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outlook, their significance for explaining the difference between an ancient
Greek moral outlook and a modern one is subject to doubt; the easy dis­
tinction between internal and external sanctions implied by the use of the
concepts was rejected in this revised consideration: “Concern for honour,
even when it is acute, betokens no simple reliance on external sanctions
alone.”9 When living within a society shaped by such sanctions, internal
motivation can always play a role even through shame by the presence of
an internalised other: “the internalised other is … potentially somebody
rather than nobody, and somebody other than me. He can provide the
focus of real social expectations, of how I shall live if I act in one way
rather than another, of how my actions and reactions will alter my relations
to the world about me.”10 While Cairns showed what was unhelpful about
branding Archaic and Classical Greece a shame­culture, Williams sought
depth in the concept of shame absent from that of guilt; the latter is the
more confining notion, for shame, as opposed to guilt, “embodies concep­
tions of what one is and how one is related to others.”11 This was part of
Williams’ critique of modern moral thought and an attempt to liberate the
ancients, in order to draw lessons for the modern world. But the ancients
he referred to were emphatically not the philosophers; Aristotle is in fact
on the other side of the divide, along with other ‘progressives’: “Plato,
Aristotle, Kant, Hegel are all on the same side, all believing in one way or
another that the universe or history or the structure of human reason can,
when properly understood, yield a pattern that makes sense of human life
and human aspirations.”12 In short, on the one hand the usefulness of the
established shame­guilt antithesis for an understanding of the moral out­
look of the ancient Greeks was all but rejected, and on the other, shame
(together with honour) was introduced as a moral concept of depth which
actually had something to offer the modern reader.
9 Douglas L. Cairns, Aidōs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek
Literature (oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 43.
10 Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: university of California
Press, 1993), 84.
11 Ibid., 94. Chapter IV of Williams’ study is mostly concerned with shame. For a useful
analysis of Williams’ theses, see Michael Stocker, “Shame, Guilt, and Pathological Guilt:
A Discussion of Bernard Williams,” Bernard Williams, ed. Alan thomas (Cambridge:
Cambridge university Press, 2007), 135–54, and A.A. Long, “Williams on Greek Literature
and Philosophy,” ibid., 155–80.
12 Williams, Shame and Necessity, 163.