Shame and Necessity: 57 (Sather Classical Lectures) - Hardcover

Williams, Bernard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520080467 ISBN 13: 9780520080461

Verlag: University of California Press, 1993

Inhaltsangabe

Although humanity has changed since the times of the ancient Greeks, this study claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in 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. This treatise is directed towards writers such as Homer and the tragedians. At the centre of the study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bernard Williams (1929-2003) was White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University, and Monroe Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. His previous books include Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (1979), Moral Luck (1981), and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985).

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Shame and Necessity

By Bernard Williams

University of California Press

Copyright © 1993 Bernard Williams
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520080467


Chapter One
The Liberation of Antiquity

We are now used to thinking of the ancient Greeks as an exotic people. Forty years ago, in the preface to The Greeks and the Irrational , Dodds apologised, or rather declined to apologise, for using anthropological material in interpreting an "aspect of the mental world of ancient Greece."1 Since then, we have become familiar with the activity of applying to the societies of ancient Greece methods similar to those of cultural anthropology. Much has been achieved in these ways, and efforts, in particular, to uncover structures of myth and ritual in such terms have yielded some of the most illuminating work of recent times.2

These methods define certain differences between ourselves and the Greeks. Cultural anthropologists, in their well-known role of observers living in a traditional society, may come very close to the people with whom they are living, but they are committed to thinking of that life as different; the point of their visit is to understand and describe another form of human life. The kind of work I have mentioned helps us to understand the Greeks by first making them seem strange—more strange, that is to say, than they seem when their life is too benignly assimilated to modern conceptions. We cannot live with the ancient Greeks or to any substantial degree imagine ourselves doing so.

Much of their life is hidden from us, and just because of that, it is important for us to keep a sense of their otherness, a sense which the methods of cultural anthropology help us to sustain.

This study does not use those methods. Many of the subjects I discuss have been treated in those terms, but I have largely left those discussions to one side.3 I want to ask a different sort of question about the ancient world, one that places it in a different—and, in just one sense, a closer—relation to our own. But I do not want to deny the otherness of the Greek world. I shall not be saying that Greeks of the fifth century B.C . were after all more modem than we have recently been encouraged to suppose, and that despite gods, daimons, pollutions, blood-guilt, sacrifices, fertility festivals, and slavery, they were really almost as much like Victorian English gentlemen, say, as some Victorian English gentlemen liked to think.4

I shall stress some unacknowledged similarities between Greek conceptions and our own. Cultural anthropology of course also invokes similarities, or it could not make the societies it studies intelligible to us. Some of the similarities are very obvious, lying in universal needs: human beings everywhere need a cultural framework to deal with reproduction, eating, death, violence. Some of the similarities may be unobvious, because unconscious; theorists have claimed to make sense of Greek myths and rituals and their reflections in literature by appeal to structures of imagery that at some level we share. Nothing I say will be in conflict with such inquiries, but the similarities I shall stress are at a different level and concern the concepts that we use in interpreting our own and other people's feelings and actions. If these similarities between our own ways of thought and those of the ancient Greeks are, in some cases, unobvious, this is not because they arise from a structure hidden in the unconscious, but because they are, for cultural and historical reasons, unacknowledged. It is an effect of our ethical situation, and of

our relations to the ancient Greeks, that we should be blind to some of the ways in which we resemble them.

Cultural anthropologists in the field are not committed to any particular evaluation of the life they are studying, compared with the life back home—what might be called the life of modernity. They have many reasons for not feeling superior to the people they study, but those reasons circle a little warily, perhaps, round the basic asymmetry between the parties, created by the fact that one of them does indeed study the other and brings to their relations a theoretical apparatus that has studied others before. With our relations to the ancient Greeks, the situation is different. They are among our cultural ancestors, and our view of them is intimately connected with our view of ourselves. That has always been the particular point of studying their world. It is not just a matter, as it may be in studying other societies, of our getting to know about human diversity, other social or cultural achievements, or, again, what has been spoiled or set aside by the history of European domination. To learn those things is itself an important aid to self-understanding, but to learn about the Greeks is more immediately part of self-understanding. It will continue to be so even though the modern world stretches round the earth and draws into itself other traditions as well. Those other traditions will give it new and different configurations, but they will not cancel the fact that the Greek past is specially the past of modernity.

