knowledge drives him crazy. He is a man divided against himself. He is a soldier, a man of war. His virtue is his bravery. Bravery is the overcoming of fear. Confrontation is fearful because it necessarily contains the willingness to chance prevailing or perishing. He is not unique in Scotland. Siward and Macduff are hard men and soldiers just like he is. They have children and remain true to their virtue which defines them (bravery, soldiering), but Macbeth lacks children and allows himself to act unlike himself (becomes the king, which is not merely defined by courage, but contains courage in what it is defined by, which is wisdom).

Because Macbeth lacks self-knowledge, he forgoes a contest of arms in the open field, during daylight, with deeds visible to all, which would bring victory or death—and death with good conscience, as Cawdor had good conscience at his death—and fame no matter the outcome. But Macbeth resorts to subterranean means—and he discovers that he cannot keep by legitimacy what he acquired through intrigue. He is delivered from his bad conscience that haunts him in his last moments, when he becomes the good old brave Macbeth again during the confrontation of Macduff. Just before then, he was at his nadir, declaiming about “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” and “all our yesterdays.” He was not declaiming about today. Only men of good conscience can live for “today,” look at “today,” and discourse for “today.” Jesus Christ and Achilles are one in this regard.

Macbeth asks the assassins whether they are so “gospelled” that they will not kill their enemies, to which they answer “we are men.” The gospel is the good news, the promise of justice, the eventual and certain arrival of perfect accounting of all deeds intenerated by grace and mercy. This is considered unmanly. This gospel is the “womanly defense” of Lady Macduff, while to be manly is to slaughter those who do you wrong. Macbeth goes on to say men who take revenge are of a different natural order, race, species, breed than those who forgive, as different as wolves and dogs.

But the ultimate ungospelled hero is Achilles, and the climax of the Iliad is him showing compassion to Priam. Macbeth becomes more and more cruel as the plot progresses, because Achilles only had the pain of anger and grief and was not troubled by bad conscience. Achilles did not know what doubting whether you had been untrue to yourself was. His metamorphosis is no betrayal, he only became what he already was.

Macbeth pursues security in his kingship, which involves assassinations of defenseless women and children, making himself hated. Achilles spurned a long inglorious life, he chose nobility, and had contempt for security. But for Macbeth to rule is “nothing, but to be safely thus.” That he has no posterity to impart his rule gnaws at him because that would be a substitute for losing his eternal soul. How would Achilles, who recognizes no “common enemy of mankind,” respond? With a scoff. All this was caused by the parody of the good news from the weird sisters. The gospel of salvation and immortality was replaced by their good news of kingship acquired through dishonor, maintained without security, transferred without heredity.

Macduff (and Siward also) is cut off the same cloth as Macbeth but where Macbeth says damn the one whose courage would fail, Macduff says if Macbeth escapes then Heaven should forgive him. That is, Macduff only prays to meet Macbeth, he does not pray to overcome him. The contest between them must be without help from heaven. Macbeth desired security, Macduff desires a test. Macduff is the paragon of what a soldier can be in a gospelled world. Macduff, and not Malcolm, proves to be the adversary of Macbeth, who could never act like a king, but could instantly embody the soldier on demand. Macduff was equally valourous in the battle near Fife against Cawdor, as Macbeth was in the battle near Forres against Macdonald. Siward was relieved to learn that his son died facing the enemy. Macduff refused to cry for his wife and children.

The false primacy of courage over wisdom came at the cost of incoherence for Macbeth. Siward and Macduff did not hanker after what they were not suited for, hence in their preference to be subordinates to the king they were wise, which allowed them to rebel against Macbeth who acted without wisdom in attempting to leap over his own deceitful actions in order to stop them (his actions) at their track. Macbeth could get Lady Macduff and her child killed, but what men learned from their deaths when they learned of it and what they resolved, he is helpless to prevent, because all men are helpless in this matter. There is an inherent will and internal intelligence in all of life in all of its individual specimens, that the particular forms of that will and intelligence—instantiations—can never claim nor create a suzerainty over. The whole dwells in each particular, ineradicable, that no other particular can subsume and subordinate.

