Before the Act: Shame as Discretion

The difficulties in describing what shame is are reflected in the dictionary definition where shame is varyingly described as a sentiment, a state of mind, a disposition, an attitude, a feeling-all of which, of course, are not the same thing in psychology. Some authors claim, further, that it is inaccurate to describe shame only in terms of an intrapsychic state, since it is a phenomenon that refers to a total situation and not merely to a subjective reaction. Disgrace-shame clearly seems to be an affect; discretion-shame is more difficult to locate.⁸ Is it an emotion? The spontaneous blush of modesty indicates that it may be, and Darwin so conceived it. But when we implore someone "Don't you have any shame?" we appear to be appealing to something both volitional and dispositional.

All of these differences, of course, reflect and determine the varying ethical evaluations shame receives. If it is seen as an emotion, it can hardly qualify as a virtue. Feelings are variable and unpredictable while virtues refer to settled dispositions, to habitual tendencies to act in certain ways and according to certain principles. Both Aristotle and Aquinas, for example, regard shame as a feeling, and consequently give it a low ethical evaluation.⁹ Spinoza, while also refusing to accept shame as a virtue, argues that it is "comparatively good," possibly leading to good without being a virtue."¹⁰

The close parallel between shame and modesty, on the other hand, suggests an ethical element in shame, inasmuch as modesty is normally treated as a virtue. Cicero, for example, regarded modesty as a masculine virtue, the equivalent of the Greek sophrosune ("moderation," "temperance"). The connection between shame and virtue is even more closely established when we note that cultures regularly give shamelessness a negative connotation. The concept of shamelessness suggests that the lack of a proper sense of shame is a moral deficiency and that the possession of a sense of shame is a moral obligation. Havelock Ellis argues that our confusion about the nature of shame and modesty stems precisely from the fact that Christianity effects a union of "natural emotion" and "the masculine virtue of modesty --modestia."¹¹

The intractability of shame when one tries to categorize it as an emotion or a disposition resembles a very old and knotty debate in Christian thought concerning the nature of love. Is love an emotion, a feeling? If so, how is it possible that Jesus can command persons to love? If love is not an emotion, is it a disposition, an attitude of will, a norm, a way of acting toward others? This debate recurs throughout the literature of Christian ethics and theology. Discussions that make any headway with this question seem compelled to employ synonyms for love or to make distinctions among kinds of love (for example, agape and eros) to indicate what we are speaking of.

The nature of shame similarly requires synonyms and distinctions, such as we have made between honte and pudeur, disgrace-shame and discretion-shame. Being ashamed is an affect; a sense of shame involves something more than emotion. The kinship of a sense of shame with modesty and its converse in shamelessness suggests a degree of settled disposition, or at least attitude. In speaking of discretion we are also implying a perceptual component. The sense of shame recognizes what is the proper attitude, the fitting response. This perceptual quality of shame further points toward the necessity of considering the context that is perceived. The human context involves the total situation within which shame occurs. Shame, then, is not "just a feeling," but reflects an order of things. Furthermore, discretion-shame not only reflects, but sustains, our personal and social ordering of the world. Some examples may make this more concrete.

    In the Metamorphoses, Ovid, in his famous description of the Four Ages of the World, vividly depicts the connection between shame and the social order. Humanity's first state, he says, was a Golden Age, in which innocence and justice determined human relations. Punishment, and the fear of it, did not exist; there was no war, and "the minds of men, free from care, enjoyed an easy tranquillity." Nature participated in this harmony: the earth itself, "untouched by the harrow, and wounded by no ploughshares, of its own accord . . . yielded crops of grain, and the land... was whitened with the heavy ears of corn." In succeeding ages, however, the harmony of man and nature was disturbed, until there came the last age of hard iron, a time of wickedness and impiety. "Immediately every species of crime burst forth," and "shame [pudor], truth and honour took flight; in their place succeeded fraud, deceit, treachery, violence, and the cursed hankering for acquisition."¹² It is a hard age, Ovid recognizes, which has no room for shame. Ovid, accordingly, values shame, laments its loss, and longs for its restoration.

