Williams on Greek Literature and Philosophy

P1: SBT 9780521662161c06 CUNY946/Thomas 978 0 521 66216 1 July 11, 2007 14:3 6 Williams on Greek Literature and Philosophy A. A. LONG Having studied Greek and Latin at school and in the Oxford Mods and Greats curriculum, Bernard Williams received the philological and histor- ical training that would have equipped him, if he had wished, to make a career as a professor of classics. He chose instead to make his mark as an exceptionally creative philosopher engaging with largely modern issues, but his classical education, his interests in Greek literature and philoso- phy, and his commitment to the history of philosophy, shine throughout his illustrious career, especially during its later years. 1 In 1989, as Sather Professor of Classical Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, he delivered a series of six lectures on Greek literature, ethics, and moral psychology under the general title Shame and Necessity. Appointment to the Sather professorship is regarded in the community of classical scholars as the equivalent of a Nobel Prize. Williams’ lectures, which attracted a large and appreciative audience, were published in 1993 in the book also entitled Shame and Necessity. 2 Because this volume is his most extended foray into the field of classics, I shall concentrate on it in this study; but by way of introduction, I begin with brief remarks about Williams’ reflections on Greek philosophy and the Greeks in some of his other publications. Much of what he says in these works anticipates ideas he develops in Shame and Necessity. This book in its turn presupposes or draws upon numerous thoughts that Williams explores in other books, especially Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. 3 While the arguments and positions he advances in Shame and Necessity are self- standing, the book’s force and significance can be most fully appreciated 1 Shortly before his death, Williams collected twenty of his essays on the history of philosophy for publication in Williams (2006). I am grateful to Myles Burnyeat for sending me his ‘Introduction’ to this volume, before its publication. It gives an excellent appreciation of the increasing importance that historical (especially ancient Greek) themes assumed in Williams’ thinking over the course of his life. 2 Williams (1993). 3 Williams (1985). 155 P1: SBT 9780521662161c06 CUNY946/Thomas 978 0 521 66216 1 July 11, 2007 14:3 156 A. A. Long when it is set in the context of the philosophical and historical interests that chiefly occupied him during the last three decades of his life. 1. WILLIAMS’ WRITINGS BEFORE SHAME AND NECESSITY In 1981, Williams published an extensive account of Greek philosophy for The Legacy of Greece: A New Appraisal. 4 He finds the Greek philosophers (by whom he means primarily Plato and Aristotle) not only starting but also distinguishing “what would still be recognized as many of the most basic questions” in almost all the major fields of subsequent philosophy. 5 As radical exceptions to this generalization he identifies perhaps “just two important kinds of speculation”: idealism “according to which the entire world consists of the contents of mind,” and historicist explanations of mental categories, as in Marxism or historical consciousness. 6 Williams focuses this account of Greek philosophy on metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Starting, in the case of the latter, with Socrates’ attempts in Plato’s Republic to refute Thrasymachus’ “entirely egoistic con- ception of practical rationality,” Williams observes that the Thasymachean position derived some of its historical grounding and appeal from the “aris- tocratic or feudal morality” evidenced in the competitive success highly valued by Homeric heroes. For such a morality, he observes, “shame is a predominant notion, and a leading motive the fear of disgrace, ridicule, and the loss of prestige.” 7 However, we should not suppose that shame is only occasioned by failures in competitive and self-assertive exploits; for it may also be prompted by “a failure to act in some expected self-sacrificing or co-operative manner”: The confusion of these two things [i.e. the value set on competitive success and the occasion for shame] is encouraged by measuring Greek attitudes by the standard of a Christian .outlook. That outlook associates moral- ity simultaneously with benevolence, self-denial, and inner directedness or guilt (shame before God or oneself). It sees the development of moral thought to this point as progress, and it tends to run together a number of different ideas which have been discarded – or at least rendered less reputable – by that progress. 8 4 Williams (1981a). 5 Williams (1981a), p. 202. 6 Williams (1981a), pp. 204–205. 7 Williams (1981a), p. 243. 