This week in lecture, we have been discussing the concept of honor and shame as a driving force behind agency. There is always the question of whether or not humans truly possess agency or complete freedom of will. Often times, it seems that our choices are not completely our own, that they have been influenced by various external forces such as societal expectations, our friends and family, cultural values, and other aspects of our milieu.
I personally feel that I have also been strongly influenced and shaped by others. For one, my parents have always put an emphasis on the importance of education and academic success. As a result, I never settled for anything less than what I knew was my best, sometimes working for hours on an assignment that should have taken only half an hour. It got to the point where more than working to meet my parents’ expectations, I was striving towards a bar that I had set for myself and refused to lower. If I didn’t reach that bar, I’d be overcome with a feeling of failure and shame, not in the eyes of others necessarily, but in my own eyes. Therefore, I do possess my own agency and will to do well in school, but it was highly influenced by my parents’ values.
My parents also influenced my moral beliefs and, in turn, my personality and behavior. From a very young age, I was told to be considerate of others and to never forget my manners. And though they wanted me to be kind and open-minded, they also wanted me to be firm and confident. Aside from the lessons and morals they were determined to instill in me, I was also influenced by their own personalities. For example, my mother and I both tend to be overly sensitive and worrisome, and my father and I have similar senses of humor. I picked up on much of what they conditioned me to know and the examples that they set for me, but I also was able to develop my own personality separate from theirs and found a way to apply what they taught me in my own decision-making. Now that I am more independent, rather than making the decisions that I think my parents would want me to make, I’ve begun to develop my own sense of direction and my own definition of honor and shame, and make choices on my own.
My parents also influenced my moral beliefs and, in turn, my personality and behavior. From a very young age, I was told to be considerate of others and to never forget my manners. And though they wanted me to be kind and open-minded, they also wanted me to be firm and confident. Aside from the lessons and morals they were determined to instill in me, I was also influenced by their own personalities. For example, my mother and I both tend to be overly sensitive and worrisome, and my father and I have similar senses of humor. I picked up on much of what they conditioned me to know and the examples that they set for me, but I also was able to develop my own personality separate from theirs and found a way to apply what they taught me in my own decision-making. Now that I am more independent, rather than making the decisions that I think my parents would want me to make, I’ve begun to develop my own sense of direction and my own definition of honor and shame, and make choices on my own.
The heavy influence that my parents have had on me exemplifies the idea that agency comes not completely from one’s free will but also is shaped by and can be derived from the will of others around them. But this raises the question of whether or not agency can exist in its purest form, the form by which we define it. Do the characters in the Iliad truly lack agency, or are they merely displaying the limits imposed on human agency even to this day? Perhaps we are more similar to them than we initially thought.