The process by which modernity takes in other traditions will not undo the fact that the modern world was a European creation presided over by the Greek past. It might, however, make that fact no longer interesting. Perhaps it might prove more helpful, more productive of a new life, to forget about that fact, at least at any level that claims to be history. It is too late to assume that the Greek past must be interesting just because it is "ours".5 We need a reason, not so much for saying that the

historical study of the Greeks bears a special relation to the ways in which modern societies can understand themselves—so much is obvious enough—but rather that this dimension of self-understanding should be important. I believe that there is such a reason, one that was compactly expressed by Nietzsche: "I cannot imagine what would be the meaning of classical philology in our own age, if it is not to be untimely—that is, to act against the age, and by so doing, to have an effect on the age, and, let us hope, to the benefit of a future age."6 We, now, should try to understand how our ideas are related to the Greeks' because, if we do so, this can specially help us to see ways in which our ideas may be wrong.

This book is directed to what I call, broadly, ethical ideas of the Greeks: in particular, ideas of responsible action, justice, and the motivations that lead people to do things that are admired and respected. My aim is a philosophical description of an historical reality. What is to be recovered and compared with our kinds of ethical thought is an historical formation, certain ideas of the Greeks; but the comparison is philosophical, because it has to lay bare certain structures of thought and experience and, above all, ask questions about their value to us. In some ways, I shall claim, the basic ethical ideas possessed by the Greeks were different from ours, and also in better condition. In some other respects, it is rather that we rely on much the same conceptions as the Greeks, but we do not acknowledge the extent to which we do so.7

Both these claims are opposed to a familiar picture of our ethical relations to the ancient Greeks. No one, certainly, thinks that the Greeks' beliefs about these matters were just the same as ours; no one supposes that there is no real difference between modern morality and outlooks typical of the Greek world. The familiar picture of Greek ethical ideas and their relations to our own is, rather, developmental, evolutionary, and—in an ugly word that I have found no way of avoiding—progressivist. It is

directly offered by some modern authors,8 and taken for granted by many more. According to the progressivist account, the Greeks had primitive ideas of action, responsibility, ethical modernity. 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. It is agreed, on this account, that the development took a long time; it is also agreed that some of the improvements occurred in the lifetime of Greek antiquity itself, while others were reserved for a later time. Within that framework, however, it is not agreed when various improvements occurred. It is accepted that the world of Homer embodied a shame culture, and that shame was later replaced, in its crucial ethical role, by guilt. Some think that this process had gone a long way by the time of Plato or even the tragedians. Others see all Greek culture as governed by notions that are nearer to shame than to a full notion of moral guilt, with its implications of freedom and autonomy; they believe that moral guilt was attained only by the modern consciousness.9 Similar disagreements arise about moral agency. Homer's men and women, we are told, were not moral agents; according to one influential theory, which I discuss in the next chapter, they were not even agents. Plato's and Aristotle's people are allowed to have been agents, but they perhaps still fell short of moral agency, because—on some of these accounts at least— they lacked a proper conception of the will.

These stories are deeply misleading, both historically and ethically. Many of the questions they generate, of when this, that, or the other element of a developed moral consciousness is supposed to have arisen, are unanswerable, because the notion of a developed moral consciousness that gives rise to these questions is basically a myth. These theories measure the ideas and the experience of the ancient Greeks against modern conceptions of freedom, autonomy, inner responsibility, moral obligation, and so forth, and it is assumed that we have an entirely

adequate control of these conceptions themselves. But if we ask ourselves honestly, I believe that we shall find that we have no dear idea of the substance of these conceptions, and hence no clear idea of what it is that, according to the progressivist accounts, the Greeks did not have.

There is indeed a word for what it is that they supposedly did not have, the word "morality", and it is a sure sign that we are in the world of the progressivists when we are told that the Greeks, all or some of them, lacked a moral notion of responsibility, approval, or whatever it may be. This word is supposed, it seems, to deliver in itself the crucial assumptions that we enjoy and the Greeks lacked. It is perhaps an indication of some justified anxiety on the part of these writers, whether this word could deliver this (or indeed, by itself, driver anything), that they find it necessary so often to fortify its saving power by putting it in italics.

