Abstract
In this article, we present, assess and give reasons to reject the popular claim that shame is essentially social. We start by presenting several theses which the social claim has motivated in the philosophical literature. All of them, in their own way, regard shame as displaying a structure in which “others” play an essential role. We argue that while all these theses are true of some important families of shame episodes, none of them generalize so as to motivate the conclusion that shame is an essentially social emotion. We consider each thesis in turn, explaining in the process their connections with one another as well as the constraints on a theory of shame they help uncover. Finally, we show how a non-social picture of shame is not only capable of meeting these constraints, but has the further virtue of shedding light on those situations in which others seem to play no role in why we feel shame.
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Notes
- 1.
Good representatives of the first approach are Lamb (1983) and Tangney (1991). Good representatives of the second are Calhoun (2004), Williams (1993, chap. 4) and Wollheim (1999). Although we shall not address these issues at all in this paper, relevant discussions of the relations between shame and morality are taken up in Deonna and Teroni (2008) and Bruun and Teroni (2011).
- 2.
Taking our lead from the theories we discuss, the coming discussion will refer to “judgements” in connection with the evaluations subjects make in shame. This should not be read as implying that a satisfactory account of shame should ultimately appeal to judgements rather than to conceptually less demanding states such as is now customary in emotion theory. See for instance Goldie (2000, chap. 3), Roberts (2003) and Tappolet (2000).
- 3.
This is not to say that an investigation into the genesis of shame is philosophically irrelevant, but only that we cannot derive social theses about it from genetic considerations. A psychoanalytically-informed philosophical treatment of the genesis of shame can be found in Nussbaum (2004, chap. 4). For a developmental perspective, see e.g. Ferguson, Stegge, and Damhuis (1991) and Olthof et al. (2004).
- 4.
According to Tangney et al.’s studies (1996), subjects claim that more of their shame than of their guilt episodes are experienced privately. The figures are 18.2% of shame experiences and 10.4% of guilt experiences (pp. 1259–260).
- 5.
- 6.
On the role of imagined narratives in emotions, see Goldie (2000).
- 7.
- 8.
For Wollheim, all primitive instances of shame can be so characterized, even if, as we grow older, the force of these assaults may wane.
- 9.
In a similar vein, Deigh claims that “we must admit cases of shame felt in response to another’s criticism and ridicule in which the subjects do not accept the other person’s judgement of them and so do not make the same judgement of themselves.” (1983, 233)
- 10.
While David Velleman also speaks of threats to one’s image, his account differs markedly from Deigh’s in that Velleman (2001) explicitly allows for the possibility of private shame. However, we have argued elsewhere that his theory suffers from difficulties related to the failure to distinguish between deep and superficial shame of the kind discussed in this section. See Deonna and Teroni (2009).
- 11.
She writes that “this [identificatory] judgement is brought about by the realization of how her position is or may be seen from an observer’s point of view. But there is no reference to such a point of view in her final self-directed judgement. It is because the agent thinks of herself in a certain relation to the audience that she now thinks herself degraded, but she does not think of this degradation as depending on an audience.” (1985, 68) Taylor is thus sensitive to the distinction between what is shameful in itself and what is shameful when observed we emphasised in Section 11.4.
- 12.
This is of course compatible with the thesis that reflexivity depends on the possession of the concept of another. What we claim is that this concept, however acquired, need not be deployed in shame.
- 13.
Unfortunately, Scheler goes on to gloss this in ways that are too specific to fit all shame episodes. Roughly, he argues that the relevant shift in the subject’s own perspective is to be understood either as that between a judgement about himself that construes him as an individual and another judgement that construes him merely as an instance of some general category, or vice versa. Although some well-known examples of Scheler’s (the model and the artist) lend themselves nicely to such a treatment, it does not extend easily to all cases of shame, not even some of the central ones we mention.
- 14.
As O’Hear notes, others have the power to reveal to us things about ourselves that we should be ashamed of. Others, in particular those we respect, might help us identify some aspect of ourselves that is not viewed as problematic but becomes so through their negative assessment. See O’Hear (1977, 79) and Williams (1993, chap. 4).
- 15.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Otto Bruun, Tjeert Olthof, Kevin Mulligan, Martha Nussbaum and Raffaele Rodogno for their helpful comments on previous versions of this paper. This paper was written with the support of the Swiss National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR) in Affective Sciences.
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Deonna, J., Teroni, F. (2011). Is Shame a Social Emotion?. In: Konzelmann Ziv, A., Lehrer, K., Schmid, H. (eds) Self-Evaluation. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 116. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1266-9_11
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