Shameful self‐consciousness
2020; Wiley; Volume: 28; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/ejop.12596
ISSN1468-0378
Autores Tópico(s)Language, Metaphor, and Cognition
ResumoShame can be occasioned in startlingly different ways. Here are two classic depictions—one in words, one in paint—that stand in contrast with each other. They also correspond, in a helpful way, to twin strands of philosophical theorizing about shame: as recognition of wrong done, and as innocent social exposure. “Dear me!” said his father, who was in especially good humour. “I told you it would not be enough. How much?” “Very much,” said Nicholas flushing, and with a stupid careless smile, for which he was long unable to forgive himself, “I have lost a little, I mean a good deal, a great deal – forty three thousand.” “It can't be helped. It happens to everyone!” said the son, with a bold, free, and easy tone, while in his soul he regarded himself as a worthless scoundrel whose whole life could not atone for his crime. He longed to kiss his father's hands and kneel to beg his forgiveness, but said, in a careless and even rude voice, that it happens to everyone!1 The old count immediately relents, and starts to leave the room to try his best to raise funds. The bold easy tone cracks, and Rostov grabs his father's hand, sobbing. Even if we do not think him a “worthless scoundrel”, Rostov has behaved gullibly and selfishly, has hurt those he loves, and recognizes that he has done so. He is riven with shame, both at his original careless actions, at breaking his word to his father that he would be economical with funds already given to him, and now at his attempts to subvert the blameworthiness of them—through his “stupid careless smile”, and his arrogant kick back “everyone does it” manoeuvrings. He longs for forgiveness and love as the only antidote. Now consider the case of Rembrandt's depiction of the story of Susannah and the Elders. He—like many renaissance painters before him—is concerned with the moment that Susannah has learnt that she is being spied on bathing by two elders, and has been exposed naked to them against her will. The focus of the painting is not on the moment that they threaten to lie about her meeting a lover if she does not “lie with” them—one of the elders is still emerging from hiding—nor on the moment that she is later publicly falsely accused of infidelity by the elders. Her feeling of shame is at being the object of their lasciviousness and at being seen naked by them, and indeed being seen naked by the viewers of the painting—she looks directly at us. Rembrandt paints Susannah with the bodily stoop, and anxious look, of shame. However, at the moment painted, she has neither been accused of wrongdoing, nor has she done anything wrong.2 Susannah is a woman of virtue who has done no wrong—she has been disrespected, her social standing tarnished, and her body exploited by the elders against her will. They feel no shame, and she does. One way of seeing philosophical theorizing about shame is as coalescing around two strands of thinking that come from attending to examples of one kind, to the neglect of examples of the other. One strand, that we can call the Adverse Self-evaluation Model, comes from focussing on our first kind of example: we see Rostov suffering from an adverse self-evaluation. The second strand, that we can call the Mere Exposure Model, comes from focussing on the other kind: we see Susannah shamed by mere exposure. To characterize the philosophical literature on shame in terms of a choice or competition between these two models would be to mischaracterize it. Theorists who stress the centrality of an adverse self-evaluation often do not deny that shame can involve or be evoked by social exposure; and theorists who take shame as centrally a form of exposure to another do not deny that adverse self-evaluations are often involved or invoked. X construes herself as bad = df X construes herself, first personally, as having done something, or as being something, that fails to meet the demands of X's own morals, ethics and ideals. Adverse Self-evaluation Model: For X to feel shame, is for X to construe herself as having done, or being, something bad. Mere Exposure Model: For X to feel shame is for X to construe herself under the guise of being exposed to another, and to feel shame requires only such a construal as exposed to another, and no construal as bad. Before going any further, let me emphasise that we should not set our project to be, nor assume that of our opponents is, one of finding necessary and/or sufficient conditions for feeling shame. On the account offered here, shame is a psychosocial phenomenon that corresponds to human capacities for self-consciousness which can be occasioned capriciously, aberrantly and pathologically. It is also continuous with a network of other forms of social self-consciousness. Our psychological ascriptive vocabulary might suggest sharp distinctions between embarrassment, feelings of