The Genesis of shame

Philosophy and Public Affairs

Volumn 30, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 27-52

  Velleman, J David ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 52849091903     PISSN: 00483915     EISSN: 10884963     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1088-4963.2001.00027.x     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. My characterization of the standard analysis is intended to be vague, so as to encompass the views of several philosophers, including John Deigh, "Shame and Self-Esteem: A Critique," Ethics 93 (1983): 225-45;
2. Gabrielle Taylor, Pride, Shame, and Guilt; Emotions of Self-Assessment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), Chapter 3;
3. Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire; A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic (New York: The Free Press, 1986), pp. 140-49;
4. Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 17-19;
5. and Richard Wollheim, On the Emotions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), Chapter 3.
6. Other authors include only some of these elements in their accounts of shame. For example, some analyze shame in terms of a negative self-assessment, without reference to any real or imagined observer (e.g., John Rawls, A Theory of Justice [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971], pp. 442-46;
7. Michael Stocker and Elizabeth Hegemon, Valuing Emotions [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996], pp. 217-30;
8. Jon Elster, Strong Feelings: Emotion, Addiction, and Human Behavior [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999], p. 21).
9. Others analyze shame as a response to the denigrating regard of others, without requiring a negative assessment of the self (e.g., Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993], Appendix 2).
10. This example is discussed by GabrielleTaylor, Pride, Shame, and Guilt, pp. 60-61;
11. and by Richard Wollheim, On the Emotions, pp. 159-63.
12. Wollheim traces it to Max Scheler, "Über Scham und Schmagefühle," in Schriften aus dem Nachlass (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1957), Vol. 1.
13. A recent report on the BBC World Service described a criminal defendant who appeared on the witness stand stark naked, "with nothing but a plastic clipboard to hide his shame." Here the reporter replaced the English "private parts" with a translation of the Latin, French, or German expressions.
14. The City of God, Book XIV, chapter 15, transl. Marcus Dods (New York: The Modern Library, 1950), p. 463: "[B]y the just retribution of the sovereign God whom we refused to be subject to and serve, our flesh, which was subjected to us, now torments us by insubordination." I am grateful to George Mavrodes for directing me to these passages discussed below.
15. The City of God, Ibid., Chapter 21, p. 468: "Far be it, then, from us to suppose that our first parents in Paradise felt that lust which caused them afterwards to blush and hide their nakedness, or that by its means they should have fulfilled the benediction of God, 'Increase and multiply and replenish the earth;' for it was after sin that lust began."
16. The City of God, Ibid., Chapter 24, p. 472.
17. The City of God, Ibid., Chapter 19, p. 467: "[T]hese parts, I say, were not vicious in Paradise before sin, for they were never moved in opposition to a holy will towards any object from which it was necessary that they should be withheld by the restraining bridle of reason."
18. Presumably, good and evil corresponded to the will's obedience and disobedience, respectively. But how could the good have consisted in obedience to instinct? The answer, I assume, is that human instincts were adapted to the conditions of Paradise in such a way that their promptings were unfailingly good.
19. In this and the following paragraph, I draw on a conception of agency that I have developed elsewhere. See my Practical Reflection (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), also available at http://www-personal.umich. edu/-velleman/);
20. The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. Chs. 1, 7, and 9;
21. and "The Self as Narrator," to appear in Decentering Autonomy, ed. Joel Anderson and John Christman.
22. See Georg Simmel, "The Secret and the Secret Society," Part IV of The Sociology of Georg Simmel, transl. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, Ill.: The Free Press, 1950), pp. 311-12: All we communicate to another individual by means of words or perhaps in another fashion - even the most subjective, impulsive, intimate matters - is a selection from that psychological-real whole whose absolutely exact report (absolutely exact in terms of content and sequence) would drive everybody into the insane asylum - if a paradoxical expression is permissible. In a quantitative sense, it is not only fragments of our inner life which we alone reveal, even to our closest fellowmen. What is more, these fragments are not a representative selection, but one made from the standpoint of reason, value, and relation to the listener and his understanding. ... We simply cannot imagine any interaction or social relation or society which are not based on this teleologically determined non-knowledge of one another.
23. Here I am simply making the familiar Gricean point about the content of communicative intentions; in the remainder of the sentence, I extend the point to other modes of social interaction.
24. See Thomas Nagel, "Concealment and Exposure," Philosophy & Public Affairs 27, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 3-30, p. 6: "The first and most obvious thing to note about many of the most important forms of reticence is that they are not dishonest, because the conventions that govern them are generally known."; "[O]ne has to keep a firm grip on the fact that the social self that others present to us is not the whole of their personality ... and that this is not a form of deception because it is meant to be understood by everyone" (p. 7).
25. Thomas Nagel, Philosophy & Public Affairs Ibid., p. 4.
26. Williams, Shame and Necessity, p. 220.
27. The example is Sartre's, Being and Nothingness, transl. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), pp. 261-62.
