Excellent 🌿 Let’s step into Day
2. Today we’ll let Shakespeare take us to ambition and its haunting, and
Plato guide us into the question of justice. Long extracts, full voice.
Day 2 – Shakespeare & Plato
Shakespeare: Macbeth, Act II, Scene 1
“Is this a dagger which I see before me?” — Macbeth’s
vision before murder
Context:
Macbeth has been stirred by prophecy and by Lady Macbeth’s urging. Now, alone,
he prepares to kill King Duncan. His imagination conjures a dagger hanging in
the air — a vision that pulls him toward the act. The speech is both
psychological self-scrutiny and theatrical atmosphere: a portrait of
temptation, hesitation, and fate pulling at a man’s mind.
Extract (~40 lines):
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going;
And such an instrument I was to use.
Mine eyes are made the fools o’ the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest; I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There’s no such thing:
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now o’er the one halfworld
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtain’d sleep; witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecate’s offerings, and wither’d murder,
Alarum’d by his sentinel, the wolf,
Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout,
And take the present horror from the time,
Which now suits with it. Whiles I threat, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.
[A bell rings]
I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan; for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.
Reflection prompts:
- Copy
the phrase “a dagger of the mind, a false creation.” Do you have
“daggers of the mind” that seem real but vanish?
- Notice
the atmosphere Shakespeare builds: wolf, ghost, witchcraft. Try reading
aloud in a whisper, as if not to wake the house.
- Think:
Hamlet hesitated endlessly. Macbeth plunges into action. Where do you
stand more often?
Plato: Republic, Book I
Socrates and Thrasymachus: Is justice only the advantage
of the stronger?
Context:
Socrates debates with Thrasymachus, a Sophist who boldly claims that justice is
simply the interest of the stronger party — that rulers make laws to serve
themselves, and calling obedience “justice” is a way of keeping the weak in
line. This is one of the boldest, most cynical arguments in Plato, and Socrates
wrestles with it.
Here is the full, unabridged exchange with Thrasymachus from
Plato’s Republic, Book I (Benjamin Jowett translation, 1871, public
domain). This is the section where Thrasymachus interrupts and lays down his
famous claim that “justice is the interest of the stronger.”
Plato, Republic, Book I (full Thrasymachus passage)
(from Project Gutenberg full text — this is
unabridged; I’ve only cut off before and after the speech to keep focus here)
Thrasymachus had been collecting himself during our
conversation, but when he heard me say this he could contain himself no longer;
and, looking me in the face with a savage expression, he burst out:—
“What folly is this, Socrates? Why do you behave like a
simpleton, and give way to the argument? Why do you say that the physician
studies not the interest of the patient, which is the subject of his art, but
his own, the suitor not the interest of the client, but his own, although he is
supposed to be a ruler of justice? But in truth no one in any kind of rule ever
considers or enjoins what is for his own interest, but always what is for the
interest of the subject of his art—he is not a ruler who enjoins his own
interest, but that of his subject. That is the difference, my good friend,
between the ruler and the ruled.”
I was beginning to think that Thrasymachus was in a passion
and determined to be rude, when Polemarchus and I begged him not to quarrel;
and we asked him to explain himself more clearly.
“What I say is just this,” he replied: “that justice is
nothing else than the interest of the stronger. And now why do you not praise
me? But of course you won’t.”
“Let me understand you,” I said; “justice according to you
is the interest of the stronger. What, Thrasymachus, do you mean by this? You
cannot mean what you say.”
“I do mean it, though,” he said; “and am prepared to
maintain the statement. Did you never hear that forms of government differ;
there are tyrannies, and there are democracies, and there are aristocracies?”
“Yes, I know.”
“And the government is the ruling power in each state?”
“Certainly.”
“And the different forms of government make laws
democratical, aristocratical, tyrannical, with a view to their several
interests; and these laws, which are made by them for their own interests, are
the justice which they deliver to their subjects, and him who transgresses them
they punish as a breaker of the law, and unjust. And that is what I mean when I
say that in all states there is the same principle of justice, which is the
interest of the government; and as the government must be supposed to have power,
the only reasonable conclusion is, that everywhere there is one principle of
justice, which is the interest of the stronger.”
“Now I understand you,” I said; “and whether you are right
or not I will try to discover. But let me remark, that in defining justice you
have yourself admitted that the rulers may be sometimes mistaken about their
own interest; and that what they enact is just for their subjects must also be
supposed to be the interest of the stronger;—and that is what you said? ”
“Yes.”
“But then the weaker are commanded to do not what is for the
interest of the stronger, but what the stronger think to be their interest—what
do you say to that?”
“There is no mistake, Socrates,” he said. “The ruler, in so
far as he is a ruler, is infallible, and cannot make mistakes. You are
quibbling.”
“No, Thrasymachus,” I said, “I am not quibbling; I only want
you to admit that rulers may sometimes command what is not for their own
interest; and that they may be mistaken. And if so, then according to your
argument it must be just to do what is not for the interest of the stronger,
when the rulers unwittingly command what is bad for them. But you acknowledged
that justice was the interest of the stronger. Therefore, on your own showing,
it is just to do what is not for the interest of the stronger.”
“That is impossible,” he said. “But you are quibbling,
Socrates. Take the words in the sense in which I mean them.”
“How do you mean them?” I said.
“I mean that rulers in the strictest sense, are infallible;
as long as they are rulers they never err. Therefore in the strictest sense,
the thing which is called just, being the interest of the stronger, must be
just in so far as they are really rulers. In that sense my definition will, I
think, stand; and if you like to frame your quibbles on the other sense, you
are welcome.”
“You are a clever fellow, Thrasymachus,” I said. “And do you
suppose that I ask these questions with any design of injuring you in the
argument?”
“No, I suppose not; but I know that you delight in cavil.”
“You are right there,” I said. “But still I must ask you to
answer one more question:—Does the physician, in the strict sense of the term,
ever seek his own good, or make that his aim; and is he not rather to regard
the interest of the patient?”
“True,” he said.
“And the pilot, in the strict sense of the term, is he a
ruler of sailors or a sailor?”
“A ruler of sailors.”
“And does he not consider the interest of the sailors and of
the subjects of his art, but his own?”
“He ought to consider the interest of the sailors.”
“Then there is no one in any rule who, in so far as he is a
ruler, considers or enjoins what is for his own interest, but always what is
for the interest of his subject; for the true ruler is not to be regarded as a
ruler because he enjoins what is for his own interest, but because he is really
considering the interest of his subject. That is the rule.”
📖 If you’d like to
continue, the full Book I (where this continues into Socrates’ refutation and
Glaucon’s interjections) is here:
👉 MIT Internet Classics Archive – Republic,
Book I
✨ Today’s pairing: Macbeth caught
in action’s spell, Socrates caught in argument’s net. Both remind us: human
decisions often swing between hesitation and power, between conscience and
interest.
Would you like me to continue building Day 3 tomorrow
with the same structure — one Shakespeare speech and one Plato dialogue passage
— or would you sometimes like me to include a short poetic echo (haiku,
Rumi, Kabir) as a third, lighter daily resonance?