Shame Vs Guilt Culture Essay Example

could be interpreted as a weak attempt to avoid responsibility however Dodd makes the strong assertion that this is not the case. He backs up this assertion by pointing to the fact that when Achillis is explaining the events he also attributes Agamemnon's unjust action to his ate. Either way, assertion or no assertion, Agamemnon would not have benefited because Greek justice "cared nothing for intent - it was the act that mattered. "(p.3) This is one example of an instance where ate plays a role in the Iliad, there are many more. Another common occurrence of god-to-human communication is seen in the form of menos.Menos, like ate, is a state on mind which is instilled in the individual by the Gods. Menos however comes in the form of a "mysterious access of energy"(p. 8) and brings "a new confidence and eagerness"(p. 8).

In Homer's writings menos often enters an individual in the midst of battle and results in an ease of performing difficult tasks. Both of these ideas, ate and menos, can appear far fetched in our modern world understanding and can easily be pushed into the category of fiction, however Dodds believes that these seemingly absurd ideas do indeed explain a great deal about the mentality of the time.He proposes that within Greek society mortals and Gods existed in the same realm. In other words the Gods, which in societies today are seen as being otherworldly, existed in and influenced the sphere of everyday Greek life. He also suggests that in ancient Greek culture "whenever someone has a particularly brilliant or a particularly foolish idea; when he suddenly recognises another person's identity or sees

a flash the meaning of an omen"(p.11) this event was attributed to the psychic intervention of a spiritual being.In ancient Greek life any behaviour that departed from the norm, just like the weather and the seasons were attributed to the actions of the Gods.

Being a society which regarded all out of the ordinary activities as the intent of the Gods, the Homeric Greeks did not believe in the idea of an individual ego or of free will. Theirs was a culture which had "no unified concept of what we call 'soul' or 'personality"(p. 15) The closest concept which the Homeric Greeks had to a soul was their concept of thumos. Dodds roughly defines thumos as "the organ of feeling"(p.6) and he defines its role: "a man's thumos tells him that he must now eat or drink or slay an enemy, it advises him on his course of action, it puts words in his mouth"(p. 16).Essentially the thumos is everything ordinary and instinctual that the Greeks would do, and anything which fell out of this category would be accredited to the will of the Gods. Along with the idea of thumos Dodd also found another interesting attribute of the Homeric Greek culture. This was the Greek's peculiar "habit of explaining character or behaviour in terms of knowledge"(p. 6).

What this means is that what was not knowledge was not part of the character. "In other words, unsystematised, non-rational impulses, and the acts resulting from them, tend to be excluded from the self and ascribed to an alien origin"(p. 17). This unique cultural characteristic further adds to both, the lack of individualism and the considerable communality of their

social system. The puzzle of the Homeric Greek culture is now set up enough to decipher what Dodds means by a "shame culture". Read shame by Gregory questions and answersWithin the Homeric Greek system nothing was left to the devices of personal determinism, free will or accident because these notions simply did not exist for the Greeks.

Rather, all the occurrences within the system were accounted for by either the thumos or superhuman intervention. Because there was no concept of an ego or a personality there was no possible way guilt could exist, because guilt requires an ego and a concept of the individual. If a Greek citizen were to commit a crime they would not feel guilt because it was not them committing the crime but rather a "psychic intervention"(p. ) of the Gods.However the citizen, instead of guilt, would feel shame because "the strongest moral force which Homeric man knows is not the fear of god, but respect for public opinion"(p.18) These feelings of shame, which were strong and unbearable for the Greeks, would then be projected in the direction of the entity which was responsible for the unacceptable deed. This is what Dodds means by the "shame culture" of the Homeric Greeks. As time progressed beyond the Homeric Greek period the Gods began to gain more power within the society and the people began to become more individualized.The result of this was, over time, a shift from the "shame culture" to the "guilt culture" of the Archaic era. Today Western societies are "guilt cultures", mainly because we are so individualized. Also the popular belief

in a higher spiritual God or Gods produces within many of us a direction in which our guilt can be projected.

As if feeling inner guilt is not enough we also are often faced with feeling guilt at the hands of the greater society as well as the 'higher powers'.The concept of a "shame culture" is a hard concept to grasp for modern minds because it takes an untainted mind to comprehend such a different social system. The Homeric Greek paradigm is one which at its very foundations is dissimilar to our individualistic system, so from the start comprehension is problematic. However if an understanding is achieved, the benefits are numerable, because one begins to see that modern culture, just like Homeric Greek culture is enshrouded in a framework of socially constructed morality and is in essence an evolved form of the same myth.