249 © e Editor(s) (if applicable) and e Author(s) 2016
A. Daly, Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52744-8_8
8
The Social Matrix: Primary Empathy
as the Ground of Ethics
Come seeling night, scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, And with thy
bloody and invisible hand, Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond
which keeps me pale. Light thickens and the crow makes wing to the
rooky wood. Good things of day begin to droop and drowse. While night’s
black agents to their preys do rouse.
Macbeth Act 3, Scene2. (Quotation from e Tragedy of Macbeth
(1606, adapted 1616) (Shakespeare 2005).)
Macbeth has resolved that he will kill Banquo, his friend and comrade in
battle, so as to assure his future as King. He calls on the night to galva-
nize his resolve by annulling ‘that great bond’ which keeps him pale and
vacillating. e presentiment of evil follows quickly with the flight of the
crow to the rooky wood and all the creatures of darkness, the black agents
aroused by the atmosphere charged with malevolence, stir in readiness to
aid this foul deed.
is ‘great bond’, which underwrites the power of moral restraint, has
been variously interpreted as the very personal bonds of friendship and
comradeship between Macbeth and Banquo and also the more general