The way in which we often think about these matters—about morality, in particular, but also about modernity, liberalism, and progress—is structured in such a simple way that it is very hard to say the kind of thing I have just said without being seen as a classicising reactionary. Moreover, since the recent anthropological studies I mentioned earlier, and the work of distinguished scholars who came before them, have rightly shadowed the Hellenic world with darker images, the kind of classicising reactionary one will be taken to be may well be very black indeed. I must therefore state as soon and as firmly as I can that I do not propose that the modern state should be run on the principles of Theognis, or wish to ally myself with those who suspect that the closing scenes of the Eumenides already display a dangerous weakening toward liberalism. I am not suggesting that we should revive the attitudes that the Greeks shared towards slavery, or continue their attitudes—the attitudes of men, that is to say, and no doubt of many women—towards women.

In criticising what I call progressivism, I am not saying that

there has been no progress. Indeed, there was progress in the Greek world itself, notably to the extent that the idea of arete , human excellence, was freed to some extent from determination by social position. Still more there are differences, differences we must approve, between ourselves and the Greeks. The question is how these differences are to be understood. My claim is that they cannot best be understood in terms of a shift in basic ethical conceptions of agency, responsibility, shame, or freedom. Rather, by better grasping these conceptions themselves and the extent to which we share them with antiquity, we may be helped to recognize some of our illusions about the modem world, and through this gain a firmer hold on the differences that we value between ourselves and the Greeks. It is not a question of reviving anything. What is dead is dead, and in many important respects we would not want to revive it even if we knew what that could mean. What is alive from the Greek world is already alive and is helping (often in hidden ways) to keep us alive.10

When I say that our differences from the Greeks cannot best be understood in terms of a shift in basic ethical conceptions, I mean two separate things. First, where our underlying conceptions are different from those of the Greeks, what we most value in our differences does not, typically, come from those conceptions. Moreover—and this is the second point—it is not true that there has been as big a shift in underlying conceptions as the progressivists suppose. How much of a shift there has been, how much we do rely on changed ideas of such things as freedom, responsibility, and the individual agent, is an elusive question that in the end cannot be fully answered; to answer it would involve drawing a firm line between what we think and what we merely think that we think. For the same reason, in saying that the notion of the "developed moral consciousness", contrasted with the supposedly more primitive notions of the Greeks, was a myth, I introduced two different ideas, which inevitably run into one another. To some extent there is such a

consciousness, but its distinctive content consists of a myth; to some extent it is a myth that such a consciousness even exists. What is certainly true is that, to a greater extent than the progressivist story claims, we rely on ideas that we share with the Greeks. In my view, that must be so, since the supposedly more developed conceptions do not offer much to rely on. So far as such basic conceptions are concerned, the Greeks were on firm ground—often on firmer ground than ourselves. How that is so, and how some Greeks were in certain respects on firmer ground than others, is the subject of the second, third, and fourth chapters of this study, in which I discuss agency, responsibility, and shame.

If it is true that the basic ethical conceptions of the Greeks were in many ways more secure than our own, then this should lead us not to deny the substantive differences between them and us, on questions of justice, for instance, but to understand them in new ways. Our distance from Greek attitudes to slaves and to women (attitudes that I discuss in chapter 5) is properly measured not by the standards of some new structural conception called "morality", but by considerations that can themselves be traced to the Greek world—considerations of power, fortune, and very elementary forms of justice.

It is tempting to suppose that there can logically be only three basic positions to be taken in comparing our ethical conceptions to those of the Greeks—better, worse, much the same. But besides being a comical oversimplification, the schema puts together two different kinds of question, which are indeed taken together in the attitude of progressivism, but which it is important to separate. It is one question whether we are to understand the history of ethical conceptions from the ancient world to modernity as a story of development, evolution, and so forth, the outcome of which is that our conceptions are more sophisticated and complex replacements for those of the Greeks. It is another matter to distribute admiration between them. This is

illustrated in one way by those, such as orthodox Marxists, who have held an evolutionary view but for that very reason have thought that evaluations of ancient ideas and practices were beside the point: Engels would have treated the progressivists' views with the same contempt that he applied to modern moralising about ancient slavery, for instance.11

