Guarding moral boundaries: Shame in early confucianism

Philosophy East and West

Volumn 54, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 113-142

  Geaney, Jane ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF RICHMOND   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950453254     PISSN: 00318221     EISSN: 15291898     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/pew.2004.0004     Document Type: Review

References (36)

1. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (San Francisco: City Lights 1986), p. 31
2. See, for example, Bryan W. Van Norden, "The Emotion of Shame and the Virtue of Righteousness in Mencius," in Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 1 (2002)
3. Kwong-loi Shun, "Self and Self-Cultivation in Early Confucian Thought," in Bo Mou, ed., Two Roads to Wisdom? Chinese and Analytic Philosophical Traditions (Peru, IL: Open Court, 2001)
4. Heiner Roetz, Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993)
5. Paolo Santangelo, "Human Conscience and Responsibility in Ming-Qing China," in East Asian History 4 (1992)
6. Margaret Ng, "Internal Shame as Moral Sanction," in Journal of Chinese Philosophy 8 (1981)
7. and Wolfram Eberhard, Guilt and Sin in Traditional China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967)
8. Roetz (Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age)
9. and Ng ("Internal Shame as Moral Sanction") all speak explicitly of early Confucian shame as internal shame. While also making use of these studies, Van Norden ("The Emotion of Shame and the Virtue of Righteousness in Mencius") opts for different terminology-speaking of ethical shame and conventional shame. In using the term "Confucian ethicists" as shorthand for scholars of Confucian ethics, I do not mean to imply that they consider themselves to be Confucians, although some may
10. The terms for shame appear frequently in the early philosophical Confucian texts (the Lunyu, the Xunzi, and the Mengzi) - both in the form of views that the texts challenge and in the form of views that the texts endorse. While the texts do not always promote feelings of shame as explicitly as Mengzi 7A6 (which names shame as a requirement for humanity), even the texts' rejections of shameful feelings reinforce the sense that it was an important cultural pre-occupation in the period. However, unless we assume that shame is a physiological affect associated with blushing (which might be indicated by the composition of the character chi - a heartmind and an ear), the translation itself is open to question. Shun raises the possibility that chi is closer to contempt (Shun, "Self and Self-Cultivation in Early Confucian Thought," p. 236)
11. Van Norden implies that the overlap in usage with our terms for conventional and ethical shame vindicates the translation, although in some cases he treats dislike and disgrace as interchangeable with shame (Van Norden, "The Emotion of Shame and the Virtue of Righteousness in Mencius," p. 47)
12. In the context of Asia, the most famous case of this is Ruth Benedict's claim that Japan is a shame culture, in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1947). The notion is also applied to China by David Reisman in The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969)
13. Gerhart Piers and Milton Singer, Shame and Guilt: A Psychoanalytic and a Cultural Study (Toronto: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 53
14. Gabriele Taylor, Pride, Shame and Guilt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 66
15. Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), p. 102
16. Williams argues that if internalized motivation means thinking that right and wrong can be determined simply on the basis of internalized laws (those of God or reason, for example), then its ethical value is suspect. Instead, he suggests that right and wrong are not easily determined without recourse to a sense of one's place within a society: It [guilt] can direct one towards those who have been wronged or damaged, and demand reparation in the name, simply, of what has happened to them. But it cannot by itself help one to understand one's relations to those happenings, or to rebuild the self that has done these things and the world in which that self has to live. Only shame can do that, because it embodies conceptions of what one is and how one is related to others. (Williams, Shame and Necessity, p. 94) He notes that without an internalized other, "the convictions of autonomous self-legislation may become hard to distinguish from an insensate degree of moral egoism" (Shame and Necessity, p. 100)
17. Agnes Heller (who counterposes shame and conscience rather than shame and guilt) arrives at a similar question and asks, "Is it so obvious, so much beyond reasonable doubt, that obedience to an internal authority is always so far superior to an external one?" (Agnes Heller, The Power of Shame: A Rational Perspective [Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985], p. 39). Although he adopts the language of "internal shame," the nonempirical sense of shame that Roetz attributes to early Confucians (see below) contrasts sharply with the point that Williams and Heller make here
18. Robert Metcalf, "The Truth of Shame-Consciousness in Freud and Phenomenology," Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 31 (11) (2000): 1-18
19. Piers and Singer, Shame and Guilt, p. 47
