As a result of placing the experience of having explicit awareness of how the body appears to the judgmental and diminishing gaze of the Other at the heart of his accounts of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, Sartre makes shame central to his analysis. Shame, for Sartre, is inextricably linked to the physical body and is primarily an affective, embodied response: it “is an immediate shudder which runs through me from head to foot without any discursive preparation” (2003: 246). Shame makes me aware of my body because its symptoms (the shudder, the heat of the blush, etc.) are lodged there. However, beyond the symptoms of shame being felt on a physical level, shame, in Sartre’s account, also brings thematic awareness to the body. In other words, while shame necessarily occurs through the body and has a necessary physiological manifestation, I can also feel shame about my body.Footnote 10 I suddenly ‘see’ my body engaged in a particular action or appearing in a particular way: “I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other” (Sartre 2003: 246).
Sartre’s account of shame is multifaceted and multi-layered. Shame is discussed variously as a moral emotion, an embodied affect, a self-evaluative structure, an intersubjective experience and an ontological category. For the purposes of this discussion, I will differentiate three levels of shame in Sartre’s account.Footnote 11 First, he discusses shame as a moral emotion; it is an experience where the judgement of others can teach me that I have transgressed or violated some social norm or moral code. Second, shame is a mode of self-evaluation; through shame I can see and judge myself. Third, and most significantly for this article, shame is an ontological structure of subjectivity and intersubjectivity; it is because of our “original shame,” for Sartre, that we have the capacity for reflective self-consciousness and are relational subjects through our embodiment.
Shame initially arises when the other’s ‘look’ reveals to me that I have transgressed some social expectation or norm; this is Sartre’s characterization of shame as a moral emotion. The voyeur is overcome by shame in the moment when he hears the footsteps behind him because he knows the act of spying is reprehensible: “shame … is the recognition of the fact that I am indeed the object which the Other is looking at and judging” (Sartre 2003: 285). This structure appears in several examples in Being and Nothingness: “I have just made an awkward or vulgar gesture … Somebody was there and has seen me. Suddenly I realize the vulgarity of the gesture and I am ashamed” (2003: 245).Footnote 12 In these examples, shame is straightforwardly linked to judgment by another person who has witnessed a transgression on my part: “Shame is by nature recognition. I recognize that I am as the Other sees me” (Sartre 2003: 246). I have done something wrong or inappropriate and I have suddenly become aware of this fact by the presence of another person—this is shame. In these cases, shame arises unexpectedly and suddenly, without any necessary cognitive action, or ‘discursive preparation’ as Sartre puts it, on my part.
However, it seems that for Sartre shame must also be able to occur when one is alone, and is linked also to how I see myself. The empirical presence of another person is not necessary for shame to occur, as the voyeur example ultimately demonstrates: he hears the footsteps, lifts his head and it turns out that nobody is there. In fact, there are many examples in Sartre’s account where the other is merely imagined or possible (there is a rustle in the bushes, or movement in the curtains) (2003: 299). As such, shame is also a self-evaluative experience for Sartre.
However, Sartre does not stop his analysis of shame with moralistic or self-evaluative readings. While there are other self-conscious experiences, such as pride or guilt, that have a similar triangular structure to shame, and can arguably lead to the same self-reflexive didactic moments, Sartre is at pains to give shame a deeper and more symbolic significance. In fact for Sartre, as Guenther argues, shame becomes the “fundamental mood of intersubjectivity” (2011: 26). And Zahavi asserts in his discussion of Sartre’s account, “shame rather than merely being a self-reflective emotion, an emotion involving negative self-evaluation, is an emotion that reveals our relationality, our being-for-others” (2014: 214). While guilt and pride reveal and reflect on our actions or deeds, shame, it is argued, reveals our core identity or self. Surpassing the moralistic and self-evaluative aspects suggested by his voyeur example, Sartre argues that shame extends beyond the everyday experience of transgression in intersubjective encounters or in social settings. Sartre calls this ‘pure shame’ and argues that it arises because I am disgusted or disappointed with the dependency or vulnerability I feel before the other:
Pure shame is not a feeling of being this or that guilty object but in general of being an object; that is, of recognizing myself in this degraded, fixed and dependent being which I am for the Other. Shame is the feeling of an original fall, not because of the fact that I may have committed this or that particular fault but simply that I have ‘fallen’ into the world in the midst of things and that I need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am. (2003: 312)
Pure shame for Sartre is ontological, it reveals a structure of our existence. This shame is ‘pure’ because it is not encumbered by the contingencies of particular social contexts or norms, it exists irrespective of our behaviour, character or circumstances. This ontological shame, as Sartre conceives it, is a necessary feature of every look and hence a permanent background to reflective consciousness. In this schema, shame that arises as a result of a social transgression in an intersubjective encounter or in a self-evaluative moment are meant to be conceived as examples of a more fundamental relation: the shame of having been rendered an object in the first place. As Zahavi notes in discussing Sartre’s account, shame “makes me aware of not being in control and having my foundation outside myself” (2014: 213).
For Sartre, when the body is on display to the Other (particularly in its naked state), the vulnerability of objectification is manifested in the experience of shame. He refers again tellingly to the ‘original fall’ in Genesis:
Modesty and in particular the fear of being surprised in a state of nakedness are only a symbolic specification of original shame; the body symbolizes here our defenseless state as objects. To put on clothes is to hide one’s object-state: it is to claim the right of seeing without being seen; that is, to be pure subject. That is why the Biblical symbol of the fall after the original sin is the fact that Adam and Eve ‘know that they are naked.’ The reaction to shame will consist exactly in apprehending as an object the one who apprehended my own object-state. (2003: 312)
In considering this passage, Guenther argues that Sartre’s reference to an original fall indicates that the subject’s deepest desire is to become “like God,” or a being that is pure transcendence, impervious to the objectification of others (2011: 26). However, it is also possible to read Sartre’s account of pure shame in this context as concerned with a recognition of our inherent physical dependency or neediness, or with the fact that others matter to us in the most non-trivial way; we fundamentally need them to realize the structures of our being, both psychically and materially. As Sartre repeatedly asserts: ‘I need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am’ (2003: 312).
Pure shame as Sartre describes it here seems to be shame about the human condition in general: because we are thrown into the world and because we are vulnerable before others through our bodies. Hence, ‘pure shame’ is not shame in the sense of self-conscious evaluative emotions, as described above; it is not an affective response to a situation where one has an awareness of the self as failing to meet some social expectations. Nor is pure shame merely shame that is by-passed or repressed. Instead, when Sartre discusses ‘shame’ ontologically, he intends the term to signify something more fundamental: quite simply, a relation of embodied dependency and vulnerability to the other. As Guenther remarks, “For Sartre … the lesson of shame is that I have an outside that is vulnerable and exposed, a body that exceeds my own conscious experience” (2011: 27).
Indeed, Sartre is at pains to relate our ‘object-state’ with the body, and he links pure shame intrinsically to concerns around bodily vulnerability. The other, Sartre notes in his Notebooks for an Ethics is apprehended as a “fragile body” and in this apprehension I know that “I can do violence to him” (1992: 499). Sartre writes: “Through me there is a vulnerability of the Other … This vulnerability, this finitude is the body. The body for others. To unveil the other in his being-within-the-world is to love him in his body” (1992: 501). Nudity, in the passage above, symbolizes this original shame linked intimately to our vulnerable, and ultimately defenseless, physical bodies which strive for connection, belonging or ‘love,’ to echo Sartre.