Abstract
This paper explores the fruitful concept of necessary identity, put forward by Bernard Williams in Shame and Necessity (1993) in order to explain a peculiar kind of social identity. Firstly, we will investigate the foundation of this concept, by analyzing Williams’s account of personal practical identity. To this end, we will discuss the role played by luck and necessity in Williams’ understanding of personal practical identity. Secondly, we will focus on the analysis of necessary identities by addressing two historical examples given by Williams. In the second part of the paper, we will consider a debate that followed Williams’s concept of necessary identity, which was taken up by Margaret Walker in light of feminist accounts about necessary identity constitution. In Moral Understandings: A Feminist Study in Ethics (2007) Walker deepens Williams’s position by focusing on the invisible mechanisms of social power and misrecognition that perpetuate the immutability of some social identities; as a model of the perpetuation of necessary identities we will discuss Angela Davis’s positions in Women, Race and Class. From a feminist perspective, we will investigate gender identity as a necessary identity which personal character develops within. From a point of view of the affective situation, we are particularly interested in examining necessary identities as a dispositive where emotion repertoire takes place. Dwelling on the link between Williams’s and Walker’s accounts sheds new light on how personal development and emotion regulation take place within a practical identity that stems from asymmetrical relations of power.
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Notes
On Williams’s account, character is a basic element that distinguishes a person from another and it is composed by projects: «an individual person has a set of desires, concerns or, as I shall often call them, projects, which help to constitute a character». Character is made up by life-projects that give a person «a reason for living this life, in the sense that he has no desire to give up and make room for others, but they do not require him to lead a distinctive life».
Williams distinguishes between accidental luck and constitutive luck throughout the examples of the fictious Gaugin and Anna Karenina.
In Shame and Necessity Williams explores the role of shame in Ancient Greek literature in order to overcome the dichotomy between shame and guilt, whereby guilt should be morally superior to shame, and to reflect on contemporary issues, especially about social justice questions.
In Shame and Necessity, p. 107, Williams writes: «It was important for the ideology of this institution that the slaves were mostly barbarians, people who did not speak Greek, usually from the north and the northeast. […] The supply of slaves had to be renewed, and this was by no means necessarily a matter of regular warfare. The skills involved in capturing people to be slaves are said by Aristotle to be “a kind of hunting”; being a slave trader was regarded as both dangerous and unpopular».
This is attested by numerous characters in pieces of Ancient Greek literature, as Tekmessa in Iliad or Hecuba and the suppliants in Euripides’s tragedies: being enslaved was a life disaster for which there was nothing to do but sorrow.
Williams notices that in Athens a manumitted slave was a metic, a status that carried fewer rights than being a citizen but was already far away from being a slave.
To the extent that Aristotle had tried to establish it on natural basis (Politics, 1253b, pp. 20, 23).
Williams notices that if free Greeks had thought of chattel slavery as a just institution, they would also have thought that the slaves themselves—free people captured into slavery, for instance—would have been mistaken to complain about it. Most people did not suppose the justice of slavery due to its necessity: a further argument would be needed, as the one Aristotle tried to find.
Woman is considered a social identity for females whereas citizens was referred to free males.
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Fussi, A., Giannoni, M. Necessary Identities: From Bernard Williams to Feminist Critique. Topoi (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09980-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-023-09980-9