Thus Macbeth acts so single-mindedly, devoted to something he would not be able to name, that he destroys his principle characteristic (what a soldier is) until the last possible moment where he rallies back to his true nature (courage). Macbeth dies unafraid. But Hamlet is so perplexed by bad conscience that he will act in every way except to go straight at his purpose. He stands in contrast to Laertes who flies in a straight line to avenge his father, Laertes would cut throats in a church. But to kill is not enough justice for Hamlet, he must secure damnation as well.

Hamlet causes agitation in the Danish court by naming the killer in the play-within-the-play to be the king’s nephew, not the king’s brother. Claudius is King Hamlet the Senior’s brother, Hamlet the Junior is King Claudius’s nephew. He announces thus to everyone that he intends to kill his uncle. Yet he delays after he announces this, because he is perfectly clear to himself, the coherence of his reasoned discourse saps vitality from the purpose he commits himself to because he cannot possess good conscience to act in a world that he believes to be worthless. He will only indirectly massacre the palace.

If Hamlet was to be the man that his father was, he would be Fortinbras. He admires that type of man, but cannot be it, because he must value his understanding that sees the paltriness of the world above the excellences that he acknowledges to be embedded in that paltriness. Hamlet cannot find quarrel in a straw, or fight for an eggshell. Victory or mastery hold no charms for him. Attempting to do justice is no good when you have no attachment to the thing you want to good by. Hamlet dislikes Denmark’s customs. He declares himself later to be Hamlet the Dane (which means Hamlet the King of Denmark), but his heart is not in it. A great-souled man claims honors for himself while despising them. Hamlet goes a step further, and despises as well what is called the greatness of soul that acquires those honors, that springs from the world, that is shaped by the world, that shapes the world in turn. He calls the world, not only the honors, wormwood.

Macbeth chose ambition over virtue when ambition diverged from virtue, Hamlet feels a compulsion to put something right where he feels there is nothing right. The king is the fount of order, and turns disorder into order. To be king, to rule, Hamlet must declare what the value or measure of things are. A state cannot be governed with only paternosters in hand and Hamlet chooses nothing until Claudies chooses for him. This leads to breaking of the commandment that the Ghost gave to Hamlet: his mother dies without necessity.

No man springs from the earth. Everyone is the offspring of a father and a mother. The family is the most immediate belonging. And war is never waged for itself. Those who pretend to praise war for itself never advocate that a man should attack his family or friends and they blame a man where they think he acted badly. Distinction is how life operates. Friend and foe belong to politics, as kin and stranger belong to generation. Politics, the manly art, shapes men, and does not generate them.

We wish to act, always for a purpose, and to understand that purpose and how to do it, or simply to tell it to someone, we reason. We are colored by passion and appetite, by pride and generosity. Reasoning is a half-opaque operation operating on the half-opaque reasoner. Men act, and are surprised by their actions. They reason their way into things they do not want and reason their way out of things they do want. Men have epiphanies over things they already knew. When we discover a man who is “in command of himself” we are astonished with admiration, because we had half-forgotten that our souls have the antagonism of multiplicity that somehow come together to animate a unity.

Political association is predicated on the existence of men, who are generated by what politics declares itself to be compentent to rule over (and politics has to declare this). The general comes into existence through the particular and then the whole denies that it is bound by the part. No generation, no politics. No politics, no war. These are the permanent disjunctions of the dyad. The concept of justice requires disinterestedness, but without interest, there is no drive to do it. Justice declares that this or that value to be true always, everywhere, for everybody, so that men, who always seek the good, which is necessarily also what is (or believed to be) good for them, deny that their actions contain anything that is good for them, but that they are acting without interest and are embodying the absolute because they cannot bear the burden of being responsible for what they do. Almost nobody in the world can, except for the few, the exceptional, the aristocractic. These men do not claim or believe that their actions are immoral or amoral.