humiliation, guilt, feelings of self-consciousness and shyness, but the use of it, and the psychological matter underlying appropriate ascriptions gives us no reason to think we will find sharp boundaries, or anything like necessary or sufficient conditions for each phenomenon. Moreover, our concept of shame, and ascriptions involving it, itself have their social uses—uses of regulation, of subordination, demanding recognition and recompense, normative theorizing—which affect the patterns of use.3 My task, here, will be to try—as an exercise within the philosophy of mind—to consider what is at the core of the human capacity for shame, understood as an affective psychological phenomenon. In this paper, I want to argue that the advocate of an Adverse Self-evaluation Model is right to think that there is a negative aspect of shame at the core of our notion of shame, over above that of mere exposure, but wrong to assume that that negative aspect should be understood only as self-construal as bad. On my understanding of shame, the Mere Exposure model is right to take social, or interpersonal, self-consciousness to be at the core of shame, but it fails to give us a story about the negative valance inherent to shame. I want to make a case for seeing shame as an affective form of self-consciousness—in particular, an affective form of interpersonal self-consciousness—and to offer a structure for understanding such consciousness.4 At the core of a feeling of shame is our consciousness of ourselves, as ourselves, with a consciousness that we are candidates for, or subjects of, the evaluative attention of another. Moreover, it is form of self-consciousness that has a particular negative social valence; in its central case, to feel shame is to be conscious of oneself as diminished by the social group of which one is a part, and so be diminished in social magnitude. We can call this the Social Diminution Model of shame. To some extent it is a decision whether to call only consciousness of diminution shame, or whether to use shame to refer to consciousness of all changes in social magnitude—including increases. Heller (1982, p. 215) takes shame to be a feeling that is the “involvement of persons in the judgement of authorities on human conduct. In the case of shame, the authority is social custom …represented by the ‘eye of others’” and is an authority that “can approve as well as disapprove”. She, thereby, includes the “highly pleasant feeling…when we are praised in public…the magnificent experience of happy embarrassment” as a feeling of shame. We would tend to call such a feeling only embarrassment or pride, but the point may not be a deep one. If we had positive evidence that the capacity to track negative social evaluations—disapprovals—and the capacity to track positive social evaluations—approvals—were the same, or symmetric, capacities then that might give us a reason for using one label to cover our consciousness of our changing social magnitudes. However, as far as I know we have no such evidence. Indeed, since the costs of misreading disapproval are likely, in general, to be higher than the costs of misreading approval, it is probable that we have distinct ways of deploying our attention towards negative, as opposed to positive, social evaluations. So, I will stick with calling only consciousness of diminution, shame. I will come back to set out a framework for the Social Diminution Model in the final section of this paper but let me make a few things clear now. By “social group of which one is a part” I mean the cluster of human beings that are part of one's life, and that one takes oneself, to be one of. It is natural to reach for ungrammatical phrases like “the us,” or “the we” to try to capture the group and its relation to the subject of concern. Let me note three things straightaway about this use. One, my use of “social group” here is entirely different from that used in much social and political philosophy.5 It is an entirely non-identity related notion: it is just the group of people that are bundled up with me in actual life, whether I like it, them, or not. They are “my others.” Two, and relatedly, the social group of which I am a part needs not be a group I identify with, or share values with, or am “one of a kind” with—it is the group that constitutes the social and practical fabric of my every day. Three, it is an initial, and simplifying, move to suggest that a subject's shame is to be understood in relation to just one group—one “us”—“the” group that constitutes the social and practical fabric of my every day can grow, change, subdivide, be constituted by subgroups. What it takes for something to be subgroup will be fuzzy, and will depend on the location, frequency and nature of the relations with which I interact with members of the group. And, importantly, the patterns of evaluations to which an individual is subject can be complex and divergent. A subject might be conscious of opposing, or in tension, evaluations relative to distinct