8 Williams (1981a), p. 244. P1: SBT 9780521662161c06 CUNY946/Thomas 978 0 521 66216 1 July 11, 2007 14:3 Williams on Greek Literature and Philosophy 157 This dense passage, when read retrospectively, can be seen as setting much of the agenda for Shame and Necessity, especially that later book’s close attention to Homer, the recognition that shame can motivate cooperative as well as competitive action, the pejorative assessment of a Christian moral outlook, and criticism of the progressivist moral attitude for being confused and irrelevant to much human experience. But Williams devotes most of his treatment of Greek ethics in The Legacy of Greece to a largely positive appraisal of the view of morality defended by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. He seems to approve Plato for rejecting “an instrumental or contrac- tual view of morality” and for trying to show “that it was rational for each person to want to be just, whatever his circumstances.” 9 Taking this project to be neither “a moralizing prejudice on Plato’s part,” still less a Kantian “autonomous demand which cannot be rationalized or explained by any- thing else,” Williams takes Plato’s position to “be grounded in an account of what sort of person it was rational to be,” or “to show that each man has good reason to act morally, and that the good reason has to appeal to him in terms of something about himself.” 10 Here we already get a foreshadowing of Williams’ insistence in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy on the necessity for a satisfactory ethical imperative to address internal reasons, first per- son deliberations and interests, and facts to do with an agent’s character, as distinct from presenting themselves as external impositions and purely objective obligations. Williams in The Legacy of Greece finds certain aspects of Greek ethics problematic: for instance, the Socratic ideal that a clear-headed person always has “stronger reasons to do acts of justice . . . rather than acts of mean temporal self-interest,” or Aristotle’s “rational integration of character.” 11 Summing up, however, he concludes that in many respects “the ethical thought of the Greeks was not only different from most modern thought, particularly modern thought influenced by Christianity, but was also in much better shape”: It has, and needs, no God. . . . It takes as central and primary questions of character, and of how moral considerations are grounded in human nature: it asks what life it is rational for the individual to live. It makes no use of a blank categorical imperative. In fact – though we have used the word “moral” quite often for the sake of convenience – this system of ideas basically lacks the 9 Similarly, Williams (1985), pp. 30–1, although in this later treatment of the same points Williams’ approval of Plato is more qualified. 10 Williams (1981a), p. 246. 11 Williams (1981a), pp. 249–250. P1: SBT 9780521662161c06 CUNY946/Thomas 978 0 521 66216 1 July 11, 2007 14:3 158 A. A. Long concept of morality altogether, in the sense of a class of reasons or demands which are vitally different from other kinds of reason or demand . . . Relatedly, there is not a rift between a world of public “moral rules” and of private personal ideals: the questions of how one’s relations to others are to be regulated, both in the context of society and more privately, are not detached from questions about the kind of life it is worth living, and of what it is worth caring for. 12 Williams acknowledges that the Greek philosophers’ application of this outlook is neither fully recoverable nor fully admirable: we cannot inhabit a Greek city-state, and we certainly should not endorse Greek attitudes to slavery and women. In addition, he finds that Greek ethical thought, like “most ethical outlooks subsequently,” rested upon an “objective teleology of human nature,” which “we are perhaps more conscious now of having to do without than anyone has been since some fifth-century Sophists first doubted it.” Even so, he approves Greek philosophical ethics for repre- senting “one of the very few sets of ideas which can help now to put moral thought into honest touch with reality.” 13 In the final page of his contribution to The Legacy of Greece,Williams turns from Greek philosophy to tragedy; and here, as in his brief remarks on the Homeric world, he adumbrates ideas he will strongly develop in Shame and Necessity, and which will also resonate in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. 14 Whereas Greek philosophy, “in its sustained pursuit of rational self-sufficiency” seeks to insulate the good life from chance, Greek litera- ture, above all tragedy, offers us a sense “that what is great is fragile and that what is necessary may be destructive.” 15 This page, like parts of those later books, is strongly marked by his qualified endorsement of Nietzsche. Granted the range, the power, the imagination and inventiveness of the Greek foundation of Western philosophy, it is yet more striking that we can take seriously, as we should, Nietzsche’s remark: “Among the great- est characteristics of the Hellenes is their inability to turn the best into reflection.” 16 12 Williams (1981a), p. 251. 13 Williams (1981a), p. 252. 14 Williams (1981a), p. 253. 15 Both in Williams (1981a), p. 248, and in Williams (1985), p. 34, Williams raises against Plato’s Socrates the telling question that “if bodily hurt is no real harm” to the good man, why are we strongly required by virtue not to harm other people’s bodies? Williams’ scepticism about the possibility of freeing morality from chance, first articulated in Williams (1981b) becomes an important theme in Shame and Necessity. 