Bernard Williams Shame and Necessity 1994

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overwhelming concern for her own reputation. That concern is self-directed, but it honours, in a
certain way, the existence of
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others. If, as Phaedra herself puts it, that sort of shame can destroy the house, it is because it is
directed only to what others think and say. Hippolytus's self-concern, by contrast, leaves out other
people altogether; in regarding himself as an unpolluted place, he has withdrawn entirely from
humanity, from both their opinions and their needs.
The Hippolytus creates a space in which "inner-directed" and "other-directed" aspects of aidos can
be laid against each other in several different contrasts. Hippolytus's view of himself, in his
confrontation with Theseus, represents the truth about what he has done as opposed to what others
falsely think: at this point, "inner" is to "outer" as reality is to appearance. Theseus's criticism of
Hippolytus, however, and of his private virtue of self-protection and purity, identifies the "inner" as a
devotion to self that is contrasted with a proper concern for others. With Phaedra, too, the relations
between public and private are wrong, but in another direction; she is concerned with others, but
Shame and Necessity http://content.cdlib.org.oca.ucsc.edu/xtf/view?docId=ft4t1nb2fb&chunk....
overwhelmingly in the form of fear a fear of the private becoming public and of how her reality will,
truly, appear. Charles Segal has rightly said that the play contrasts "inward and outward, private and
public realms, 'shame' and 'repute'."[46] Those three oppositions do not all mark the same contrast:
indeed, each of them can be used to mark more than one of the contrasts that are at work.
Greek thought itself had the materials, and powerful ones, to bring out the ambivalence and
possible betrayals of shame. It is a question not of some moral motivation quite different from shame,
but of the articulation of shame itself. Even before we reach the remarkable constructions of the
Hippolytus , the Greeks' understanding of shame, I have claimed, was strong and complex enough to
dispose of the familiar criticism that an ethical life shaped by it is unacceptably heteronomous, crudely
dependent on public opinion. But I also said at the beginning of this chapter that if there were
anything in those criticisms, it
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would have to be found at a much deeper level, and the question remains whether there is
anything at all to be found at a deeper level. If there is, it will be found in the fact that the internalised
other, as I put it, still has some independent identity: that it is not just a screen for one's own ethical
ideas but is the locus of some genuine social expectations. If a charge of social heteronomy is to stick
at a more interesting level, its claim will have to be that even this abstracted, improved, neighbour
lodged in one's inner life represents a compromise of genuine autonomy.
This charge most familiarly comes from distinctively modem, in particular Kantian, conceptions of
morality, but a version of it can be found in the Greek world itself. It was made by Plato. The Republic
pursues by a long and political route a question that Glaukon put in the second book in the form of a
thought experiment, one that sets out from the idea of Gyges' Ring of invisibility. We are to suppose
the just man and the unjust man in isolation from any corresponding social appearance, abstracted
from all the normal conventional forces that respectively encourage and discourage those dispositions:
The perfectly unjust man, then, must be given the most perfect injustice, and we must not take anything away from him,
but rather allow him, although he does the greatest injustice, to fix himself a perfect reputation for justice.... Next to him
in the argument, let us set up the just man, who will be a simple and noble person, who, as Aeschylus says, wants to be
just rather than to seem it. We will have to take away the possibility that he seems just. For if he seems just, there will
be the honors and awards that go with that, and it will then be unclear whether he is just for the sake of justice, or for
the sake of the honors and awards.[47]
What Plato tries to do in the Republic is to show that the isolated and misunderstood man of
justice will have a life more worth living than the other. This will be so, according to Plato, because the
soul of the just man will be in the best condition,
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and that will be so because he knows what is just. But more than this is required if this
experiment in motivational solipsism is to work. The subject of the experiment will have to know that
he knows: he will have to be, in fact, in the condition that Plato requires of his Guardians. The
members of the lower classes in the city, we are eventually told, do not have self-supporting
motivations of justice; only the Guardians, who have attained the self-revealing state of knowledge,
have those. If the other classes could ethically survive at all when not subjected to the actual power of
the Guardians and that is a deeply ambiguous issue in the Republic [48] they would need an
internalised other: an inner Guardian. The Guardians do not need that, because they have internalised
something else, and carry in them a paradigm of justice gained from their intellectual formation (more
exactly, revived in them by it).
A great deal is assumed in the formulation of this thought experiment. When we are presented
with it, we are simply told that this man is just and that he is misunderstood by a perverse or wicked
world. This is something we are supposed to understand from outside the imagined situation. We are
given the convictions of the just man himself, and those are taken to be both true and unshakable. But
suppose we decline to stand outside and to assume the man's justice. Suppose we change the terms
of the solipsistic experiment and arrange it from the agent's perspective, rather than from ours or
from Plato's; suppose we make it, in effect, an exercise in ethical Cartesianism. Then we should
describe the situation in these terms: this is a man who thinks that he is just, but is treated by
everyone else as though he were not. If he were given merely that description of himself, it is less
dear how steady his motivations would prove. Moreover, it is less dear how steady we think they
should prove. For given simply that description, there is nothing to show whether he is a solitary [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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