    Discretion-shame, then, to Ovid is fundamentally a positive quality, functioning to sustain what Augustine spoke of as "the right order of values." Others have shared his opinion: the characteristics of this shame are evident in Julio Caro Baroja's description of verguenza ("shame") in Spanish society:
 

At this sight, Apollo in a speech to the gods urges that Achilles "has destroyed pity, and there is not in him any shame [aidos]." In desecrating Hector he has demeaned himself, and "nothing is gained thereby for his good, or his honour."

Finally, Priam goes to Achilles' tent as a suppliant, and implores, "Honour [aideio] then the gods, Achilleus, and take pity upon me."¹⁵ Achilles is at last moved by this appeal, and returns the body to Priam for proper burial. Commenting on this passage, John Ferguson observes that it is in the aides, the respect-shame that Achilles finally shows toward the humbled Priam "that the highest morality of the Homeric poems is to be seen."16 Achilles, transcending the prudential element that so colored Greek morality, is moved by sympathy for Priam and respect-shame before the gods to check his own passion.

After the Act: Shame as Disgrace

Being ashamed is a more ambivalent phenomenon than the sense of shame. If discretion-shame sustains the personal and social ordering of the world, disgrace-shame is a painful experience of the disintegration of one's world. A break occurs in the self's relationship with itself and/or others. An awkward, uncomfortable space opens up in the world. The self is no longer whole, but divided. It feels less than it wants to be, less than at its best it knows itself to be. Disgrace-shame is painful, unexpected, and disorienting. This has a positive as well as an obvious negative side. Shame is painful. Aristotle puts this painful quality at the heart of shame: "Let shame then be defined as a kind of pain or uneasiness in respect of misdeeds past, present,  or future, which seems to bring dishonour ...."¹⁷ Kurt Riezler captures the depth of pain and the intensity of suffering involved in being put to shame:
 

Sartre, highly sensitive to this aspect of shame, finds the effect of this disruption so radical that he calls it an "internal hemorrhage," the "regrouping of all the objects which people my universe."²³ Even when the advent of shame is less dramatic, there is a disruption nonetheless that manifests itself in a sense of confusion.²⁴ Confusion, in fact, so characteristically accompanies disgrace-shame that the two form a biblical cliche. Thus we hear both the Psalmist's plea, "Let all who seek my life be brought to shame and confusion,"²⁵ and the call for retribution, "Let them be put to shame and confusion who rejoice at my fall…."²⁶

The disorientation that triggers shame always involves a reflexive movement of consciousness. What is actually experienced is a relation of distance. In some cases the relation is interpersonal, between the self and others who look at it; at other times the relation occurs intrapersonally, as the self sees itself.

Sartre and Scheler have each described this dynamic of disruption arousing self-consciousness. In their examples, people experience shame when their immediate situation is disrupted: the woman running naked into the street with her child in her arms from a burning house, the nude model suddenly made self-conscious before the artist, the man peeking through a keyhole. In these instances, the persons concerned are initially unselfconscious, involved in, and given over to, an external situation. They are conscious not of themselves, but of the objects before them. But suddenly, the situation changes, the mood is broken, and they are made acutely aware of themselves as they are at that moment. Something happens that turns their attention to themselves in such a way that they are not simply there, but see themselves there, and this seeing amuses shame. Shame opens up a new level of consciousness of the self. The undivided self in action gives way to the doubled self. Shame is an act of self-attention.