individuals, and subgroups, within her current social group. As Heller points, out the way shame operates will vary depending on whether my social group is “small…stratified…predominantly closed” (Heller, 1982, p. 216). If a human subject is operating within complex social groups with distinct stratifications—and subject to change—the psychological machinations of their shame responses will be correspondingly complex. I will come back to the significance of these points. Let me also expand a little on what is involved in being conscious of oneself as “socially diminished.” One, it is a painful whole animal form of self-consciousness—taking the human animal as its object. It is a feeling—in fact like most feelings, including feelings of grief, joy, and anger—in relation to which any distinction between bodily feeling and mental feeling is unhelpful.6 In shame, in its basic form, we do not get bodily feelings of, say, taking up too much space in the world with urges to retract and close in on ourselves, and then react mentally with anguish—we feel the animal we are as socially diminished, and part of doing that is to feel we are taking up too much space, to have the urge to hide, and to retract etc., or so I want to claim. Two, the form of self-consciousness involved needs to be understood in relation to corresponding acts or expressions—actual, feared, or imagined—of social disregard or diminution by others. The capacity for shame in human beings is an affective capacity with the function of detecting, anticipating, and responding to the social evaluations, of their co-specifics. In particular, it is a capacity the function of which is to enable the human animal to anticipate, track, and incorporate, negative changes in her social magnitude or standing. A shameful feeling of social diminution is a felt incorporation of a lowering of social standing relative to my social group. My having a capacity to track such devaluations also allows, of course, that shameful feelings of social diminution can occur when there is in fact no social diminution in actuality or prospect: the capacity can be exercised erroneously. Three, the feeling of social diminution can be an incorporation, or anticipation, without being an identification or, on some senses of the term, internalisation—of the actual or possible diminution in social magnitude signalled by the actual or possible negative evaluation of the other. Finally, although consciousness of social diminution is at the core of our capacity shame—on the view to be defended—the view allows for shame when we fear, expect, anticipate or otherwise alter our consciousness of ourselves under the guise of a diminishing evaluation by another. Indeed, for reflective, anxious, self-conscious animals such as humans, who are not bound to the present in their imaginations and reflections, fear, expectation, and anticipation of shame may be the more commonly occurring and useful exercise of the capacity.8 In the extreme case of shame, on the diminution view, shame is experienced as a form of social expulsion. I am conscious of being diminished to such an extent that I experience a form of social annihilation or expungement: I can come to be conscious of myself as no longer counted as social participant with a social value at all. Exile, or “being sent to Coventry,” as expulsion from the social domain, is the punishment of wrong doing, or wrong being, concordant with extreme cases of shameful behaviour or nature.9 In more moderate cases of shame, I feel socially diminished, without feeling socially expunged. In all cases of shame, I am forced to be conscious of the threat of social rejection and containment by “us,” the sensitivity to which means I am subject to the incoherent desire to escape from the self that is to be rejected. This gives us the Levinas observation that “what appears in shame is thus the fact of being riveted to oneself.” Levinas, On Escape, p. 64. We retract from me.10 The motive for the account being defended is best brought out by considering, first, the shortcomings of the suggestion that an adverse self-evaluation is the core aspect of shame. Prima facie, it is a highly intuitive starting point to take shame as involving a construal of oneself as bad. It is the core commitment of what is perhaps the most influential recent analytical treatment of shame: Taylor's Pride, Shame and Guilt.11 Expressions of shame very often explicitly involve subjects describing themselves as failures relative to the standards—moral, ethically or ideal—that they endorse. Witness Rostov: he regards “himself as a worthless scoundrel whose whole life could not atone for his crime.” It is not new to point out, however, that such a self-evaluation does not seem to be required for shame. It is a familiar, even if somewhat puzzling, phenomenon to have people manifesting shame, and self-ascribing shame, when there is no reason to interpret them as construing them as bad. They will both declare themselves as riven with shame, and also