28. Here is a piece ethnographic of evidence. In some cultures, men wear almost nothing other than penis sheaths, which have the effect of making every penis look erect. This mode of dress represents an alternative solution to the problem of keeping male arousal private, since it entails that an erect-looking penis is no longer a sign of arousal (just as wearing a yellow star in occupied Denmark was not a sign of being Jewish). Of course, the sight of penis sheaths can be alarming to outsiders if they belong to a culture that favors outright concealment over camouflage. Another piece of evidence, I think, is that the traditional focus for women's shame about their bodies is not the genitals as such but rather menstrual blood, which is unlike female sexual arousal, but like male arousal, in being visibly insubordinate to the will.
29. On this feature of blushing, and its relation to sexual arousal, see Scruton, Sexual Desire, pp. 63-68. Another aspect of the reflexive response to shame is a sudden sense of confusion and disorientation: one's head spins, one's ears ring, and the lights may seem to go dim. A way of describing this aspect of the shame-response would be to say that shame causes a loss of self-possession; but I would prefer to say that shame is the experience of self-possession already lost. The occasion for shame is a failure to compose oneself in the manner distinctive of persons, and this failure comes to be felt as a loss of composure.
30. Also relevant here are various terms for shamelessness, such as 'barefaced', 'cheek', and 'effrontery'. The shameless person holds up his or her face in circumstances where self-presentation has been discredited and should therefore be withdrawn. (See also notes 25 and 27, below.)
31. Of the existing accounts of shame, Sartre's is the one with which I most agree. For Sartre, the thought involved in shame is that "I am as the Other sees me." And this thought is in fact the recognition that I am an object: "I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other" (Being and Nothingness, p. 222). Hence the reflected self-assessment in Sartre's analysis of shame is an assessment of the self as less than a freely self-defining person: thus far, I agree. As I understand Sartre, however, he also thinks that this assessment includes the attribution of a specific flaw or failing, such as vulgarity, which is attributed to the self as to an object; and here I disagree, for reasons explained below.
32. Williams mentions this possibility: "people can be ashamed of being admired by the wrong audience in the wrong way" (Shame and Necessity, p. 82).
33. Here is an example, which arose in discussion with members of the Philosophy Department at the University of Manitoba. It was pointed out that whereas men's locker rooms have communal showers, women's locker rooms have private showers, because women are less willing to be seen naked, even by other women. How can this difference be reconciled with my claim that male nakedness is naturally more shameful? The answer may be that our greater toleration for images of female nudity has resulted in more specific and more demanding standards of beauty for the naked female body than for the male. Although female nakedness is naturally less shameful, then, women are more likely to regard their bodies as ugly and to keep them private for that reason - a reason that applies in the locker room no less than elsewhere. Men generally keep their bodies private on account of their natural shamefulness, which is based in sexuality, whose relevance to the locker room is vehemently denied by social fictions of sexual orientation.
34. The fact that one can feel shame without being ashamed of anything in particular entails that an analysis of the emotion cannot simultaneously be an analysis of the word and all of its cognates. Not every instance of shame can be described in terms of what the subject is ashamed of. By the same token, a subject need not feel shame in order to be described as ashamed of something, since it may be something that the subject tries and succeeds at keeping private, with the result that it never occasions the emotion of shame. The words 'shame' and 'ashamed' have many uses that are related only indirectly to the emotion. I have not offered an account of the words, only an account of the emotion itself, as a sense of being compromised in one's standing as a self-presenting social agent.
35. For a deeper discussion of this issue, with references to relevant literature, see Cheshire Calhoun, "An Apology for Moral Shame" (MS). Calhoun argues that shame experienced in the face of racism or sexism may be a perfectly legitimate response that does not betray self-hatred. But Calhoun reaches this conclusion from a rather different analysis of shame and its place in the practice of morality. Liz Anderson has directed me to an apt passage in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, where the narrator describes the shame he felt to find himself enjoying a yam: "What a group of people we were, I thought. Why, you could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with something weliked.... This is all very wild and childish, I thought, but hell with being ashamed of what you liked. No more of that for me. I am what I am!" [Invisible Man (New York: New American Library, 1952), pp. 230-31]. The thought behind this shame is not that liking yams is wrong or bad; it is that liking yams is part of a stereotype that a black man must escape in order to be self-defining. Enjoying his yam, the narrator feels "I am as the Other sees me" - which is Sartre's formulation of the thought involved in shame. For further discussion of this formulation, see note 19, above.
36. Of course, positive stereotypes offer roles that are easier to play with that sense of conviction which feels like authorship. Hence people often fail to experience the shame that they ought to feel in letting themselves be co-opted into positive stereotypes, including such current favorites as The Good Liberal or The Right-Thinking Multiculturalist. But these stereotypes are only a further form of self-compromise, which might be described as putting on whiteface.
