Episode 14: Shame
Episode 14 of Hotel Bar Sessions Podcast is on shame. What do we mean when we talk about shame? Is it a moral feeling? Is shame harmful or are their productive uses of it? Is shame an appropriate propaedeutic tool to educate children into being virtuous or does it only cause negative feelings of self? Is shame only a mechanism for maintaining social hierarchies? What do we do about people who feel no shame? Who is the most shameless person in the world? Does the shameless person simply enjoy breaking social rules and flaunting shared mores that the majority of people would feel bad about doing? Can you shame individuals into changing? Does public shaming, such as witnessed in the #metoo movement, actually change the social fabric?
For more on this topic, check out the links below:
Krista K. Thomason’s piece in Aeon on shame and her book, Naked: The Dark Side of Shame and Moral Life.
In Plato’s Protagoras, Protagoras claims that Zeus gave humanity justice and shame as the two components of “political wisdom” necessary to live together.
In the ninth section of Book Four of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle talks about a sense of shame as “a fear of disrepute” only befitting youth.
Check here for a take on Freud’s notion of shame.
See Ann V. Murphy’s Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, particularly Chapter Two: “Philosophy’s Shame.”
Sandra Bartky’s 1990 Femininity and Domination argues that patriarchy has fostered chronic gendered shame in women.
In Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, he argues that shame makes us an object for another.
Marcel Duchamp’s Etant Donnes and Black Mirror’s “The National Anthem” may be designed to cause shame in viewers.
Click here for the origin of the #metoo movement.Is Donald Trump shameless and if so, what does it mean that he was the president of the United States for four years?
Thank you very much. I really enjoyed the podcast, and this week gave me a lot to think about. I am particularly interested in the idea that shame is not distributed equally throughout society. While it was touched on to some degree, I wanted to highlight the notion that an excess of unwarranted shame can limit a subject’s ability to meaningfully connect with others. In Osamu Dazai’s “No Longer Human”, the most famous line in the novel is: “Mine has been a life of much shame. I can’t even guess myself what it must be to live the life of a human being”. The main character Yozo feels shame for even the most innocuous of actions, and shame produces a schism between how he sees himself and how others see him. As the novel progresses, he does perform actions that are genuinely shameful, but since shame is so ingrained in his personality, he can’t meaningfully act as a moral agent. My comment is a bit longwinded, but I wanted to discuss how shame can paralyze the subject, in terms of moral agency, as much as shamelessness can. With that being said, it is true that the shame-laden subject behaves better than a shameless person, I think that both can be crippling in terms of moral development. I’m not an ethicist and it is just a novel, so I could be wrong, but the novel does seem to make a case for the damage that shame does.