faultless, with respect to any standard they endorse. Perhaps the most familiar kind of case—and perhaps the kind of case that motivates the strand of thinking behind the Mere Exposure Model—is the case of the victim of sexual, or merely violent, assault. A person who has been a victim of assault will often manifest shame—in speech and behaviour—while at the same time sincerely denying that the failure lies in any way with them: “I felt full of shame although I know I did nothing wrong.” A distinct kind of case involves the shame a person can feel for “being the wrong thing” in the eyes of others. The person who is proud and protective of their Jewish identity, can feel shame when admitting they are Jewish in certain social environments. The person, proud of their class identity, can be shamed by the invisibility that descends as soon as their upper middle class hosts, and other guests, hear their accent and mode of speech. A case, conjured by Ellison in his Invisible Man, cited by Velleman (p. 45–46, fn. 23), is a particularly complex and rich one. The unnamed narrator is walking through Harlem in the snow, and smells yams cooking on an outdoor wagon. He buys one and decides to eat it in the street, a decision that results in “a surge of homesickness” and “an intense feeling of freedom” at the transgression. As he eats his imagination goes to work in two directions. First, he imagines someone “from school or home” seeing him eating his yam in the street. He thinks “How shocked they'd be!” and reflects “What a group of people we were, I thought. Why, you could cause us the greatest humiliation simply by confronting us with something we liked.” with others present, it would be worse than if I had accused him of raping an old woman… Bledsoe would disintegrate, disinflate! With a profound sigh he'd drop his head in shame. He'd lose caste. (Ellison, 2001, p,255) This is all very wild and childish, I thought, but to hell with being ashamed of what you liked. No more of that for me. I am what I am! (p. 255).12 Similarly, the adverse evaluation theorist of shame can suggest that for a subject to feel shame is for them is to construe themselves as bad, and that for the subject to get it wrong in feeling shame is for them to (self-consciously) construe themselves as bad when they are not bad. If the subject feels shame when the subject herself is bad the attitude is rational (or fitting, or apt); if the subject feels shame when the subject herself is not bad then the attitude is irrational (or unfitting, or inapt). At first look the cases of shame without adverse self-evaluation, that we have identified above, seem to sit well with this model. The subjects take themselves to feel shame, they do not judge themselves adversely, and they take this to be irrational in some way. The victim of racial or sexual abuse will tend to use the connective “although”: “I felt ashamed, although I did nothing wrong.” In the end Ellison declares it “wild and childish,” and seeks to puncture and ridicule Bledsoe's imagined disintegration and disinflation. However, to construe these cases simply as irrational construals of oneself as bad seems to leave something important out. We see this in the to-ing and fro-ing in the passage from Ellison. The determination on Ellison's part that the shame is irrational—“wild and childish”—is not a discovery of irrationality on the part of the narrator, but more of an instruction to the will: “No more of that for me.” Moreover, it is an instruction that he is fully aware that Bledsoe is not yet in a position to make. The person who feels ashamed, despite not doing, or being, anything bad, when they are diminished for what there have done, or are, by another is in many ways construing their situation aright. They are not like the arachnophobe whose construal is entirely discordant with facts of the situation. To feel shame in circumstances of bullying, or prejudice can be to be getting aspects of one's world aright, and to that extent it is rational. When Ellison describes the narrator being ashamed of what he likes, and in imagining Bledsoe's shame, Ellison gives voice to the idea of there being a social diminution in living a form of life. To be an African American, at that time and in that context, was to live with one's social value diminished, and Ellison is conscious of that diminished value. Moreover, he is aware that to care about it is for it to cause pain: it is uncomfortable for a person to be aware that they have a diminished social value. And, there is a dimension along which it is rational to care about it: it is costly having diminished social value, to as Ellison puts it, to “lose caste.” Ellison does not, of course, share the evaluations that his narrator is subject to, and does not share the means by which their social value is determined, but he is conscious of the costliness of the way in which they impact on a subject. And perhaps more importantly, and less obviously, nor does Bledsoe share the evaluations that