Gripla - 20.12.2009, Síða 252

GRIPLA252
virtues. But now, if Vilhjálmur is correct, we are faced with a problem.
either the aporia is internal to saga Sittlichkeit, and the co­operative virtues
are as thick as the competitive ones, or the aporia is created from without,
arising from the need of exchanging competition for co­operation. While
the latter possibility seems to demand a reflective ethics that is nowhere to
be found in the saga culture, the former admits the co­operative virtues
into the moral realm dominated by honour. Since vilhjálmur argues for the
latter interpretation, he seems hard pressed to explain the fact that the
morality of honour surely includes virtues of co­operation, in medieval
Iceland just as in Archaic Greece, as I already suggested. Within such a
culture, the dominant moral concepts employed depend on honour as a
kind of focal concept. But if moral concepts that denote co­operation are
just as weighty as those that denote competition, the tension generated by
their clash is internal to the culture itself. And insofar as it is internal, it is
part of the unreflective moral thickness of the culture. for moral (or
political) reflection to upset this culture one would expect an external view
to be needed, as in the case of the Greeks.37 the thick values of Homeric
culture tumbled down first through constitutional changes (by the gradual
devaluation of aristocratic ideals of manly excellence in pursuit of honour,
especially associated with democratic Athens), and then forcefully through
the moral and political reflection culminating in the works of Plato and
Aristotle.38 there does not seem to be anything quite analogous to that
process in medieval Iceland. eventually, the republic crashes through inter­
nal paradoxes, no doubt generated by clashes between competitive and
cooperative virtues. The sagas, however, do not seem to reflect on the inad­
equacy of this culture to deal with internal problems, but rather simply to
reflect the thick moral world of the culture.39 Here we return to a previ­
ously mentioned flaw in MacIntyre’s comparisons of Homeric literature
and that of the sagas. While for the Classical Greeks, the Homeric poems
37 vilhjálmur finds reflection in the importance of advocacy itself (“Morality and Social
Structure in the Icelandic Sagas,” 173). But that is internal to the culture itself.
38 for a study on the changes in the Greek conception of honour, see Gabriel Herman,
Morality and Behaviour in Democratic Athens: A Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge
university Press, 2006), 194–203, 258–68.
39 Gunnar Harðarson has suggested to me that the reflection needed was supplied by Christian
ethics, in a way explained most conspicuously by Hermann Pálsson. Although this interpre­
tation remains an option, it does strain the notion of reflection; cf. Meulengracht Sørensen,
Fortælling og ære, ch. 12.