Shame and Necessity, Second Edition (Sather Classical Lectures Book 57) 2nd Edition by Bernard Williams (PDF)

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We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams’s original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery.The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours.Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. In a new foreword A.A. Long explores the impact of this volume in the context of Williams’s stunning career.

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⭐The early Greek philosopher Heraclitus once wrote: “A man’s character is his fate.” (Ethos anthropoi daimon) This quotation could be the epigraph for this book of essays by the distinguished philosopher Bernard Williams, delivered as the fifty-seventh Sather Classical Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley in the spring of 1989.Williams’s death in 2003 was much lamented in the profession for Williams had the happy and exceedingly rare ability to express the most complicated thoughts clearly, without unduly reducing them or ignoring possible objections to them in order to make them more easily intelligible. (His colleague at Oxford, Gilbert Ryle, expressed it this way. When you talk to Williams, he said, Williams “understands what you’re going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, all the possible answers to the objections, before you’ve got the end of your sentence.”) Williams was primus inter pares in the ability to express his views in a manner pleasing not only to fellow philosophers but to interested laymen. This is not to say that what he wrote was always easy to follow, but it was never harder to follow than the subject matter required for it to be a faithful recounting. Williams didn’t shun complexity, which he found meaningful and beautiful. For Williams, complexity was a normal symptom of human living.Grace is not often a quality ascribed to serious philosophical writings, but it applies to Williams’s best works, of which this is clearly one.Shame and Necessity is an eloquent, carefully argued defense of the view that the ancient Greeks, whatever their differences in viewpoint from the modern one, did espouse a coherent ethics and that this ethics still has meaning for us today. In the process, he discusses the anthropologists’ distinction between shame societies (where individual behavior is motivated by considerations of what others will think of one’s actions) and guilt societies (where individual behavior is motivated by a judging voice that is internalized) and rejects it as insufficiently subtle to explain the commonalities and differences between the classical conscience and the modern conscience. Using the evidence of Homer and the tragedians, he absolutely trashes the well known thesis of Bruno Snell (The Discovery of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, 1946, trans. 1953) which argued that the Homeric Greeks had no concept of self and thus were not in the modern sense self-conscious at all. Many of the other classicists he discusses I’ve not read, so I can not comment on them, but he also takes to task Martha Nussbaum (The Fragility of Good: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986) and James M. Redfield’s Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector, 1975), not denying their contribution to the study of Greek ethical thought but by disagreeing with it at points, refining it. (Cf. Williams’s short book, Moral Luck, 1981.) Kant, too, receives short shrift: Williams argues that his views distort our interpretation of Greek ethics by predetermining the categories by which we examine it.Of books I’ve read, Williams praises most E. R. Dodds’s The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), which were also originally delivered as Sather Lectures.In the lectures addressing the notion of necessity in Greek writings, he has a lengthy, subtle and fair discussion of Greek ideas concerning slavery (unjust but necessary) and the subordinate status of women (natural, thus just). Writes Williams, Aristotle appropriated the common teaching concerning women’s nature and status to argue that there were people who were “natural slaves.” Williams doesn’t think Aristotle’s argument holds water. His discussion of what Williams labels “supernatural necessity” is particularly interesting because so elusive: in the tragedies (Ajax, Oedipus, Agamemnon…), there are instances where no matter what the protagonist does in his or her attempt to elude fate, fate happens. Does it then make sense to talk of moral choice -autonomous action– for those parties whose fate is ineluctably determined? (Thucydides is a good guide in this instance. He has Pericles say, at the beginning of his history: “It is possible for the circumstances of our affairs to take as blundering a course as men’s plans.” Williams’s comment? Thucydides “had a powerful sense of the limitations of foresight, and of the uncontrollable impact of chance.”)The footnotes in this fine book are a pleasure: they are extensive and generous, allowing Williams to argue finer points in detail. Following the notes, there are two endnotes, the first on “Mechanisms of Shame and Guilt” and the second a commentary on a passage in Euripides’s Hippolytus.All told, this is a book that will delight any scholar although by now, most of them will have read it. But it can be appreciated and enjoyed by more than classicists or philosophers. I’m proof of that. I had read two of Williams’s books earlier. I ordered this book in 2004, let it sit on my bookshelf until a few weeks ago, and have read it since then with constant pleasure and enlightenment. It gave me much to think about.