he, Bledsoe, is subject to. However, to a greater extent than the narrator, he succumbs to them without resistance. The core of the originating experience is an experience of damage: deep damage, or damage to the sense of self…we damaged ourselves by bringing down upon ourselves the hostile judgment. But, since the judgment is not necessarily one with which we concur, the judgment is experienced primarily as the brute impact of the world upon us. (Wollheim, 1999, p. 187). A number of philosophers have recognized the fact that we feel shame in relation to social evaluations we do not identify with, and a few have argued that it is not irrational for us to do so. The explanation of this, most often, draws on the idea that our evaluative lives are not lived autonomously, but take place within a shared moral practice. Sometimes, this fact leads to a move that in some, more or less direct, way re-creates a proxy for the negative self-evaluation. This may be through the suggestion that we internalize, or come to identify with, the evaluation of the social other, either by holding ourselves responsible for drawing to ourselves a negative evaluation, as in the case of Wollheim, or because we ethically identify with, and in some way select, the social peer group who have the power to shame us, as in the case of Williams in Shame and Necessity. (Williams tells us that Ajax feels shame in virtue “of the relations between what he expects of the world and what the world expects of a man who expects that if it” where “‘The world’ there is represented by an internalized other”, and thus that "Ajax is identified with the standards of excellence represented by his father's honours”, p. 85). Calhoun (2016), however, offers an account of the appropriateness of shame in such cases without interjecting any identification in relation to those who are subordinated.13 Calhoun asks us to recognize the fact that “moral criticism has ‘practical weight’ for us and the power to shame when it is seen as issuing from those who are to be taken seriously because they are co-participants with us in a shared social practice of morality.” (p. 47).14 Thus, even if they do not share the criticism they are subject to, “it is no error on the part of the subordinated that they feel the practical weight of their fellow participants' moral criticisms.” (p. 72), and that understanding such shame does not require us to attribute to them “either internalized contempt for their own social group or a failure to maintain their own critical perspective in the face of others' shaming contempt.” (p. 49). I think Calhoun is right that moral criticism has practical weight, and right that the moral criticisms of one's social peers are appropriately felt as shame by subjects who disavow the criticism. However, the point is a broader and more pervasive one. The point should not be made as a point about our moral communities—those with whom there is a shared social practice of morality—as such. Nor should the appropriateness or rationality of shame in non-identifying cases be thought to rest on a relation to a shared moral practice. A shared practical practice is enough. Negative evaluations of us—moral, or otherwise—that come from our own social groups—moral, or otherwise—have practical weight. They have practical weight in two ways. The negative evaluations, or diminutions of us by others, have social consequences for us—they diminish our capacity to function alongside others by diminishing the concessions and opportunities accorded us by those who have the power to offer such concessions and opportunities. However, they also have practical weight in a simpler, and often just as costly, way. They are in themselves felt as weighty—acts of others that aim to degrade us, can diminish us. They, thereby, directly impinge on us in a painful and uncomfortable way.15 As the above suggests, the metaphor of “weight,” here, is a very natural and very useful one, but also one that it is apt to be used in very different ways: for characterizing both the, more direct, felt diminution by criticism, and the consequential, more indirect, costs of the criticism for the criticized subject. Matters become yet more complicated when we consider how to characterize the attitude of the subject who is criticized, to their critics, and to the evaluative schemas that are the supposed grounds of their critics' evaluations. Here again it is natural to talk of the criticized subject's weighting of the critic, and weighting of the grounds of critics' evaluations.16 To give a framework for thinking of these distinct relevant kinds of weighting, the diminishing and expanding acts of evaluation, and the social magnitudes that they interact with, will be a task I make (only) a start on at the end of the paper. Having considered these cases of shame without negative self-evaluation, we might now wonder how we are supposed to think about irrational or inappropriate shame on the view that it is rational or appropriate to feel shame in the absence