16 Williams (1981a), p. 253. P1: SBT 9780521662161c06 CUNY946/Thomas 978 0 521 66216 1 July 11, 2007 14:3 Williams on Greek Literature and Philosophy 159 The Sather lectures that generated Shame and Necessity,asweshall shortly see, gave Williams an opportunity to expatiate on Nietzsche’s dic- tum, an opportunity he clearly relished; for the most notable feature of that book is Williams’ sympathetic engagement with the implicit ethics and psychology of Homer and the Greek tragedians. Equally notable in Shame and Necessity, and in surprisingly sharp contrast to his chapter in The Legacy of Greece,isthe strongly critical posture he adopts in relation to the moral psychology of the Greek philosophers, especially Plato. To understand this shift, we need to take account of his sceptical challenges to what he calls “morality” or “the moral system,” as articulated in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, the book that he wrote after his chapter in The Legacy of Greece and before Shame and Necessity. Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, building on many of Williams’ earlier studies, is a vigorous challenge to the coherence, psychological plausibility, and practicality of contemporary moral philosophy. Although he discusses numerous “styles of ethical theory,” the principal target of his critique is “the special notion of moral obligation,” inherited from Kant, which he charac- terizes as “the outlook, or, incoherently, part of the outlook, of almost all of us.” The many problems Williams has with the concept of moral obli- gation include its categorical claims to trump all other kinds of motivation, its focus on a supposedly autonomous will undetermined by particular per- sons’ dispositions, interests, and social roles, and, in sum, its insulation from their lived experience as members of a community with an outlook that is both partly shared but also meaningfully individual. This book presents a wholesale challenge to the idea that philosophical reflection, just by itself, can generate ethical norms and shape people’s outlook in abstraction from their social context and psychological particularities. Williams approaches his criticism of “the morality system,” as so char- acterized, by contrasting it in the above respects with Greek philosophical ethics. Yet, right from the outset of his book he raises doubts about whether any moral philosophy, including that of the Greeks, “can reasonably hope to answer” the question of “how one should live.” 17 None the less, he identifies that Socratic question as “the best place for moral philosophy to start,” in as much as the question, in its generality, is noncommittal about any specif- ically “moral” considerations or assumptions about duty or goodness. 18 In Williams’ terms, the Socratic question pertains to “ethics” rather than to 17 Williams (1985), p. 1. 18 Williams (1985), p. 4. P1: SBT 9780521662161c06 CUNY946/Thomas 978 0 521 66216 1 July 11, 2007 14:3 160 A. A. Long “morality,” which he uses as his name for the narrow kind of ethics that emphasizes the notion of obligation. Williams grants, as he must, that the life approved in Greek philosoph- ical ethics had to be a “good” life and a “whole” life, marked by virtues – admirable dispositions of character. (In the time since he wrote Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, virtue, with strong influence from Aristotle, has become a major topic of contemporary moral philosophy.) What he espe- cially approves in that book is that, in asking the Socratic question, the Greek philosophers did not presuppose “respectable justifying reasons” in answering it. 19 However, because the “ethical,” as Williams uses the expres- sion, pertains to considerations that go beyond self-interest, the Socratic question is hardly as free from such presuppositions as he suggests. Plato, and especially Aristotle, take centre stage in the third chapter entitled “Foundations: Well-Being.” As in The Legacy of Greece,Williams approves Greek philosophical ethics for its rational, non-religious appeals to persons in terms of the structure of the self, showing that “it was rational to pursue a certain kind of life or to be a certain sort of person.” 20 Aristotle in particular is singled out as providing in his Ethics “the paradigm of an approach that tries to base ethics on considerations of well-being and of a life worth living.” 21 But what of persons who are not impressed by the Aristotelian treatment of these considerations? Williams correctly observes that Aristotle, owing to his teleology of human nature, must say that they misconceive their real interests. Yet, that rejoinder, Williams plausibly says, opens a highly problematic gap between the person’s own point of view and “our” view of his or her interests. Moreover, he continues, the complexity and diversity of the modern world, together with what we don’t know about psychological health, vastly complicate any prospects for an Aristotelian harmonisation of internal ethical dispositions with external values and the outside point of view. Williams concludes this chapter with the following observations: Aristotle saw a certain kind of ethical, cultural, and indeed political life as a harmonious culmination of human potentialities, recoverable from an absolute understanding of nature. We have no reason to believe in that. We understand – and most important, the agent can come to understand – that the agent’s perspective is only one of many that are equally compatible with human nature, all open to various conflicts with themselves and with other 19 Williams (1985), p. 19. 