Upon One Bank and Shoal of Time: Literature, Nihilism, and Moral Philosophy

They thought him honest and they "loved him well," a valiant, worthy gentleman. A brave man, the bridegroom of Bellona, the Roman war goddess. He won "golden opinion from all sorts of people." But all that changed. Instead, he became despised for his treachery and feared for actions that know no moral bounds. From murdering his king to killing his past friends and from that to infanticide, Macbeth's story, at least from the perspective of others, is one of a change in reputation. ¹ From his own point of view--an outlook which never experiences a good name or, for that matter, any other thing as an accomplishment--things are somewhat more complicated than a simple story of loss.

There is something hollow in Macbeth. What is missing is not motivation for his actions--his "vaulting ambition" is supposed to cover that--but a sense of motivational depth. What worries us as we read the play is, I think, the emptiness of Macbeth's ambition. ² He wants to be king, that much is certain. This desire, however, was not always in him. It overtook him only when a possibility appeared. The problem is not with the overwhelming nature of his ambition. The alien quality of Macbeth lies, rather, in the way in which he never enjoys his accomplishments. There is never happiness or satisfaction in the man. Not when he returns triumphant from fighting Macdonald. Not when he becomes a king. Not when he secures his reign. He never hints how he wishes to put to use the power he so desperately wants to have. Like Richard III, Macbeth never dwells on the object of his ambitions. However, whereas in the former one detects an unmistakable delight that accompanies his villainies, a sense of the proud performer calling attention to the atrocities he commits, Macbeth remains an unhappy, frightened man. One wonders why it was that he wanted to become a king in the first place. ³

Nihilism--that, I shall soon argue, is the philosophical concern that underlies Macbeth--could be presented as a philosophical position. A nihilist rejects any process in which "things"--states of affairs, feelings, lives, actions, dispositions--are endowed with value. The position could take the form of dismissing any criteria according to which values may be ascribed. Another route is through showing that value is always relative to some perspective which one has no reason to privilege. At its extreme, the position seems irrefutable. The argument would be that since philosophical discussion is limited to rational debate, the best philosophy can do in answering a nihilist is to show that ascribing value is a rational--justified, beneficial, end-serving--act. However, philosophy is reduced to silence if the value of rationality--or the value of always being rational--is questioned. Put differently, since a nihilist would have to acknowledge the value of rational debate in order to listen to philosophy at all, an extreme nihilist who refuses to grant this presupposition would always win.

The impasse philosophy leads to when foundational questions of value arise should make us look hard for alternatives. Turning to literary works is one such route. In a discussion of Richard III, I argued that the play enables a deeper grasp of the sort of ethical skepticism it depicts. ⁴ "Deep" there meant that through portraying a plausible existential framework in which immorality becomes an explicit choice, literature forces us to go beyond the sort of hypothetical smiling skeptic that haunts philosophy and that one never in fact meets. We grasp the intellectual and emotional underpinnings of moral skepticism as it arises in a life-like situation. We get to know how it is experienced and through such understanding get to experience the sort of impotence that consists in an inability to ultimately ground a condemnation of intentionally chosen villainy. However, whereas in that work the contributions of Shakespeare's...