of any negative self-evaluation as bad. On the account of shame I want to defend, the core case of feeling shame is the case in which a subject is conscious of herself as diminished, having been diminished by her social group. To get it right—to feel shame appropriately and rationally—is to feel oneself to be socially diminished when one has been. If that is right, then one can get it wrong in feeling shame—one can feel irrational shame in at least three ways. One can feel socially diminished, exercising one's capacity to feel shame, when in fact one has not been, or is not in threat of being. This might be either because there was no degrading criticism, or threat of one, or because there was such a criticism but it did not come with the power to diminish one socially. This might be because it did not come from a source that was part of one's social group, or because it came from a source within one's social group but one that for some reason lacked any power to effect social diminution on another—a child, perhaps.17 Before moving on to consider the Mere Exposure Model, as part of positioning the account of shameful self-consciousness that I am trying to set out, I want to consider a response the adverse self-evaluation theorist might make to the suggestion that the forms of shame we have considered fall outside its explanatory boundaries. Perhaps, they may say, one of the ideals relative to which I evaluate myself—and thus take myself to be bad if I fail to meet it—is the ideal of being positively valued. A liability to be diminished by my social world would then justify a self-ascription of badness. Perhaps, in fact, I have an ideal not just of being kind, and adequate at dancing, but also of having “high social value.” If that is so, then recognition of criticism from another that has the power to diminish my social value, will be a construal of myself as “bad” in so far as it is a construal of myself as failing to meet my ideal of being positively valued or having high social value. There is something right about the objection—but also something wrong with it. Let me try to illuminate the model of shame as consciousness of social diminution by bringing out how it differs from a model of shame on which shame is understood as a failure to meet an ideal of avoiding social diminution. The first thing to note is that the theorist who appeals to an ideal of being valued by their social group faces something of a dilemma. If this is an ideal that can be differentially adopted—so that some have the ideal of being valued and some eschew any such value—then the theorist cannot make sense of cases of non-identifying shame in which the subject who feels shame nevertheless fails to take as an ideal—part of his conception of what is bad—the valuations of the critics that inflict such shame. To see how this might work imagine a case, a case we can call Caulfield shame, after Salinger's hero, in which a subject explicitly has the ideal not to be valued by his social group—by “those phonies”—but nevertheless feels shame. I say his shame is because he is conscious of himself as diminished in social value by their negative evaluations of him, and that Caulfield shame is no less rational or appropriate than Ellison's shame, or Susannah's shame. The subject of Caulfield shame may even feel proud of their shame—it is a marker of their failing to be valued by their social group, and so a marker of their securing an ideal they have—to not be valued by them. Perhaps, it will be responded that that cannot be what is meant by the suggestion that shame involves the negative self-evaluation as bad in virtue of not meeting ones ideal of being valued. The kind of, high minded, socially alienated, reflective, ideal a Caulfield might have is consistent with a more universal “caring about the valuation of the other”—and it is this caring about the valuation of the other that is the ideal most of us operate with, and which is evidenced in the feelings of shame even in the Caufield case. But if that is the ideal, then it cannot be thought of as just one more ideal in the set of an individuals' ethics and ideals. It will have two features that make it behave rather differently from any such ideals as we understand them. One, it will be a structural and pre-conditional ideal—to be affectively attendant to the valuations of the other looks more like a necessary condition of being able to form an ethical outlook at all, not any kind of ingredient, or value, in the outlook formed. And so understood the view is not obviously discordant with the one being proposed: on that account part of our standing condition as social animals is to be affectively attendant to the valuations of the other, and it is in virtue of that condition that I come to feel shame. Two, if being valued is an ideal I set myself, it will often not offer me any way of my being in reference to which we make sense of me aspiring. If we are subject to the feelin
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