By Bernard Williams, A. A. Long
We have a tendency to think that the traditional Greeks had primitive rules of the self, of accountability, freedom, and disgrace, and that now humanity has complicated from those to a extra subtle ethical attention. Bernard Williams's unique and radical e-book questions this photo of Western heritage. whereas we're in lots of methods diversified from the Greeks, Williams claims that the variations usually are not to be traced to a shift in those simple conceptions of moral existence. we're extra just like the ancients than we're ready to recognize, and basically while this is often understood will we correctly grab our most crucial changes from them, equivalent to our rejection of slavery. the writer is a thinker, yet a lot of his ebook is directed to writers akin to Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and never simply as fabrics for philosophy. on the heart of his examine is the query of ways we will comprehend Greek tragedy in any respect, whilst its global is up to now from ours. Williams explains the way it is that after the ancients communicate, they don't basically let us know approximately themselves, yet approximately ourselves. disgrace and Necessity supplies a brand new account of our relationships to the Greeks, and is helping us to work out what moral principles we want for you to dwell within the smooth global.
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Sample text
She is in love with her brother's death. [29] Because of much that has happened since, particularly because of Hegel, we tend to see this as a play about political morality. We are led to this by the occasion, the material, of Antigone's defiance, and then we may be puzzled to find, if we look closely, less to mirror this in Antigone's representation of herself than we might have expected. I suspect in fact that Antigone—Sophocles' Antigone, if there is now such a figure—is even more like Sophocles' Electra, a manifestly obsessed character, than the relations of each to her sister already suggest.
One way in which we can be helped by the Greek conception that brings (something like) guilt under a wider conception of (something more than) shame is that it can give us a wiser understanding of the connections between guilt and shame themselves. We can feel both guilt and shame towards the same action. [42] As always, the action stands between the inner world of disposition, feeling, and decision and an outer world of harm and wrong. What I have done points in one direction towards what has happened to others, in another direction to what I am.
But if we are to make such a claim, we have to get clearer about what is involved in shame itself. [8] It is straightforwardly connected with nakedness, particularly in sexual connections. The word aidoia , a derivative of aidos , "shame",[9] is a standard Greek word for the genitals, and similar terms are found in other languages. The reaction is to cover oneself or to hide, and people naturally take steps to avoid the situations that call for it: Odysseus would be ashamed to walk naked with Nausikaa's companions.