20. Heller, The Power of Shame, p. 5
21. Thus, the association of shame with disgust may be caused by their common provocation. In other words, they both seem like mild versions of what Julia Kristeva calls "abjection" - the feelings of loathing and disgust in response to things that expose the border between self and other (Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection [New York: Columbia University Press, 1982])
22. Rather than contrasting vision to hearing, Freud interprets this as vision overtaking the sense of smell. He says that when humans walked on all fours, their sexual desire was stimulated by the olfactory sense and was limited to a specific period. In walking erect, human sexual desire is stimulated by vision and can occur at any time. Hence, he argues, visual sexual stimulation has overtaken the power of olfactory stimulation, so much so that sources of sexual smells, like menstrual blood, are now taboo (Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey [New York: W. W. Norton, 1961], p. 54)
23. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 54
24. Metcalf, "The Truth of Shame-Consciousness in Freud and Phenomenology," p. 16
25. Something like this seems to be operative in Metcalf's text as well: the essential shame experience of being seen naked is a matter of being seen as the other sees me. For Metcalf, this is a power relation, like that of master and slave. It is a power relation in the sense that it constitutes "me." I am insofar as I am seen by the other who has power over me. In belying my privacy, this experience of shame also belies my autonomy and my very selfhood ("The Truth of Shame-Consciousness in Freud and Phenomenology," pp. 15-16). Thus, Metcalf implies, the self is produced by oppositional power relations. One reason I am hesitant to apply this scheme to early Confucian texts is that the notion of the construction of self through this kind of power-bond seems foreign to the early Confucian context. In early Confucian texts the forces of power seem more constructive and less personal. Of course there are violent forces, like the impulse to chaos, but these forces destroy identity rather than create it. Moreover, although the "other" in the visual-shame models is metaphorical, the metaphor itself is more personal and judgmental than those in early Confucian texts. It is hard to say, since the Confucian texts do not address this kind of question directly, but it does not seem to fit early Confucianism to say the construction of personal identity is overtly based on an either/or conflict with the judgment of an other (even granting, as Williams does, that the judgment might be less than hostile). (More on this below.)
26. and Eberhard, Guilt and Sin in Traditional China, p. 12
27. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), p. 122
28. Shigehisa Kuriyama, "The Imagination of Winds," in Body, Subject, and Power in China, ed. Angela Zito and Tani E. Barlow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 34
29. Even if, as Kuriyama contends, the concept of the body emerged through disharmony within those relations, this still does not imply that the body has a clearly distinguished form (Kuriyama "The Imagination of Winds," p. 31)
30. Roger T. Ames, "The Body in Classical Chinese Philosophy," in Self as Body in Asian Theory and Practice, ed. Thomas Kasulis, Roger T. Ames, and Wimal Dissanayake (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), p. 160
31. Roger T. Ames, "The Focus-Field Self," in Self as Person in Asian Theory and Practice, ed. Thomas Kasulis, Roger T. Ames, and Wimal Dissanayake (Albany: State University of New York Press 1994), p. 198
32. Chris Jochim, "Just Say No To "No-Self" in Zhuangzi," in Wandering at Ease in the Zhuangzi, ed. Roger T. Ames (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), p. 39
33. John Hay, "The Body Invisible in Chinese Art?" in Zito and Barlow, Body Subject, and Power in China, p. 51
34. This notion that mind and body must be seen as fully distinct from one another in order for shame to be internal - and therefore moral - seems dubious. As Williams notes, a individual disconnected from his/her own body and those of others is as likely to be a moral egoist as an ideal moral agent. In any case, there is little evidence of such a definitive distinction between mind and body in these early Confucian texts. Certainly there is no sustained attempt to explain how one feature (mind or body) goes about affecting or influencing the other, which suggests that there is no such gap. Moreover, as Ames points out, the term shen (self-body) seems to refer to both a physical and a psychic entity (Ames, "The Body in Classical Chinese Philosophy," p. 165)
35. Van Norden, "The Emotion of Shame and the Virtue of Righteousness in Mencius," pp. 60-61
36. Here I disagree with Van Norden, who claims that Mencius "almost always uses his shame vocabulary in connection with failures of character" (Van Norden, Confucian Ethics of the Axial Age, p. 67; emphasis added). It is true that Mengzi 2A6 connects yi (rightness) to xiu (shame), and Mengzi 6A6 affirms the certainty of our having a sense of rightness (among other things) by noting that it is not fused from without. However, I take this to mean that the sense of rightness, born of shame and distaste, originates within - not that one's own shame is never justifiably influenced by what others think