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enterprise.
53. See chap. 4, PP. 94-95, 100, and Endnote 1. We should recall once more the difficulty that progressivist thinkers
encounter in deciding how far Plato had travelled in the direction of true moral autonomy.
54. See the works referred to in Chap. 1, n. 17. A similar point is pressed in criticism of Rawls by Michael Sandel, Liberalism
and the Limits of Justice : it is unclear how far he is committed to the strongly Hegelian alternative that his formulations often
seem to imply.
55. EN 1103a24.
56. Daybreak , translated by R.J. Hollingdale, p. 168. See also The Twilight of the Idols , ''What I Owe to the Ancients," sec.
2.
57. See the full quotation, p. 17 above: the words "unsoftened, unmoralized" point to wider possibilities.
58. As with Plato's and Kant's conceptions of the Characterless moral self, mentioned above, historians of philosophy will
rightly insist that Kant was conscious of this criticism of earlier philosophy and indeed effectively invented it; the project of a
critical, as opposed to a dogmatic, philosophy was designed to overcome this problem. But in his transcendental psychology and
the moral philosophy that depends on it, Kant failed to overcome it. Though practical reason, in Kant's phrase, makes law for
itself and does not draw it from any external source, it is still true that reason's constraints intrinsically yield the moral law. Much
post-Kantian philosophy has been concerned with the fact that the critical philosophy, in this as in other respects, destroys itself.
59. The kind of relation suggested here between Thucydides and Sophocles should not be confused with the association
between the historian and tragedy proposed by F. M. Cornford, in Thucydides Mythistoricus , who claimed that Thucydides fell
unconsciously into tragic styles of narration because he lacked the resources to produce a properly positivist history.
60. Réflexions sur la tragédie [1829], pp. 945, 952-53. In the course of his long discussion of this theme, Constant also
says: "L'ordre social, l'action de la société sur l'individu, . . . ce réseau d'institutions et de conventions qui nous enveloppe dès
notre naissance et ne se rompt qu'à notre mort, sont des ressorts tragiques qu'il ne faut que savoir manier. Ils sont tout à fait
équivalents à la fatalité des anciens; leur poids a tout ce qui était invincible et oppressif dans cette fatalité; les habitudes qui en
découlent, l'insolence, la dureté frivole, l'incurie obstinée, ont tout ce que cette fatalité avait de désespérant et de dé-chitant" (p.
952).
61. , the Heracleitean phrase quoted earlier in this chapter, can hold true without the daimonic.
If the notions of character, self, or individual project are themselves abandoned, then of course a larger gap opens between
ourselves and not only tragedy but most other works discussed in this study. I have not discussed the arguments for abandoning
Shame and Necessity http://content.cdlib.org.oca.ucsc.edu/xtf/view?docId=ft4t1nb2fb&chunk....
those notions: all such arguments known to me rest on supposing that the notions have Platonic, Gartesian, or Kantian
implications, which it is precisely one aim of this study to detach from them.
62. In The Rhetoric of Reaction ; this is what he calls "the perversity thesis". As he points out (pp. 16-17), the thesis also
exists in an explicitly supernatural version, for instance in de Maistre.
63. Hes. Op ., esp. 90 seq., 109 seq.
64. Pyth . 4.263-69. The suggested translation is possible and makes more interesting sense of
: for this (and the association with Il . 1.234-38, first suggested by Schroeder) cf. Charles
Segal, Pindar's Mythmaking: The Fourth Pythian Ode . The conventional view, adopted by, among others, B.K. Bras-well, A
Commentary on the Fourth Pythian Ode of Pindar , takes it merely as a way of drawing attention to a riddle; this follows the
scholiast: .
Endnote One
Mechanisms of Shame and Guilt
The psychological model for each emotion involves an internalised figure. In the case of shame this is,
I have suggested in the text, a watcher or witness. In the case of guilt, the internalised figure is a
victim or an enforcer .
If an account using such models is to be helpful, it must not involve at the most primitive level an
appeal to the emotions that it is trying to explain: it is no good saying that there is some internalised
figure that elicits in the subject guilt or shame. In the case of guilt, this condition can be met by
supposing that, at the most primitive level, the attitude of the internalised figure is anger, while the
reaction of the subject is fear. The fear, most primitively, is fear at anger, rather than fear of anger,
which is a more complex development, as is fear of the loss of love.
From this primitive basis, it is possible, by what is sometimes called "bootstrapping", to develop
the model to allow for reactions that are progressively more structured by social, ethical, or moral
notions. So mere fear at mere anger becomes fear of recrimination, and this can develop into a
reaction that is restricted to what the subject regards as justified recrimination. In guiltcentred,
autonomous, moralities the point is supposedly reached where there is no distance at all between
subject and internalised figure, and guilt is pictured as an emotion experi-
220
enced in the face of an abstraction, the moral law, which has become part of the subject himself.
This idealised picture serves the false conception of total moral autonomy, which is criticised in the
text. But in addition to that, by blotting out the primitive basis of guilt, it also conceals one of its
virtues, a point I shall come back to at the end of this appendix.
In the case of shame, the story is in one respect more complex. If we start from the elementary
situation of actually being seen naked, there is no direct route to internalisation, for the reason
mentioned in the text: nakedness before an imagined watcher is no exposure. It may seem mysterious
how any process of internalisation can explain shame. The answer lies in the fact that the root of
shame lies not so much in observed nakedness itself, but in something of which that is, in most
cultures but not all, a powerful expression. (The cultures in which observed nakedness has this force
include our own and that of the Greeks, though the conventions governing what counts as nakedness,
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