20 Williams (1985), p. 34. 21 Williams (1985), ibid. P1: SBT 9780521662161c06 CUNY946/Thomas 978 0 521 66216 1 July 11, 2007 14:3 Williams on Greek Literature and Philosophy 161 cultural aims .We must admit that the Aristotelian assumptions which fitted together the agent’s perspective and the outside view have collapsed. No one has yet found a good way of doing without those assumptions. That is the state of affairs on which the argument of this book will turn. 22 In Shame and Necessity,towhich I now turn, Williams looks back beyond Plato and Aristotle to Homer and the tragedians, whose work was untouched by philosophy in the sense of a special type of discourse and inquiry that Plato was the first to inaugurate fully. In that material, he finds evidence for an ethical outlook that escapes his strictures against moral phi- losophy in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy thanks to its ways of integrating the agent’s perspective and the outside view. 2. SHAME AND NECESSITY: THE CRITIQUE OF “PROGRESSIVISM” Williams sets the scene for his project in the first chapter of Shame and Necessity, entitled “The Liberation of Antiquity.” 23 What he wants to liber- ate the ancient Greeks from is a “progressivist account,” according to which “the Greeks had primitive ideas of action, responsibility, ethical motiva- tion, 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.” 24 Instancing moral guilt, moral agency, and “a proper conception of the will” as ideas that the progressivist account finds the Greeks lacking, Williams argues that our own lack of clarity about these ideas undermines the progressivist claim that we are thereby in better shape for having them. He does not discountenance all progress, “notably to the extent that the idea of human excellence” has been freed from determina- tion by social position and gender. 25 None the less he proposes that the Greeks were actually better off for having different ethical ideas from those instanced earlier, and, furthermore, that we shall be better off by coming to realize how much we rely, though without acknowledgement, on their conceptions rather than those of the progressivists. 22 Williams (1985), p. 52. 23 Throughout the volume, he looks back to E. R. Dodds, whose Sather Lectures of 1949 were published in his remarkable book, Dodds (2004). Dodds, as Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, had a profound influence on Williams (see his expression of homage in Williams (1993), xi). Taken together their two books, though very different in their methodology and assessments of where we stand in relation to the Greeks, represent and equally challenging set of perspectives. 24 Williams (1993), p. 5. 25 Williams (1993), pp. 6–7. P1: SBT 9780521662161c06 CUNY946/Thomas 978 0 521 66216 1 July 11, 2007 14:3 162 A. A. Long This is a very large and bold agenda. Before seeing how Williams works it out in the succeeding chapters, some clarifications and questions are in order. First, the Greeks whose ethical outlook Williams would have us approve are a very small set of authors, predominantly Homer, the three Attic tragedians, and Thucydides. In this book Plato and Aristotle come in for as much criticism as the progressivist account, and partly for similar reasons. Moreover, Greek reflection on ethics proceeded apace in post- Aristotelian philosophy with the highly influential schools of Stoicism and Epicureanism. Williams’ Greeks do not include these later figures at all, nor does he draw on such major writers from the classical period as Herodotus, or Aristophanes, or Demosthenes. He does not explain his selection of material, but it soon becomes clear that his approvable Hellenes, notwith- standing his many generalizations about “the Greeks,” are precisely and only those early authors whom he takes to adumbrate the ethical outlook he independently recommends. A reader who knows the scholarship that Williams labels progressivist will find his generalizations about it too breezy to do full justice to the two figures whose influential work he chiefly has in mind. One of these scholars, Bruno Snell, we shall come to in discussing the second chapter of Shame and Necessity. The other is Arthur Adkins, author of Merit and Responsibility. A Study in Greek Values and other related works. 26 Williams makes it clear that Adkins is the leading target of his attack on the view that our own moral outlook has greatly progressed beyond that of the (early) Greeks. Yet, instead of letting Adkins speak for himself, Williams largely confines his mentions of Adkins’ work to footnotes, giving the reader of his main text the impression that Adkins convicts “the Homeric shame culture” of “basic egoism.” 