Comedy in Chaucer and Boccaccio Book

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.