“A Sartrean Perspective on the Sociality of Shame”

Recent work on shame deserves attention for its efforts to formulate a more comprehensive analysis of shame phenomena. This occurs via a more robust account of how social bonds and public commitments underlie an individual’s susceptibility to shame, which is to say, what an individual is liable to ‘see as’ shameful about his or her actions or self. The chief feature of these socially oriented accounts lies in the reduced prominence given to any autonomous selection of and assent to particular norms and aims when analysing how shame tracks a person’s failings and shortcomings. What matters much more is rather an individual’s shortcoming in the public’s eye, that is, according to socially endorsed and monitored norms. By shifting focus away from questions of the forms of agency presupposed by the emotion of shame, such a socially oriented strategy makes equal room for exceptional, apparently involuntary forms of shame, like persecution shame and victim shame (genocide survivors, victims of physical abuse), alongside more conventional examples of shame (the remorseful wrongdoer or the unsuccessful athlete). The aim in this paper is to expand upon these socially oriented accounts of shame, namely by bringing to bear a useful phenomenological perspective, grounded primarily in the early work of Jean-Paul Sartre. The main goal will be to explore whether a Sartrean phenomenological account of human failing can address one of the most objectionable implications of a socially oriented account of shame – namely, the demurral of any question as to the appropriate conditions or criteria for shame. I argue that with Sartre’s help we can understand why feeling shame in light of social norms remains a personally appropriate experience, which is to say, why it is felt not to be a merely socially contingent emotion. The upshot is a way to shore up the notions of an individual’s susceptibility to and internalization of social norms that are relied upon by socially oriented accounts of shame.status: accepte