27 In fact, Adkins’ book is less grounded on progressivist premises than Williams implies. Its starting point is not a claim that we today are in better ethical shape than the Homeric Greeks, but the proposition, which Williams himself more or less admits, that “we are all Kantians now.” 28 Adkins does not set out to justify our Kantian outlook, but to understand why “there should exist a society so different from our own as to render it impossible to translate ‘duty’ in the Kantian sense into its ethical terminology at all.” 29 Moreover, Adkins and Williams actually agree on the importance of interpreting ethical concepts in terms of social realities as distinct from 26 Adkins (1960). Adkins acknowledges his strong indebtedness to the work and influence of Dodds (see n. 23), Adkins (1960), p. vi. 27 Williams (1993), p. 81. 28 Adkins (1960), p. 2; Williams (1985), p. 174. 29 Adkins (1960), p. 2. P1: SBT 9780521662161c06 CUNY946/Thomas 978 0 521 66216 1 July 11, 2007 14:3 Williams on Greek Literature and Philosophy 163 making them logically primary. Thus it is central to Adkins’ argument that the shame culture he finds pervasive in Homer is a system of values that “suit Homeric society, inasmuch as they commend those martial qualities which most evidently secure its existence.” 30 Williams is able to show that Adkins’ account of Homeric shame is far too rigid to capture the subtlety and diachronic relevance of Homeric values, and he is right to character- ize Adkins as someone who unsurprisingly thinks that moral thought has “advanced” in the period since early Greek antiquity. But neither Adkins nor the many others who share that position are as neatly captured by Williams’ progressivist label as his rhetorical use of it implies. Another question that arises from Williams’ “Liberation of Antiquity” concerns his claim that we modern westerners have a special relation to the (early) Greeks: They do not merely tell us about themselves. 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. 31 Strongly distancing himself from the anthropological fashion of emphasiz- ing the Greeks’ “otherness,” Williams insists that “the modern world was a European creation presided over by the Greek past” (3). 32 Although he grants “the formative influence” and “overwhelming role” of Christianity and the impossibility of thinking of people who would be ourselves inde- pendently of Christianity, he finds it worthwhile to imagine a route from fifth-century Greece to the present that did not run through Christian- ity. This is a very curious thought experiment; for it is equally possible to imagine a route to the present in which Rome shaped us more powerfully than Greece did, as in fact it did for our pre-Renaissance ancestors. The Greek bedrock of our modern identity is hardly more determinate than our Christian heritage, and Williams’ claim about the Greek presidency does not include the massively influential Plato and Aristotle but earlier authors untouched by philosophy. It is, then, a highly selective Greek past that he wants us to find “specially the past of modernity.” Thus he gets a basic premise for his argument that, by recovering the early Greek ethical outlook, we can not only avoid the errors of progressivist philosophy but also achieve a better grip on our basic human identity. What he means by both these propositions begins to emerge most clearly and eloquently in his introductory observations on Greek tragedy. 30 Adkins (1960), p. 55. 31 Williams (1993), pp. 19–20. 32 Williams (1993), p. 3. P1: SBT 9780521662161c06 CUNY946/Thomas 978 0 521 66216 1 July 11, 2007 14:3 164 A. A. Long Rather than approach tragedy as if it were simply philosophy, he locates the relevance of these dramas to his project in two related facts – first, their rep- resenting, but not expounding, such ideas as necessity and responsibility, and second, their embeddedness in the historical context of Athenian society, whose conflicts, tensions, concepts, and images they reflect. I take him to be saying that tragedy’s innocence of formal philosophy enables it to register human experience in ways that cut directly to psychological data that we can all recognize to be germane to ourselves. He meets the objection that the tragedies draw on religious ideas quite alien to us with the following retort: 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. 33 Undeniably, modern readers and audiences do respond enthusiastically to the Greek tragedians, albeit generally through the treacherous medium of translation. Williams is asking the fascinating question of how that is possible in view of the cultural distance between us and them. The answer he develops in Shame and Necessity is that, notwithstanding the cultural distance, especially Greek concepts of supernatural intervention, “our ideas of action and responsibility and other of our ethical concepts are closer to those of the ancient Greeks than we usually suppose.” 