Is Shame Necessary? Social Context and Political Emotions in Democratic Athens

• In Event: Shame and Other Political Emotions: From Cohesion to Dissent

Abstract

Justice is often thought to be the most essential political virtue, in ancient as well as contemporary political thought. With this in mind, it is a striking fact of Greek political thought that justice (dikē) is consistently paired with shame (aidōs, often translated as reverence), not only in the archaic poetry of Hesiod but throughout the political dialogues of Plato. In the Protagoras Plato presents a myth where political virtues, chiefly shame and justice, are distributed democratically, and in his last work, the Laws, he builds an extensive system of social controls via praise and blame based on the premise that justice is in fact “the daughter of shame.”
This link between justice and shame points to an under-studied aspect of Athenian political thought. In classical Greece, shame was considered to be a crucial pro-social ingredient in the construction of a shared political life. This paper aims both to clarify the mechanism through which shame was thought to function as an agent of social cohesion and to show that shame itself was in fact itself known to be dependent on other, prior aspects of social and political life. If justice needs shame, shame needs a pre-existing communal consensus about what is shameful – a consensus that draws on shared political, familial, and especially religious practices and preconceptions.
The first part of the paper engages with Bernard Williams’ arguments about shame as a regulative emotion for ethical life as it emerges in Attic tragedy. Through a reading of Euripides’ Hippolytus (a play also discussed by Williams), it shows that while Williams perceptively analyzed the ability of shame to connect the expectations of society with the inner psychology of ethical decisions, Euripides (and others) understood that this connection was a fragile one. The Hippolytus, it is argued, gives us a clear and powerful example of what Euripides thought the consequences for social stability might be in the case of dissenting understandings of shame.
The second part of the paper argues that Plato was aware of this instability around shame. If, as Christina Tarnopolsky has shown, Plato made extensive use of the virtue-producing capacities of shame in his earlier dialogues, especially the Gorgias, the Laws finds him exploring some of the same deficits in shame that emerged in the Hippolytus. In the Laws Plato paints a picture of Athens as a society where reverent behavior has given way to shamelessness (and, not unrelatedly, piety has given way to atheism). His constitutional proposals in the Laws thus present a novel form of institutional design, meant not only to produce justice, and not even merely to produce shame, but to produce the social pre-conditions for shame including piety and a hierarchy of values shared between citizens.
Contemporary political science has begun to take political emotions seriously as an important aspect of understanding how individual psychological states map on to collective action in politics. The Greeks were aware of this same problem and assigned shame a central role in mediating between the internal world of the individual and the institutions of public life. By exploring shame’s role in Greek thought, and two analyses of the failure of shame to produce pro-social results, this paper hopes to provide a case study of the deep pre-conditions for the sort of democratic consensus the Greeks believed to be both possible and optimal.

Author

• Jacob Samuel Abolafia