Status Updates From Shame and Necessity (Volume...

“A pessimist might say that in offering less when it is present than it promised when it was in doubt, metaphysical freedom resembles not only other things metaphysical, but other kinds of freedom.” (152)

“But the main feature of the Greek attitude to slavery, I have suggested, was not a morally primitive belief in its justice, but the fact that considerations of justice and injustice were immobilised by the demands of what was seen as social and economic necessity. That phenomenon has not so much been eliminated from modern life as shifted to different places.” (125)

“[Oedipus Rex] moves to the discovery of just one thing, that /he did it./ Do we understand the terror of that discovery only because we residually share magical beliefs in blood-guilt, or archaic notions of responsibility? Certainly not: we understand it because we know that in the story of one’s life there is an authority exercised by what one has done, and not merely by what one has intentionally done.” (69)

“But the fact that it takes some knowledge and imagination to see their point does not mean that when we see their point, the experience is just the product of imaginative time-travel—that they mean something to us only to the extent that we pretend to be fifth-century Greeks. If we get to the position of their meaning something to us, then they mean something to /us./“ (18)