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April 19, 2006
I want to pick up the threads on the previous post.
Towards the end of her 'Danger to Human Dignity: the Revival of Disgust and Shame in the Law' article in the Chronicle of Higher Education's Chronicle Review, Nussbaum links fear and shame as stigma and connects them to how we perceive others. This linking of shame, stigma and discrimination is common in liberal societies --- we need to just think of mental lillness and our responses to it. Shame is a powerful emotion and the common understanding of this emotion links shame to guilt.
What Nussbaum says about shame as stigma is this:
Fear of a dissident minority often masquerades as moral disapproval. Societies frequently experience what social scientists call "moral panics," in which some "deviant" group is thought to be a threat to key moral values and is stigmatized in consequence. Often the danger posed by the group is purely imaginary, and the real issue is a desire to create a zone of safety and security by defining the dominant group as good and "normal," the outsider groups as the bearer of a disgraceful tainted identity. Our debates today over gay marriage contain much of this muddled thinking, whatever else they also contain. In general, a society based on the idea of equal human dignity must find ways to inhibit stigma and the aggression that are so often linked to the proclamation that "we" are the ones who are "normal." Such a society is difficult to achieve, because incompleteness is frightening, and grandiose fictions are comforting.
Muslims are currently seen this way after 9/11. We do so on this interpretation because we human beings cannot bear to live with the constant awareness of our mortality and our frail animal bodies. We human beings living in a modern liberal society that is. And we do so because of our desire for self-sufficiency that is expressed in our desire for control over objects and others.
Is shame always associated with stigma? Can we think of shame differently? Do we have to accept Nussbaum's approach to shame?
We can bring Levinas into the conversation at this point as he questions the perfectionist assumption in Nussbaum's approach. According to Toni Kannisto's interpretation of Levinas' 1935 essay "On Escape" (OE) at Beyond Appearances. Two reviews of 'On Escape' can found here and here.
Kannisto says that Levinas sees self-sufficiency as the "Bourgeois Spirit" that manifests itself as an attempt to be free by manipulating the surroundings: freedom is seen as a positive thing, as a freedom to do something, not as a freedom from something. According to Kannisto Levinas argues that there is a:
a fundamental error in the thinking of men in the Western tradition: it has always considered imperfection as a lack of being, as limited being. (OE, 56, 58.) As if there were some holes in an imperfect man's being that remain to be filled by some properties. This is most crucially evident in the Christian tradition as it is defined by St. Augustine: desire is a mark of the original sin, as it manifests the imperfection of our being - God as the ontologically perfect being does not lack anything, does not need anything.
This line of thinking does relate to Nussbaums. Kannisto says that ths imperfection relates to the Bourgeois Spirit in the following way:
man's pursuit of perfection has run along the course of making ourselves objectively more perfect, through pursuit of power. The freedom of man has been in the greatness of his being, in the god-likeness of him - God exemplifying the ultimate perfection that man so desperately longs for, ultimate power over all there is....We are bound to ourselves even more than we are bound to the world around us, and the freedom we truly seek, according to Levinas, lies not in power over objects, but in power over ourselves. It is said that the man with the greatest desire for power is the man with least confidence in himself. He tries to protect himself by manipulating the world outside, by building fences and erecting walls around himself, forming a buffer zone around himself. Yet in the end he has only accomplished total isolation: he is left alone with himself and all the demons he may carry. This man, instead of escaping the imprisonment he perceived in his inability to control the world, has truly and utterly chained himself.
Levinas then works through three central concepts: those of pleasure, malaise and shame. On shame Kannisto says that:
According to Levinas, shame is not a moral thing. Instead it arises when we are incapable of making others, and ourselves, "forget our basic nudity" (OE, 64.). As an example he gives poverty, which is not shameful because it would be morally wrong, but because, "like the beggar's rags, it shows up a nakedness of an existence incapable of hiding itself" (Ibid.). Levinas gives other examples to back up his thesis that shame is "existence that seeks excuses" (OE, 65.). It is about us being unable to hide the fact that we are ourselves, through and through incapable of evading that fact of self-identity. Shame is, in the final analysis, the exposure of the basic fact of our being to others.
This is quite different to Nussbaum's understanding of shame as stigma and is much closer to Agamren's understanding of shame in Remnants of Auschwitz. Like Agamben Levinas severs shame from more contractual or legalistic understandings of responsibility. Shame figured as a mode of the subject's relation to the world, and not in reference to others.
This is very different terrain to the one Nussbaum works on.
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I'd wonder whether Nussbaum's conception of shame/liberal constraints doesn't imply still the transcendental/empirical ego distinction, the very "thing" Levinas was trying to do away with.
Shame, to be sure, is intrinsically an exposure to the other, the very other that can not be evaded, since it's constitutive of the interiority of a self, of the "certainty" of its "identity". Levinas' position involves, almost invites, a risk of persecution. But that persecution becomes a self-affliction, if the recognition of the denudedness of the other serves to evade the acknowledgement of one's own denudedness, in the interest of preserving one's "autonomy".
The spectral other is the price that is paid for the refusal to acknowledge the finitude and servitude of one's "freedom" before the other, an empirical specter generated by the preservation of the "autonomy" of the transcendental. Levinas' paradox of an heteronomous freedom is at once dangerous and redemptive. It attempts to preserve the very notion of human freedom in the face of and within its naturalistic dissolution.