On Shame - a project

Just over a decade ago I had started work on a Masters thesis about the moral appropriateness of shame before moving provinces for an opportunity to study cognitive science, something I'd dreamed of doing ever since I first heard the term.

I loved cog.sci, and still do - it was one of the most important intellectual moves I've ever made in my life, and would choose to do it again, every time.

But abandoning my work on shame is something that continues to haunt me. It was a project that was very close to my heart - I loved the subject matter and the philosophical approaches available to me - the intersection of moral psychology, literature, ethics.

And it subject matter was particularly relevant to me for two reasons.

Firstly, I am a white South African, and dealing with the shame of our extremely difficult past is something that I've struggled with. Understanding how I'm implicated in the evils of our past, my responsibilities with regards to it, the appropriate response etc. all of these are deeply personal, and I want to get it right, or at least, make a sincere attempt at getting it right.

If philosophy can't help me with this, then what use is philosophy? At least, to me.

Secondly, and much more particularly, there is an event in my past that brought me a lot of personal shame. And in dealing with this event and its fallout, I know that I experienced more moral growth that perhaps any other time in my life. I know first hand the kind of transformative power shame can have. However, this is not typically how shame is understood - shame is almost universally seen and felt to be entirely negative. The shame we feel about the way we look, or present, or speak, or smell, our parents, our country, our history, our relationship with the environment - shame present in these aspects of our lives can be crushing.

Indeed, many are crushed by shame.

And so this presents an interesting philosophical problem. What is the moral appropriateness of shame, given this dual nature? Is there a place for shame at all, and if so, is there a particular kind of shame that's worth cultivating? How do we submit to our shame without being destroyed by it?

My goal with this blog is for it to function as a place where I can take notes, make observations, and theorize about shame. In the decade plus since I last worked on this topic, there seems (from some digging into Google Scholar) to have been a lot of work on Shame. Indeed, Owen Flanagan has recently released a new book on just this topic, and will be one of the first stops in my reading (alongside classics like Taylor's "Pride, Shame, and Guilt" and Michael L. Morgan's "On Shame").

This is unlike any blog I've kept before - it's scope is focused on this single project. In a way, I'm treating it like a Masters thesis (in fact, I hope that I will be able to develop it into a thesis, or at least a paper, in the next few years).

In its first year, expect reviews of appropriate books and papers, as well as an attempt at a taxonomy of theories of shame from philosophy and psychology.

From there, I expect to look closely at two questions.

1. What is the moral appropriateness of shame?

2. What is the nature of group, or corporate, shame?