However, the point that there is more than one question here is more interestingly illustrated by people for whom (unlike the Marxists) the sophistication of the modern consciousness is itself part of the problem. One is Nietzsche, a writer with whom my inquiry has relations that are Very dose and necessarily ambiguous. It is not to the point here to pursue what a recent critic has well called "Nietzsche's painful, polemical, detachment from some aspects of Greece and... his agonizing involvement with others,"12 but two things, at any rate, are obvious about him, one his passion for the Greek world, the other his intense contempt and dislike for most aspects of modernity. The complexity of his attitude comes, in part, from his everpresent sense that his own consciousness would not be possible without the developments that he disliked. In particular his view of things—of the Greeks as much as of anything else—depended on a heightened reflectiveness, self-consciousness, and inwardness that, he thought, it was precisely one of the charms, and indeed the power, of the Greeks to have done without. "The Greeks were superficial out of profundity," he famously said,13 a remark that will show its strength in more than one area of this inquiry.

Nietzsche was committed to thinking that to fall back into a yearning for this lost world would be absurd. If the progressivist outlook is ridiculous, so is a mere inversion of it. We shall need more than nostalgia if we are to make sense of our ethical relations to the Greeks. One thought that impressed Nietzsche was that in lacking some kinds of reflection and self-consciousness the Greeks—whom he was willing to compare to children14 —

also lacked the capacity for some forms of self-deceit. In his role of unmasker, ultimately self-destructive pursuer of truthfulness, he uses the idea that the Greeks, or at least the Greeks before Socrates, openly lived manifestations of the will to power that later outlooks, above all Christianity and its offspring liberalism, in their increased self-consciousness, have had to conceal.

These ideas of Nietzsche's; taken by themselves, define the relation of our concepts to those of the Greeks in terms of the reflective to the unreflective, and the oblique to the straightforward. In the light of this, the resemblance or unity between the outlooks, the Greeks' and our own, emerges principally at the level of basic human motives, which are supposed to be more deeply hidden in the modern consciousness than in the archaic. But this picture does not offer enough to support or explain our understanding of the Greeks. I shall claim that if we can come to understand the ethical concepts of the Greeks, we shall recognise them in ourselves. What we recognise is an identity of content, and that recognition goes beyond simply the acknowledgement of a hidden motive that we share with the ancients, the thrill of the nerve touched by the deconstructionist's probe.

In fact, Nietzsche offered more than this line of thought to help us understand our relation to the Greeks. Nietzschean ideas will recur in this inquiry, and, above all, he set its problem, by joining in a radical way the questions of how we understand the Greeks and of how we understand ourselves. He himself did not solve either question. Although he moved beyond the conception of the world as aesthetic phenomenon that is prominent in his major, early, work devoted to the Greeks, The Birth of Tragedy ,15 he did not move to any view that offered a coherent politics. He himself provides no way of relating his ethical and psychological insights to an intelligible account of modern society—a failing only thinly concealed by the impression he gives of having thoughts about modern politics that are determinate but terrible.16 But we need a politics, in the sense of a coherent

set of opinions about the ways in which power should be exercised in modern societies, with what limitations and to what ends. If it is true that our ethical ideas have more in common with those of the Greeks than is usually believed, we have to recognise that this is not just an historical but a political truth, which affects the ways in which we should think about our actual condition.

Rejecting the progressivist view, then, had better not leave us with the idea that modernity is just a catastrophic mistake and that outlooks characteristic of the modem world, such as liberalism, for one, are mere illusion. As more than one philosopher has remarked, illusion is itself part of reality, and if many of the values of the Enlightenment are not what their advocates have taken them to be, they are certainly something.17 It is a demand on an inquiry such as this that it should help to explain how they can be something, despite their failures of self-understanding. In the terms I used earlier, what is it that we rely on? If our modern ethical understanding does involve illusions, it keeps going at all only because it is supported by models of human behaviour that are more realistic than it acknowledges. It is these models that were expressed differently, and in certain respects more directly, in the ancient world. In these relations there is, as the title of this chapter implies, a two-way street between past and present; if we can liberate the Greeks from patronising misunderstandings of them, then that same process may help to free us of misunderstandings of ourselves.

