Traditionally, Macbeth has been read as a morality tale about the perils of ambition. The question that has implicitly animated most treatments of the play is, "Why does Macbeth kill Duncan?" By shifting the emphasis away from Macbeth's motives for killing Duncan onto his inability to refrain from killing him, I draw attention to the striking fact that, in killing King Duncan, Macbeth acts against a fully considered better judgment not to. This suggests the possibility that Macbeth's much-discussed ambition can be understood as a subset of the broader theme of akrasia , the condition in which an agent is unable to perform an action he knows to be right. After identifying and exploring the theme of akrasia in several of Shakespeare's plays, I go on to situate Macbeth's murder of Duncan in the context of the long literary and philosophical debate on incontinence. I then suggest four interrelated explanations of Macbeth's akrasia. First, Macbeth's connection to the motivational conditions of his knowledge is shallow; he does not feel what he knows. Second, Macbeth's lack of self-control is habitual because his weak connection to the conative dimension of his knowledge prohibits him from appealing to techniques of skilled resistance. Third, his habitual lack of self-control renders him vulnerable to Lady Macbeth's taunts, which not only deplete the motivation supporting his better judgment but also prevent him from giving full deliberative weight to his better judgment. Finally, Macbeth also engages in a consistent pattern of self-deception that not only facilitates his akratic slaughter of King Duncan but also enables him to murder Banquo and MacDuff's family. My explanation of how Macbeth is able to act self-deceptively against his better evidence echoes my account of how he is able to act akratically against his better judgment: he does not feel what he knows.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.99391 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Shugar, Seth. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | © Seth Shugar, 2006 |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002574281, proquestno: AAIMR28576, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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