⭐Bernard Williams was a philosopher of unique fascination. He was a classics prodigy in school but choose to pursue philosophy. He engaged in a life long debate with all major schools of contemporary philosophy and most of the history of philosophy. He was a member of no major school of contemporary philosophy yet read them all and learned from them all. And after absorbing that whole history of learning, he seems to have learned the most from the early Greeks, i.e., Homer to Thucydides as well as from Nietzsche. Like many others, he seems to have seen Plato and Aristotle as taking a turn that has led our culture down ultimately the wrong road.The argument of Williams book rests on his assertion that:”…we are, in our ethical situation, more like human beings in antiquity than any Western people have been in the meantime.” (p.166) This is because Williams’ believed that our situation is “not only beyond Christianity but beyond its Kantian and its Hegelian legacies” (ibid.).Williams believed that in our situation we can learn much from the writings of the pre-Platonic Greeks, i.e., Homer, Hesiod, Pindar, Sophocles, Euripides and Thucydides among others. These writers (along with the insights of Nietzsche and the tools of analytical philosophy) are deployed against several intellectual targets.Early in Shame and Necessity (hereafter, SN), Williams takes on what he calls the `progressivist account’, according to which “the Greeks had primitive ideas of action, responsibility, ethical motivation, and justice, which in the course of history have been replaced by a more complex and refined set of conceptions that define a more mature form of ethical experience.” (p.5)SN argues instead that there has been no progress made in these ideas. Instead, we have, if anything pursued the wrong path in ethical understanding. We have done so under the influence of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle and of Christianity.Plato created part of the problem by moralizing our understanding of psychology. If I understand Williams right on this point he is claiming that Plato’s tripartite division of the soul was driven by Plato’s moral theory. “The division of the soul is invoked, basically, to describe and explain conflicts between two kinds of motive: rational concerns that aim at the good and mere desire.” (p. 42) To get back to, to understand and learn from the moral outlook of a Homer we have to de-ethicize (my ugly word) our psychology.The end result of our idealized and moralized psychology was a “characterless” self. This idea has many variants, be they Platonic, Christian, Kantian or Hegelian. The common theme to all the variants is that there is a pure and in some sense pre-existing self that has to put off the detritus of a particular life to achieve a rational understanding of a universal moral law.Williams reply is summed up by the following quote:”In truth, however, it is not that such a self is misled or blinded by the mere process of being socialized; one’s actual self…is constructed by that process.” (p.159)We do not live in a world that in some sense is attuned to our rationality. We live in a world of chance and of different types of necessities that thwart our purposes. If we agree with these assertions of Williams, then we can come to understand his attractions to the pre-Platonic Greeks. Homer does not separate Odysseus into separate faculties one of which should be in charge. Homer gives us a man of `many-turns’, emotional, clever, suspicious, testing, buffeted by fate and chance and doing the best he can to get home. Williams wants us to listen to Odysseus, to the Ajax of Sophocles, to Oedipus and to Thucydides’ ruminations on the Athenians. The Greeks are not to be regarded as tried and true guides. But the may be some of the most important guests at the banquet.Thus the broad outlines of Williams’ SN. All the various insights the Williams developes from reading the Greeks, I leave to you to tease out of your reading of SN.Bernard Williams was one of those contemporary philosophers that anyone with an interest in the field should read. Like Charles Taylor, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, Martha Nussbaum and a very few others, he combined extraordinary learning with a lucid and compelling writing style. You may not be swayed by his arguments. But you cannot help but learn from him. You may learn to read the classics in a whole new way. And you cannot help but be brought up against your own sense of what it is to live in this world. A great book, people. Read it up.

⭐Bernard Williams’s Shame and Necessity is a work of philosophy about what we could learn from the ancient Greeks. The book addresses moral concerns as well as issues of identity and human freedom. What is clear from the book is that the ancient Greek mind is not terribly different from our own but there have been changes and progress of course both in the sciences and our moral reasoning. Nevertheless, changes that have been made from the time of the Greeks to our time have not necessarily followed a linear path. It’s of interest to me, for example, an issue that Williams addresses about how just as Aristotle was uncomfortable and equivocal in talking about slavery, we too find ourselves recognizing that because of social and economic conditions people experience similar forms of enslavement–and just as with Aristotle, we can’t sit comfortably with these conditions, so we try to rationalize them or militate against them. This is just one of the many topics that comes up in Williams’ book. It’s a bit long-winded and rambling but a decent enough read.

⭐I can’t say that I’m an expert in philosophy, let alone ethics. Nonetheless the text offers some interesting insights (at least for me) into some of the possible conflicts that arise from alternative interpretations of the same information, presumably driven by different belief systems. I don’t believe such misconstruals are limited to ethics. One tends to ‘see’ what is already comfortable to the mind.

⭐The book is Bernard Williams as classics scholar and contemporary philosopher. He is the only writer who is able to tease out an understanding of the origins of Western ethics and how it transmuted into systems of morality. The essays are brilliant and informative. Bravo!

⭐Only 10% in, enjoying the book’s insights despite its somewhat long-winded and repetitive writing, but I cannot access the footnotes in the Kindle edition! Amazon, seriously? This is an academic book, where footnotes are half the story! And it costs more on Kindle than paperback… An outrageous rip-off.

⭐great thanks

⭐Masterpiece, of course.

⭐Perfect

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