Besides an historical account of the Greeks that is structured by a philosophical interest in their relations to us, there could of course be another and vaster inquiry that would be relevant to these interests, one into the history that links us to the Greeks. But that is not my topic: to pursue it would involve either knowing or ignoring most of the intellectual history of the Western world. It is admittedly tempting to speculate about a different course of history in which the ideas of antiquity

might have come in a less disguised and altered form to a modern world. It is beguiling to dream about a history in which it was not true that Christianity, in Nietzsche's words, "robbed us of the harvest of the culture of the ancient world."18 These dreams should not detain us, but the fact that such speculations are a waste of time does not mean that there could not have been such a world. Most of us do not have Hegelian reasons, or more traditional religious reasons, for thinking that the route from the fifth century B.C. to the present day had to take the course that it did take and, in particular, run through Christianity. As things turned out, the world we actually have is so significantly shaped by Christianity that we cannot endorse Oscar Wilde's engaging remark, "Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to medievalism."19 It will never be correct to see Christianity (to adapt a remark current in Eastern Europe about communism and capitalism) as merely the longest and most painful route from paganism to paganism. But the formative influence of Christianity is something we owe to the way things turned out, and although we can do little with the thought, it may well be true that not only something else, but something else very different, might have been in the place of Christianity. It was, for instance, a special development that, as Peter Brown has shown, "the new way of thinking that emerged in Christian circles in the course of the second century shifted the center of gravity of thought on the nature of human frailty from death to sexuality."20 The overwhelming role of Christianity in the transition from antiquity to the modern world is necessary, in the sense that if we try to subtract it, we cannot think determinately of an alternative history, and we cannot think of people who would be ourselves at all; but while the role of Christianity is in this way necessary, it might not have been.

In trying to recover Greek ideas, I shall turn to sources other than philosophy. There is nothing unusual about this, but the

fact that the practice is standard makes it more, rather than less, necessary for me to say something about the ways in which I see works of literature, particularly tragedy, as contributing to my undertaking. It is not of course peculiar to this sort of inquiry, which aims at historical understanding, that philosophy should be concerned with literature. Even when philosophy is not involved in history, it has to make demands on literature. In seeking a reflective understanding of ethical life, for instance, it quite often takes examples from literature. Why not take examples from life? It is a perfectly good question,21 and it has a short answer: what philosophers will lay before themselves and their readers as an alternative to literature will not be life, but bad literature.

In contrasting philosophy and literature, we should remember that some philosophy is itself literature. Philosophers often suppose that the kinds of difficulties raised for them by a literary text are not presented by texts that they classify as philosophical, but this idea is produced largely by the selective way in which they use them. We should bear in mind how drastically some of these texts are being treated when they are read in this way. The kind of treatment that is needed in order to extract from the text what philosophers mostly look for, argumentative structures, obviously demands more restructuring of some texts than others, and the texts that need the most drastic regimentation may sometimes yield the most interesting results. But this does not mean that those texts do not present literary problems of how they should be read; indeed, they present such problems to people trying to decide how to regiment them. It is merely that historians of philosophy can, for their own purposes, reduce them to texts that are designed not to present those problems.

One philosopher with whom the cost of these processes is especially high is one who will be relevant to this inquiry, Plato. With him, moreover, we meet the special problem that he was the first to offer the categories in which we discuss these ques-

tions, the categories of "literature" and "philosophy". It is hardly likely that the works in which he developed these categories should themselves respect them. We should not expect this even if we could suppose him to be straightforward: if we could assume, for instance, that he did not seek to qualify or undermine the doctrines professed by authoritative speakers in the dialogue, above all by Socrates. Moreover, we do not always have reason to assume it.22

Even in the difficult case of Plato, it is not that there is anything necessarily wrong in treating texts as the historian of philosophy typically treats them. It is wrong only if it turns out to be unrewarding, or if there is too dominating an idea that we are uncovering the argument that is "really there". If it is freed from obsession, the activity can be creative and illuminating. Some recent critics, in poststructuralist spirit, have attacked historians of philosophy for treating "philosophical" and "literary" texts as quite different from one another, and have at the same time scorned the idea that a determinate or privileged meaning can be extracted from any text. But, taken far enough, the second of these ideas undermines the first. If all that we can do with any text of the past is to play with it, then one satisfying style of play may be to force it into the regimentation demanded by the history of philosophy.

