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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

shame, ethics, Nussbaum « Previous | |Next »
April 18, 2006

Martha C. Nussbaum is one of the few people in the world of Anglo-American academic philosophy writing on the connection between the emotions and ethics in a positive manner of philosophy as moral therapy. This presupposes that the emotions have an important cognitive element embodying "ways of interpreting the world". Nussbaum has recently written the Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge, England: The Cambridge University Press, 2001), and Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). So she is useful to bring into a conversation with Agamben's turn to shame as the new ethical terrain in his Remnants of Auschwitz.

According to this accountNussbaum insists that we accept and affirm our animality and (physical) humanity on the one hand, and yet she also condemns some emotions as morally deficient in themselves on the other. On her own account of the matter, nothing could be more natural, more firmly rooted in our nature as embodied beings, than disgust or shame. Yet she also insisis that we should brand these emotions as ethically bad. She argues that though emotions play a legitimate role in public affairs (as they are not intrinsically opposed to reason for they involve pictures of the world and evaluations), there are some emotions whose role in the law has always been more controversial. Disgust and shame are two of those.

I've read neither book so I'm having to rely on bits and pieces I've gleaned from the web. Is shame seen as a prejudice from which the law protects us? Or is it seen as a form of humilation as a punishment--a shaming penalty that stigmatizes a child molestor in a local communtiy -- for a crime? Or is shame simialr to disgust in that it is seen as a form of physical revulsion or as deeply bound up with modesty and part of a Christian ascetic ethic?

In the above linked article, 'Danger to Human Dignity: the Revival of Disgust and Shame in the Law' in the the Chronicle Review, Nussbaum argues that should we begin:

...with a deeper and more detailed understanding of the emotions of shame and disgust and their role in the narrative history of human life. If we draw on cognitive psychology and psychoanalysis for a richer view, we will see that there is something very problematic about these two emotions, something of which a liberal society should indeed be suspicious. They are linked to a general shrinking from the bodily nature of human life, and hence to various forms of prejudice, exclusion, and misogyny, as people project the discomfort they feel about mortality and decay onto vulnerable groups and individuals.

Nussbaum wants to privatize shame, as it were, to disenfranchise it from any role in public life. Shame is a feeling and so extra rational. Hence the appeal to shame as a moral aversion is questionable because our shame might be misplaced.

Nussbaum says that shame is connected to:

... deep human insecurities that similarly project themselves outward, via the stigmatization of vulnerable people and groups. As Erving Goffman showed in his classic sociological analysis, Stigma (Prentice-Hall, 1963), all societies contain a composite image of the "normal" person that is actually embodied, as a whole, by more or less nobody. (Goffman's account of the American norm is that of "a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight and height, and a recent record in sports.") People who lack any of those desirable characteristics are made to feel shame; so more or less all of us feel shame about something. But some people's lives are more dominated by shame than others. Racial and sexual minorities, people with marked physical disabilities they, in particular, are ostracized and made to feel that they must hide themselves.

Shame is associated with inflicting stigma--we are ashamed of being overweight and obese. Why this connection? Why do all societies inflict stigma? Nussbaum gives a psychoanalytic interpretation:
I suggest that the desire to stigmatize others grows out of the insecurity that all human beings experience, being intelligent creatures who soon learn how weak and helpless they are in regard to things of the highest importance. The more our development encourages us to expect and seek control, the more likely we are, finding out that we can't really have it, to gain a substitute kind of safety by defining a dominant group as perfect, lacking in nothing, and projecting weakness and inadequacy onto an outside group. To the extent that societies can teach people that the desired condition is one of interdependence, rather than control and self-sufficiency, such pernicious tendencies can be minimized. But they are never likely to be completely eradicated, given that people really are weaker than they want to be and, as they grow older, are likely to have an increasing desire to conceal their weaknesses.

Note the 'eradicated' of pernicious tendencies. There's the strategy of philosophical stoicism for you. We don't have to buy into the Stoic eradiction of the passions. We can work with Aristotle's strategy of the moderation of the emotions.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:56 PM | | Comments (0)
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