BOOKS
Not to be born is best
Hugh Lloyd-Jones
SHAME AND NECESSITY by Bernard Williams University of California Press £18.50 pp.254 Much as the literature and art of Greece before the time of Plato have been admired, the notion that the ethics of that period might have much to teach us would have seemed bizarre to most people even as late as the 19th century. While the aes- thetic appeal of early religion has been uncontested, it has been looked down on as a superstition no thinking person could believe, and early Greek thinking has been esteemed only so far as it could be regard- ed as a preparation for the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle which helped the Fathers of the Church to construct a reli- gious philosophy. Even atheists looked back to Epicurean philosophy rather than to the ethics of the early Greeks, sharing the general assumption that progress had been made since their time.
Nor has the modern anthropological approach to early Greece caused early Greek thinking to be more sympathetically regarded. Until very lately many scholars believed that since certain words did not occur in Homer's poems their author or authors lacked various concepts indispens- able to modern ways of thinking; in partic- ular, they held that Homer had no Coherent, articulated concept of the self, and was therefore incapable of showing how a character makes a decision. This nonsense, which was already going out of fashion, is in this book decisively refuted.
But long ago Nietzsche had shocked the public by his criticisms of Socrates and Plato and his advocacy of an outlook clear- ly indebted to the thinking of pre-Platonic Greece. As late as the 1970's, when I pub- lished an article about Nietzsche and the use he made of classical antiquity, the Canadian philosopher George Grant wrote that 'one looks with fear as well as pleasure at praise of Nietzsche from the Regius Pro- fessor of Greek'. What will Professor Grant think now that a book avowing Nietzschian influence and arguing, with great persua- sive power, that modern ethics have much in common with and also much to learn from those of early Greece has been pub- lished by a former Provost of King's Col- lege, Cambridge who is now White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford? Williams questions the assumption that progress has been made in ethics since that time; in his language 'progressivist' is a pejorative term.
Much of modern ethical thinking, W. argues, depends on a psychology that incor- porates ethical assumptions; such a psy- chology was devised by Plato, and later formed part of Christianity. Kantian and Hegelian ethics are deeply influenced by Christianity; the Kantian categorical imper- ative resting on the concept of duty and the modern notion of the will depend upon the Christian conception of the soul. People have missed in Homer 'a will that revolves around a distinction between moral and non-moral motivations'; but the early Greeks, who had their belief in the gods and also assumed social expectations to support them, could do without a psycholo- gy that drew its support from ethical categories. If we examine our own behaviour, we shall find that, at least for a good deal of the time, we do the same.
W. goes on to show that the Greek notion of responsibility differs from our own far less than has been generally supposed; we have a different conception not of responsibility but of law. He has no truck with the too simple notion that early Greek culture was a 'shame-culture', whereas our own is a `guilt-culture'; for the early Greeks the concept of shame did much of the work that is done for us by guilt, and whether shame or guilt is in question, one must always reckon with an `internalised other', in the case of guilt a victim or an enforcer, in that of shame a watcher or a witness. For the Kantian there is only one ethical currency; for the early Greeks there were several, not easily exchangeable, so that two different possible courses of action might have an equal or vir- tually equal claim, creating a tragic situation. W. defends the Greeks against those who 'If it's any consolation, he died in my sleep' take them to task for not having anticipat- ed the modern attitude to slavery and the emancipation of women; that attitude, as he reminds us, is historically speaking a recent phenomenon, made possible because of changed conditions.
Echoing Nietzsche, W. prefers to Plato and Aristotle as guides to ethics the poet Sophocles and the historian Thucydides. Plato and Aristotle, he says, like Kant and Hegel, `believed that the universe, or histo- ry, or the structure of human reason can yield a pattern that makes sense of human life and human aspirations; Sophocles and Thucydides cherished no such belief. In fact these authors had in common the early religious outlook — if W. were aware of certain recent work, I think he would give up the old-fashioned belief that 'Thucydides was a sceptic in religion — on which early Greek ethics depended, just as much as the ethics of Kant and Hegel depend on Chris- tianity. The gods govern the universe in their own interest, and treat men, the creation of a rebellious minor deity, with contempt sometimes modified by pity. They demand honour, and destroy men who refuse it to them. Knowledge belongs to the gods and men are ignorant; oracles can predict the future, but are often misin- terpreted by men. But men with sense enough to handle these dangerous gods discreetly, men like the hero Odysseus, might get through life without great misfor- tune. Like the gods, men, and particularly the best men, desire honour; the chief word for shame, aidos, often means regard for the honour or respect due to another. Fortunately for men, offences against a god, a parent, or a suppliant were thought to offend against the honour of the chief god, Zeus, who therefore punished these crimes; since the Greeks had noticed that the wicked often flourish, the punishment often fell not on the offender but on his descendants. It is true that the Greek gods were more remarkable for power than for goodness; but that does not mean that Greek religion had no moral element.
In short, Greek religion is realistic; instead of creating a heaven or a world of ideas that can redress all the sorrows of our human life, it believes in deities whose character is just what our experience of the world would lead us to expect. It is point- less to patronise the Greek gods on the ground that they did not exist, for they represent forces that can be seen working in the world, and belief in them, which might be entertained at various levels of sophistiction, escapes the difficulties that result from crediting persons thought actually to have lived on earth with divine status or with god-given authority. As this exceptionally important book shows, the people who practised this religion had advantages in dealing with ethical ques- tions which are denied to believers in a morality closely linked with a religious belief.
Professor Williams is not primarily a classical scholar, but he has managed to use classical scholarship, together with philosophical attainments which no classi- cal scholar can equal, to obtain results which cannot be neglected by anyone seri- ously concerned with ethical reflection.
Sir Hugh Lloyd-Jones is emeritus professor of Greek in the University of Oxford.
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