Most of the texts that I consider in this book do not even look like philosophy, and my aim is not to make them do so. Tragedy, in particular, is important to many of the questions I want to ask, but its importance is not going to be discovered by treating it as philosophy, or even, rather more subtly, as a medium for discussion that was replaced by philosophy.23 By the same token, to point out the obvious fact that these plays are not works of philosophy tells us nothing at all about what their interest for philosophy might be. It may have been some confusion on this point (but not only on this point) that moved the late Sir Denys Page to issue his remarkable end-of-term report

on the author of the Oresteia : "Aeschylus is first and foremost a great poet and most powerful dramatist. The faculty of acute or profound thought is not among his gifts." And a revealingly bookish phrase: "Religion advances hardly a step in these pages, philosophy has no place in them."24

If you think about tragedy in these terms, you not only misunderstand its relation to philosophy, you also disable yourself from understanding it historically. Tragedy is formed round ideas it does not expound, and to understand its history is in some part to understand those ideas and their place in the society that produced it. All the Greek tragedies we possess were written within one century, in one city; they were performed at a religious festival of great civic importance; their material was drawn very largely from a stock of legends.25 Recent work has brought out ways in which the action of tragedy helped to articulate and express conflicts and tensions within the city's stock of concepts and guiding images.26 It was a very particular historical situation in which all this was possible, and to understand it must involve asking what pictures of human action and experience tragedy offered or implied, and how such pictures were related to the life of those who took part in its presentation.

It follows that if we are to understand Greek tragedy even from an historical perspective, we have to understand it as tragedy. The tragedy is not just a document that happens to be a drama, or a drama that happens to be in a conventional form styled tragic: to understand it in its historical situation involves grasping, among other things, its tragic effect. That connection, again, read in the opposite direction, may tell us something about this tragic effect itself: that its possibility was related to that same historical situation. As Walter Benjamin said in his admirable discussion of these problems, "the perspectives of the philosophy of history [are] ... an essential part of the theory of tragedy."27

But this leads to an important question about the inquiry that

I am undertaking. Scholars who have given accounts of that historical moment, the moment in which ancient tragedy arose, have mostly agreed that it involved a particular conception of human action in its relations to a divine or supernatural order. Benjamin himself believed this and made the highly suggestive remark, "The tragic is to the daimonic what the paradox is to ambiguity.28 In his well-known work on Greek tragedy Jean-Pierre Vernant has said, under the title "the historic moment of tragedy":

You get a tragic consciousness of responsibility when the human and the divine planes are distinct enough from one another to be opposed but nevertheless appear as inseparable. The tragic sense of responsibility arises when human action becomes the subject of a reflection, a debate, but has not yet acquired a status autonomous enough to be self-sufficient. The proper domain of tragedy is situated in a frontier zone where human actions come to be articulated with divine power, and it is in that zone that they reveal their true sense, a sense not known to the agents themselves, who, in taking on their responsibility, insert themselves into an order between man and gods which surpasses the understanding of man.29

There is a great deal of truth in this statement, as a claim about the consciousness that is expressed in much of Greek tragedy. For Vernant himself, it is part of an evolutionary story: the tragic outlook is for him "a step in the development of the notion of action."30 But I do not accept this evolutionary account, and this presents a difficulty. I want to say all of the following: our ideas of action and responsibility and other of our ethical concepts are closer to those of the ancient Greeks than we usually suppose; the significance of those Greek ideas is expressed in ancient tragedy and indeed is central to its effect; tragedy must be understood as a particular historical development, coming about at a particular time; and this historical development involved beliefs about the supernatural, the human,

and the daimonic, which we could not possibly accept, which are no part of our world. Can all these things be true together?

The problem will seem even sharper when we reflect that among the tragedians the one who embodies in the most powerful and challenging form the ideas of action and responsibility that are in question is Sophocles. Sophocles' verse can compact into a few words a great range of conflicting, alarming, and carefully controlled associations;31 his stylistic resources yield a density of reference that can in itself help to alert us to underlying connections of ideas. They also contribute markedly to the sense of a shaping necessity-that is such a feature of Sophoclean tragedy (I shall try to say something more about the relation between dramatic and metaphysical necessities in Sophocles in chapter 6, where I consider fatalism and supernatural modes of determination of human action). Generally, the work of this poet is central to many of the ideas I discuss. This sheds an uncompromising light on the difficulty, since Sophocles' images of life, and the relations of human beings to necessity that are expressed in his plays, seem inextricably tied to themes of ancient religion. Charles Segal has called Sophocles "the great master of commingling these two ways of accounting for the violence and suffering in human life, internal and external, psychological and religious."32 "It was above all Sophocles," Dodds wrote,

the last great exponent of the archaic world-view, who expressed the full significance of the old religious themes in their unsoftened, unmoralized forms—the overwhelming sense of human helplessness in the face of divine mystery, and of the ate that waits on all human achievement—and who made these thoughts part of the cultural inheritance of Western Man.33