34 3. PROGRESSIVISM AND PSYCHOLOGICAL EXPLANATIONS Some of the doubts one might have about Williams’ project, as announced in the first chapter of Shame and Necessity, are brilliantly resolved in the book’s second chapter, “Centers of Agency.” Here he argues, with excellently cho- sen examples, that the Homeric epics invoke an ethical outlook and implicit psychology that we intuitively recognize to be coherent and salient, pro- vided we do not complicate our responses by worrying about concepts that are absent. These concepts include (1) the distinction between soul and body, (2) the idea of the will as a mental action mediating between decision and doing something, and (3) the notion that mental functions with regard to action derive their significance from ethics. Such concepts, Williams argues, are all “accretions of misleading philosophy.” 35 Far from Homer’s 33 Williams (1993), p. 19. 34 Williams (1993), p. 16. 35 Williams (1993), p. 21. [...]... Press), pp 202–255 Williams, Bernard (1981b) “Moral Luck,” in Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp 20–39 Williams, Bernard (1985) Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London; Fontana) Williams, Bernard (1993) Shame and Necessity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993) Williams, Bernard (1998) Plato: The Invention of Philosophy (London: Routledge) Williams, Bernard... p 52 Long (1970); Cairns, (1993) Williams (1993), p 55 Williams (1993), p 64 14:3 P1: SBT 9780521662161c06 CUNY946/Thomas 978 0 521 66216 1 170 July 11, 2007 A A Long that in the story of one’s life there is an authority exercised by what one has done, and not merely by what one has intentionally done.”48 With great sensitivity and perceptiveness Williams asks us to respond to the “manifest grandeur”... attention on related claims that Adkins makes concerning first, the supposed irrelevance of intentions in Homer and, second, Adkins’ account of Homeric society as a “shameculture” in which public opinion is the only sanction an agent needs to consider Williams shows brilliantly that Homer does possess all the basic elements necessary to a conception of responsibility, which he lists as cause, intention,... that the Greeks paid no attention to intentions, while we make everything turn on the issue of intentions, this is doubly false.47 Such difference as there is between our allocation of responsibility and Greek practice is not due to our having “a purified notion of something called moral responsibility,” but to the way we moderns deal with “criminal responsibility under the law” and how we conceive of... “rational concerns that aim at the good, and mere desire.” What makes the model an ethicized psychology is not simply its imputing ethical dispositions to the mind or its assigning an instrumental role to reasoning (Williams has no quarrel with these ideas) but its taking reason to operate distinctively and normatively only when it has full charge of the self and controls non-rational desires Williams ... defence of “natural” slavery Williams (1993), p 125 Williams (1993), ibid 14:3 P1: SBT 9780521662161c06 CUNY946/Thomas 978 0 521 66216 1 Williams on Greek Literature and Philosophy July 11, 2007 177 no invitation in this remarkable text to ask questions about Agamemnon’s freedom of will or to apportion moral blame The “harness of necessity” invokes the idea that Agamemnon’s decision is not simply what he... we need to wear two hats On the one hand, to avoid anachronism, we have to attend to the original language and concepts present in our texts Yet, we can only attempt to understand those texts by translating them into our own terms and concepts That is the dilemma of interpretation In the case of Snell versus Williams, one horn of the dilemma is embraced without due attention to the other The result... attribution to Plato of this ethicized psychology, and its supposed absence from Homer and the tragedians, is a fundamental premise of the argument of Shame and Necessity On the one hand, he wants us to regard Plato’s psychology as being both highly influential on modernity because of its adumbrating the idea of distinctively “moral” motivation, and hence of an idea of the rational will On the other hand,... correspond to what we also call “guilt”? To pursue that question, he argues that, while Greek shame may appear to overlap with our guilt, in that shame as well as guilt may be a reaction associated with indignation, reparation, and forgiveness, there is none the less an important difference between the Greeks and ourselves Guilt, he suggests, buys into the distinction between “moral” and “nonmoral”... interaction and the testing of beliefs in an interlocutory context with people of quite various characters Platonic ethics, though it does not exclude the motivation of shame, undoubtedly places a radically new premium on the guidance of reason I sympathize with many of Williams worries about the efficacy of reason on its own to deliver appropriate ethical motivations, but his juxtaposition of Plato and . Williams on Greek Literature and Philosophy A. A. LONG Having studied Greek and Latin at school and in the Oxford Mods and Greats curriculum, Bernard Williams. shall concentrate on it in this study; but by way of introduction, I begin with brief remarks about Williams reflections on Greek philosophy and the Greeks