Shame and Self-Discovery

Each of these elements of shame--disruption, disorientation, and painful self-consciousness--manifests the relational character of the shame experience. This relational nature of shame, in turn, contains a revelatory capacity. In the reflexive movement of consciousness, a part of the self is revealed to the self. Sartre has captured this quality of shame:
 

The relational aspects of shame--the disorientation, the unexpected, painful self-consciousness--give shame this revelatory potential. They make self-confrontation inescapable. Normally, the self refuses to see itself; it looks away; it hides from itself. To know one's self is painful. There is much that, left to ourselves, we would just as soon overlook. As long as we are left to our own devices, we are willing to participate in much self-deception to avoid the pain of shameful self-revelation. But in the exposure in shame before an Other whom we cannot control or deny, we come into a confrontation with ourselves that we might otherwise avoid. It is like seeing our lives put on a stage. The objectification of the self in shame resists the ploys of blurred and vague self-awareness.

Some social scientists fail to recognize the positive elements in such expressions of being ashamed. For many, the only thing they see is that the self confronted in shame seems less than the self one wants to be. Shame, then, is regarded fundamentally as a negative experience. It is perceived in terms of personal inadequacy, failure, or shortcoming. Gerhard Piers, in his classic psychoanalytic description of shame as a product of tension between the ego and the ego-ideal, sees it as a response to failure and the shortcomings of the self in relation to the ego-ideal."" This psychoanalytic formulation--shame as failure--in turn has been widely accepted in social psychology and anthropology. It is incorporated into Lynd's well-known work on shame, whose theme is that shame occurs along a strong-weak continuum, and has to do with a sense of smallness or inadequacy, a sense of not being good enough or acceptable. In shame, we perceive the self as lacking.³⁰

The underlying dynamic of disgrace-shame is the fear of rejection. In psychoanalytic terminology, for the ego-ideal, this sense of inadequacy represents the threat of disapproval and ostracism. As Piers states, "Behind the feeling of shame stands... the fear of contempt which, on an even deeper level of the unconscious, spells fear of abandonment."³¹ The bite of shame, which, may be communicated through criticism, ridicule, scorn, abandonment, is vulnerability to the threat of rejection.³² The unconscious fear in shame is separation anxiety, the threat of loss of love.³³

Two things need to be said about such explanations. First, they provide an explanation of the genesis and dynamics only of being ashamed; they do not fit the sense of shame--as can be seen by trying to explain examples of discretion-shame (Ovid or Baroja, etc.) in terms of fear of rejection. Second, this approach fails to direct attention to the positive component that accompanies even disgrace-shame. In shame the object from which we are alienated is one with which we still sustain a positive cathexis. The work of Silvan Tomkins is almost alone in recognizing this ambivalence.

The shame response, Tomkins notes, is "deeply ambivalent": in an "act of facial communication reduction in which excitement or enjoyment is only incompletely reduced," the eyes turn away from the other toward the self. This conflict is most easily seen in young children who cover their faces before a stranger, but who also peek through their fingers. Tomkins continues:
 

The underlying dynamic of shame, then, is a positive valuation. Lincoln Steffens illustrates this in his newspaper articles at the turn of the century on American municipal corruption. Steffens describes his response to an attack upon one of his earlier articles:

When I returned to St. Louis and rewrote the facts, and, in rewriting, made them just as insulting as the truth would permit, my friends there expressed dismay over the manuscript. The article would hurt Mr. Folk; it would hurt the cause; it would arouse popular wrath.
 

Where despair rules, there is no shame. In shame, the self may feel most keenly the pain of its own betrayal of another. But there is more. Shame indicates that the self also still values that other. This ambivalence is of the essence of shame. If one stands judged and inadequate before one's better self, one still possesses that better self; while shame may separate the self from the other, it also points to a deeper connection. In shame, the object one is alienated from, one also loves still.

The recognition of this positive dimension deeply affects one's interpretation and evaluation of shame. Both Plato and Paul Goodman, for example, see shame as intrinsic to human existence, treat its manifestations with delicacy and respect, and perceive its humanizing and pedagogical function. Those who agree with them recognize, at least to some extent, this positive element in shame. In contrast, those who regard shame as artificial, repressive, and essentially a social-control mechanism and who are most impressed with its pathological and destructive manifestations, focus on the negative judgment in shame and overlook the deeper positive dimension.