But these remarks raise the problem in a very obvious way: for how, and in what form, can these thoughts be "part of the inheritance of Western Man" when the archaic worldview cer-

tainly is not—in the sense, at least, of our actually possessing it, which is what one hopes of an inheritance?

The most important thing about the problem is that although I have presented it as mine, it is in fact no less a problem for Vernant or other critics who see these works as representing a past stage in the development of ideas of autonomous human action—if, at any rate, those critics can respond, and expect us to respond, to the tragedies. How can we respond to them if their effect is grounded essentially in supernatural conceptions that lie over two thousand years behind us? Admittedly, a response to them may not be immediate and may call for some knowledge; they can appear dull in translation or, only too often, comical in production. But the fact that it takes some knowledge and imagination to see their point does not mean that when we see their point, the experience is just the product of imaginative time-travel—that they mean something to us only to the extent that we pretend to be fifth-century Greeks. If we get to the position of their meaning something to us, then they mean something to us . It is important that a modern response to them can be determinately shaped by their dramatic content: it is not adequately described just in terms of the unconscious power of a series of images. Nor is it just a large and unlikely misunderstanding, as though someone became intoxicated with Gregorian chant because he took it for a kind of raga. The fact that we can honestly and not just as tourists respond to the tragedies is almost enough in itself to show that ethically we have more in common with the audience of the tragedies than the progressivist story allows.

Some may say that the contradiction disappears because it is just not true that tragedy and its world of ideas are as closely tied to the historical circumstances in which they arose as Vernant claims. In one sense, that is true, and it is the direction in which we must look. But it is so obvious that the tragedies do involve supernatural conceptions, in particular of necessity,34

that we cannot merely sidestep that feature of them and feebly fall back on a well-worn notion that was rightly dismissed by Benjamin, of a timeless tragic experience of which these works happened to be, in their time, the expression or trigger. What the tragedies demand is that we should look for analogies in our experience and our sense of the world to the necessities they express.

In some dimensions, we can make a start just with a subtraction. Vernant also said:

In the tragic perspective, acting, being an agent, has a double character. On the one side, it consists in taking council with oneself, weighing the for and against and doing the best one can to foresee the order of means and ends. On the other hand, it is to make a bet on the unknown and the incomprehensible and to take a risk on a terrain that remains impenetrable to you. It involves entering the play of supernatural forces... where one does not know whether they are preparing success or disaster.35

In this passage, one might be left with a fairly lively sense of the tragic if one merely deleted the word "supernatural". But that would be only the first step. If the remaining description is to be more than formulaic, we shall need a better understanding of necessity and chance and of what they mean when the daimonic has gone. In other respects as well, the movement from the Greek world and from what is expressed in tragedy to our own consciousness will involve larger and more elaborate structural substitutions. To understand these substitutions properly would be a large task, both historical and philosophical. In this book I hope to situate that task, and to help us, perhaps, to reach an understanding of our relations to the Greeks that will make clearer what the task means.

In a lecture given at Oxford, Wilamowitz said: "To make the ancients speak, we must feed them with our own blood."36 When the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about them-

selves. They tell us about us. They do that in every case in which they can be made to speak, because they tell us who we are. That is, of course, the most general point of our attempts to make them speak. They can tell us not just who we are, but who we are not: they can denounce the falsity or the partiality or the limitations of our images of ourselves. I believe that they can do this for our ideas of human agency, responsibility, regret, and necessity, among others.

Continues...

Excerpted from Shame and Necessityby Bernard Williams Copyright © 1993 by Bernard Williams. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1993
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520080467
• ISBN 13: 9780520080461
• Einband: Tapa dura
• Anzahl der Seiten: 254
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar