Gripla - 20.12.2009, Side 242

GRIPLA242
The first and earliest of these theses is based on the distinction between
shame­cultures and guilt­cultures; it underlines the distinction’s validity
and interpretative significance as applied to specific periods in the history
of ancient Greece. It gained currency after it appeared in e. R. Dodds’
widely admired The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), in which he adopted
the well known formulation of the distinction made by the anthropologist
Ruth Benedict in 1947: “true shame cultures rely on external sanctions for
good behavior, not, as true guilt cultures do, on an internalized conviction
of sin. Shame is a reaction to other people’s criticism.”1 using this concept
Dodds claimed that “Homeric man’s highest good is not the enjoyment of
a quiet conscience, but the enjoyment of tīmē, public esteem: “Why should
I fight,” asks Achilles, “if the good fighter receives no more τιμή than the
bad [Il. 9.315 ff.]? And the strongest moral force which the Homeric man
knows is not the fear of god, but respect for public opinion, aidōs: αἰδέομαι
Τρῶας, says Hector at the crisis of his fate [Il. 22.105], and goes with open
eyes to his death.”2 Other classical scholars followed suit, but sometimes
applied this conceptual apparatus not only to the moral world of the
Homeric poems, as Dodds had done, but also to that of later Archaic and
then Classical Greece.3 By the early nineteen­nineties, the conceptual
soundness and usefulness of the distinction for the study of the Archaic
and Classical Greek world seemed uncontroversial.4
1 Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston:
Turtle, 2003 [1946]), 223. Benedict’s influential passage continues: “A man is shamed either
by being openly ridiculed and rejected or by fantasying to himself that he has been made
ridiculous. In either case it is a potent sanction. But it requires an audience. Guilt does not.
In a nation where honor means living up to one’s own picture of oneself, a man may suffer
from guilt though no man knows of his misdeed and a man’s feelings of guilt may actually
be relieved by confessing his sin.”
2 e.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley and Los Angeles: university of
California Press, 1951), 17–18.
3 Conspicuous examples are Arthur W. H. Adkins, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in
Greek Values (oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), and Hugh Lloyd­jones, The Justice of Zeus
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: university of California Press, 1971), ch. 1. Dodds (ibid., ch.
2) did indeed trace the gradual emergence of a guilt­culture discernable, for example, in
Sophocles.
4 Probably the last major study to make unproblematic use of the distinction is that of n. R.
e. fisher, Hybris: A Study in the Values of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greece (Warminster:
Aris and Phillips, 1992). fisher claims that “Homeric, and later, Greek has many words for
feelings of ‘shame’, and none specifically for feelings of moral guilt; and it is right to classify
Ancient Greece as more of a ‘shame­culture’ than a ‘guilt­culture’” (180, n110).