Under the Eye of Others (the Socialized Interpretation of Shame in the History of Ethics)

Abstract

The main purpose of the article is to reconstruct the development of a socialized interpretation of shame in the Western philosophical tradition from antiquity up to the 17th century. Along with the standard methods of conducting research in the history of philosophy (critical, comparative, hermeneutical, etc.), the author resorts to a strategy of identifying the historical sources and rudimentary forms of contemporary theoretical approaches to understanding moral phenomena. With regard to shame, there are three such approaches, or three interpretations: socialized (identifying shame with negative feelings about a real or imagined loss of face), anthropological (identifying shame with a painful reaction to the generic imperfection of a person in the sphere of corporeality) and desocialized (identifying shame with negative feelings of an individual generated by the awareness of the worthlessness of his own moral character). Studying the development of each of them requires an understanding of how they historically interacted with each other. The first detailed description of shame from the socialized perspective was proposed by Aristotle. In it, shame appears as a fear of disrepute or suffering from it, that is, a negative feeling that presupposes that other people know that an individual has committed an objectively vicious act or that he does not have some objectively valuable quality. Aristotle viewed shame as a less perfect moral trait than virtue (in contemporary socialized conceptions of shame, guilt is usually its more perfect alternative). Thomas Aquinas relies on the Aristotelian understanding of shame, but: a) connects it with the anthropological interpretation proposed by Augustine, b) makes a special emphasis on the fact that shame is appropriate only in the case of the sinfulness of the act. The early modern socialized conceptions of shame are characterized by a movement from doubt about the reasonableness of this feeling to its partial or complete rehabilitation. At the same time, R. Descartes, B. Spinoza and J. Locke, unlike Aristotle and Thomas, approve of shame not only because it is an imperfect counterpart of virtue, but also in connection with its positive social role (as a means of social discipline and an expression of sociability). Although early modern thinkers discuss moral emotions of self-assessment that are not mediated by the “eye of others” (repentance, remorse), they do not oppose them to shame