37. Here I disagree with Nathaniel Hawthorne, who says: "There can be no outrage. . more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame; as it was the essence of this punishment to do." (The Scarlet Letter [New York: Bantam Books, 1986], p. 53). According to Hawthorne, the essence of the pillory was to prevent culprits from alleviating shame that they already felt - presumably, for their wrongdoing. I believe that the pillory was designed to inflict shame even on wrongdoers who were not ashamed of what they had done: it was a device for teaching shame to the shameless. To be sure, the shamefaced culprit was prevented by the pillory from alleviating his shame, but only by being denied the means of self-presentation. Hiding one's face in shame is a symbolic act, since it neither hides one from view nor spares one the awareness of being viewed. It is rather a symbolic admission of having failed to manage one's public self: one withdraws one's botched self-presentation, symbolized by the face, as if to set it right before returning it to public view. The pillory prevented this gesture of withdrawal, thereby preventing the culprit from symbolically reestablishing self-possession and, with it, his or her claim to socially recognized personhood. It was by preventing this restorative self-presentation that the pillory blocked the wrongdoer's recovery from shame. As I argue in the text, this was only one means of self-presentation that the pillory denied the wrongdoer.
38. Another cultural practice of shaming is described by Jon Elster in Strong Feelings, pp. 100-101: In nineteenth-century Corsica, contempt for the person who failed to abide by the norms of vengeance was expressed by the rimbecco, "a deliberate reminder of the unfulfilled revenge. It could take the form of a song, a remark, a gesture or a look, and be delivered by relatives, neighbors or strangers, men or women. It was a direct accusation of cowardice and dereliction:" [...] "In Corsica, the man who has not avenged his father, an assassinated relative or a deceived daughter can no longer appear in public. Nobody speaks to him; he has to remain silent. If he raises his voice to emit an opinion, people will say to him: avenge yourself first, and then you can state your point of view." The rimbecco can occur at any moment and under any guise. It does not even need to express itself in words: an ironical smile, a contemptuous turning away of the head, a certain condescending look - there are a thousand small insults which at all times of the day remind the unhappy victim of how much he has fallen in the esteem of his compatriots.
39. [Quoted from S. Wilson, Feuding, Conflict, and Banditry in Nineteenth-Century Corsica (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 203] Elster interprets this practice as inducing shame in its victim by expressing the community's contempt. The practice does express contempt, of course, but it also conveys the victim's loss of credentials as a self-presenter. His every attempt to present himself to others is met with a reminder that their knowledge of his situation has rendered them deaf and blind to anything else about him.
40. One might think that what is felt on these occasions is embarrassment rather than shame. Let me respond by explaining how I distinguish between the two. Note that 'embarrassment' is not, in the first instance, the name of an emotion at all. The primary meaning of the verb 'to embarrass' is "to impede or encumber," and the noun 'embarrassment' refers either to the encumbrance or the state of being encumbered. (Hence the concept of "financial embarrassments," which are not so called because they tend to make one blush.) Insofar as 'embarrassment' refers to a mental state, it refers to the state of being mentally encumbered or impeded - that is, baffled, confounded, or flustered. In this generic sense, embarrassment can be a component or concomitant of any disconcerting emotion, inluding shame. In recent times, 'embarrassment' has also come to denote a particular emotion distinct from shame. (This use of the term is little more than a hundred years old, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.) This emotion begins with the sense of being the focus of undue or unwelcome attention - typically, ridicule or derision - and it culminates in self-consciousness, the self-focused attention that hinders fluid speech and behavior (and that consequently counts as embarrassment in the generic sense). Being flustered in the face of laughter is the typical case of the emotion called embarrassment. This emotion differs from shame, first, because it involves self-consciousness rather than anxiety and, second, because it involves a sense of attracting unwelcome recognition rather than of losing social recognition altogether. Being ridiculed is an essentially social kind of treatment. Self-consciousness in the face of ridicule is therefore different from anxiety at the prospect of social disqualification. Whereas the subject of embarrassment feels that he has egg on his face, the subject of shame feels a loss of face - the difference being precisely that between presenting a target for ridicule and not presenting a target for social interaction at all. Returning to the example under discussion in the text, I grant that some children may suffer no more than embarrassment when forced to perform for guests, if they feel merely self-conscious about being the center of attention. But other children experience their position more profoundly, as a threat to their social selves, undermining their prospects of being taken seriously as persons.
41. Several readers have pointed out that our culture has a pillory of just this kind: the tabloids. But then, celebrities feel shame about being displayed in the tabloids, insofar as they are displayed in ways that undermine rather than enable self-presentation on their part.
42. Of course, these people maybe afraid of actively receiving admiration because they would be ashamed of the vanity or exhibitionism that such a self-presentation would reveal. They consequently find themselves in a bind, with nowhere to turn without shame. Others may feel no more than embarrassment in the same circumstances: see note 27, above.
43. This point is the main theme of Nagel's "Concealment and Exposure."
44. The City of God, Chapter 18, p. 466.
45. See the quotations from Nagel in note 12, above.
46. The City of God, Chapter 18, p. 467. See again the quotations from Nagel in note 12, above.
47. As Liz Anderson has pointed out to me, this effect is aggravated by the moralists' tendency to think that homosexual relationships are all about sex and not at all about love and friendship, so that the social appearance of homosexual partners seems as indecent as the appearance of a heterosexual man with his prostitute.