Bernard Williams

Bernard Williams was the English philosopher — Cambridge, Oxford, Berkeley — whose Shame and Necessity (1993, Sather lectures) argued, against the received view of the Victorian and mid-twentieth-century classical scholarship, that the ethical world of Homer and the tragic poets is not more primitive than the modern ethical world but differently articulated, and that much of what the modern tradition takes as the discovery of moral consciousness is in fact the loss of psychological materials the Greeks had already understood.

The central thesis: the Homeric agent is not a “shame culture” in the sense Ruth Benedict gave the term — defective for want of interiorized guilt. The [[aidos|Homeric aidos]] is an affective recognition of the claims of other selves on one’s own, structurally no less ethical than modern guilt and in some respects more honest. The argument matters to the Seba lineage because it places the classical vocabulary of the feeling life — aidos, thumos, hubris — on equal philosophical ground with the modern tradition, which is the ground from which depth psychology’s retrieval of the classical must proceed. See williams-shame-necessity.

Bernard Williams

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