13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Reading in a world not made for us or we for the world, December 31, 2009
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had primitive ideas of action, responsibility, ethical motivation, and justice, which in the course of history have been replaced by a more complex and refined set of conceptions that define a more mature form of ethical experience."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.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Contemporary Classic..?, October 19, 2008
Williams book has become established as a contemporary classic. Is this warranted? On the whole, I think so. Though, in the final analysis, it doesn't quite follow-through on its promise.
Williams's goal is to establish that shame cultures, such as that of Ancient Greece (the Greece of Sophocles), were not necessarily tyranical in the way in which many modern moral philosophers have assumed. Simply put (forgive me if you want more detail! - please read Williams or Hutchinson) the emotion of shame is often depicted by we moderns as a heteronomous emotion--we feel shame beacuse our peers judge us to be worthy of shame. Whereas Williams seeks to show that shame can be autonomous--we feel shame because we judge ourselves to be worthy of the attribution of shame. This has far-reaching implications, which Williams draws out.
What are my misgivings? Well, they might appear marginal to some, though I submit that they are crucial to the success of Williams's argument. Williams's argument to the effect that shame can be autonomous is ultimately correct. However, as Phil Hutchinson has shown, (see his book
Shame and Philosophy) the argument as presented by Williams needs further support, if it is to stick (and persuade his philosophical opponents). For ultimately Williams merely appeals to metaphors, in talking of the "internalised other" when arguing for the autonomy of shame (it is the internalised other that judges us worthy of shame rather than an actually existing other). Such appeals to metaphors are unlikely to persuade those who are sceptical of Williams conclusion from the outset. Thus, Williams runs the risk of preaching only to the converted. This might have something to do with Williams' avowed dependence on Gabriele Taylor's account of shame in her
Pride, Shame, and Guilt. As Hutchinson shows, had Williams drawn on a "world-taking cognitivist" framework for understanding emotion he would not have needed to appeal to the metaphor of internalised other so as to make the case for the autonomy of shame.
Williams's book should be essential reading for any serious student of moral psychology. If one wants to go deeper, as perceptive readers will demand they must, then they should read further, as I have suggested above. For a more subtle understanding of shame would have made this a better book.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The mind of the Greeks - put your thinking cap on, December 6, 2011
Did the Greeks of Homer's era have a complete sense of self and agency? Some critics have said no, claiming that these concepts were not developed till later (some say as late as modern times). Bernard Williams counters these arguments, and further claims that early Greek ethical ideas were in some ways in better condition than ours today.
Shame and Necessity is an exploration of the working theory of action informing the works of Homer and the playwrights of his day. In order to make his point, Williams roves over a range of related concepts. In so doing he teaches us something about Greek notions of body, mind, soul, responsibility, intention, will, shame, guilt, honor, power, necessity, and freedom.
The book is based on a series of lectures, and Williams' style is erudite, literary, and subtle. To fully appreciate his arguments, one needs a solid ground in Classics as well as philosophy of mind. Nevertheless, the general reader can, with a bit of determination, learn quite a bit about the Greek mind, regardless of how much else is understood.
In the first chapter Williams outlines his contention that the Homeric Greeks did have a working theory of action, as against "progressivists" such as Bruno Snell, who claim that a complete theory only developed later through gradual intellectual progress.
The second chapter is where he begins to show this. One reason critics claim Homeric people could not decide for themselves was because they supposedly did not have selves to decide for. The notion of a unified "soul" is not yet present in Homer; there are only various parts of what modern people would call the soul. But Williams finds that characters in Homer do indeed make decisions and act on them, and this very fact shows that they have a unified sense of self, insofar as they are persons who act. It is only by imposing our modern notions of the soul onto Homer that his characters appear to lack something. Through this discussion, we learn about the Greek concepts of mind, body, soul, will, intention, and self-control. Another reason critics claim the Greeks could not decide for themselves was because Homer's characters are always being coaxed to this or that action by divine intervention. This, too, Williams debunks by showing that the gods only give characters reasons to act in a particular way, they do not actually force their hands. Characters still decide for themselves whether or not to heed the gods. Through this discussion we learn something of the complex interplay of human psychology and divine will.
Responsibility is the topic of the third chapter. This continues Williams' exploration of the acting agent by showing that Homeric characters are fully able to hold themselves accountable for their actions. This is true both for deliberate, intentional action, and also for what is not intended but nevertheless caused by action. In the course of the chapter we learn about notions of cause, blame, pollution (miasma), regret, and pity. The discussion also touches the realm of virtue, and virtue's ugly cousin, shame.
This brings us to the theme of the fourth chapter: shame and autonomy. Homer's world has been called a shame culture, as opposed to a guilt culture. And the concept of moral guilt has been upheld by progressivists as an improvement over shame. The latter is criticized for being heteronymous, or excessively concerned with others' opinions, while guilt affirms a person's autonomy. Williams attacks this first of all by showing that the Greeks had notions resembling both shame and guilt, and secondly by theorizing that a person's own internalized sense of shame is often more important than that of any external observer. In this way, he demonstrates that shame is in only certain situations dependent on the opinions of others. In other situations, a person's own shame may determine actions autonomously, as when Sophocles' Ajax determines to commit suicide after his dishonor, even though this runs contrary to the opinions of others around him. The Greeks themselves were conscious of this distinction by the later 5th-century, as demonstrated by Euripides' play Hippolytus, where the character Phaedra destroys herself through excessive concern with public opinion, while Hippolytus relies on his own sense of honor despite the ill opinions of others around him. So the Greek sense of shame was much more complex than the progressivists have allowed. As a result of this debate, we learn some interesting things about shame. First, in cases where the shame does bear relation to an external observer, there are powerful social consequences. To feel shame before others is to share values about what is shame-worthy, and so there is a bonding effect. To feel shame before others also requires that we respect them; we do not feel shame before those whose opinions we hold in contempt. And to feel shame before others does not require that the observer be critical, for a person can be ashamed of being praised in the wrong way or by the wrong person. Second, in cases where the source of shame is internal, this is more than a mere internal image of some specific external person, and also more than an empty, moral monologue. Williams calls it the "internalized other," and this is no one in particular but still potentially somebody. Williams says of Ajax "he has no way of living that anyone he respects would respect--which means that he cannot live with any self-respect" (p. 85). So the internalized other is neither merely self nor merely other, but involves a social dimension within an autonomous thought process. Third, the basic experience of shame differs from that of guilt. Guilt is rooted in hearing the voice of judgment, while shame is rooted in being seen. Guilt results from contemptible acts or omissions, but shame can result from acts as well as faults of character or body, and this can be put in more positive terms: "shame may be expressed in attempts to reconstruct or improve oneself" (p. 90). Guilt is always moral, but shame can be nonmoral, as a failure in prowess or cunning can also produce shame. Fourth, shame is bound up with self-identity. "Shame looks to what I am" is how Williams puts it (p. 93). This illuminates shame's relation to virtue, which is also bound up with self-identity, as expressed for example in Myers' The Other Side of Virtue. Fifth and finally, shame enlightens guilt. Williams writes:
The structures of shame contain the possibility of controlling and learning from guilt, because they give a conception of one's ethical identity, in relation to which guilt can make sense. Shame can understand guilt, but guilt cannot understand itself. (p. 93)
Equally, only shame can help rebuild the self after misdoings, because it alone holds notions of what one is and how one relates to others. Guilt alone provides a false picture of a featureless moral self, an agent devoid of character. Williams praises the Greeks for not isolating guilt from shame.
The Greek sense of shame was constraining, such that they felt they could not act in dishonorable ways, they necessarily must follow honor, even unto death. This sense of necessity is what Williams takes up in the fifth chapter. He finds three kinds of necessity constraining human behavior: personal necessity, of the kind just mentioned, divine necessity, or inevitable events brought out by the wills of gods, and a kind of necessity based on social power structures. This third type occupies the rest of the chapter, and relates to two ugly facts of Greek society: slavery and the subjugation of women. Williams shows that Greeks accepted these institutions not because they thought they were justifiable, but rather because they could not imagine how else society might function without crumbling. In this sense, slavery and the subjugation of women were "necessary." In this way, Williams disarms the charge that we have "progressed" since the time of Homer because we have abolished slavery and enlightened ourselves on the problem of patriarchy. He says, rather, this is not necessarily progress, because we are equally at a loss to see ways out of other social problems, such as the exploitation of capitalism. We are still in the same boat, only the problems have changed.
The final chapter is devoted to the notion of freedom. This clarifies the boundaries of human action brought into question by the foregoing discussions of personal, divine, and social necessity. Finally, Williams concludes by re-asserting his thesis that the Greek concept of action is not as different from ours as the progressivists claim, and that we may indeed make good use of the Greek legacy without also abandoning modernity.
Two short endnotes follow, exploring more detailed aspects of shame. The first attempts to model the mechanisms of shame as an internalized witness, resulting in the sense of a loss of power before that witness. The second explores an anomaly in Euripides' Hippolytus, where Phaedra appears to speaks of shame as a pleasure. As a result of this investigation, Williams finds that there may be two kinds of shame, one related to self-respect and the other to mere social embarrassment. This explicates further what has already been said in chapter four.
The central, over-riding message of Shame and Necessity, that the Greeks had a working theory of action and left a legacy worth considering today, may be of pressing significance only to the specialist. But the general reader finds more than idle curiosities in the many lessons learned along the way. The Greek notions of body, mind, soul, responsibility, shame, and freedom all teach us something about ourselves today. And pagan readers will be especially interested to get inside the minds of their ancient predecessors. Overall, this book is a worthwhile read for those willing to put on their thinking caps.
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