A Philosophy of Shame: A Revolutionary Emotionis now available from Verso Books.
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Neda Tehrani: You say in your foreword that you were technically late to the party in writing about shame, but you didn’t let it put you off from writing this book. I’m glad you didn’t. When I came away from reading, I got the impression that your book was doing something quite different as a whole. You are responding critically to the idea that there could ever be one story of shame, after all. You characterize shame as the signifier of new struggles, whereby the battle cry is no longer injustice, arbitrary treatment, or inequality, but shame. It is then no coincidence that shame’s intensity brings with it a backlash against the word. And I say the word, as it often seems this is what the backlash is in fact against—a word taken to have a narrow meaning and function—more so than the actual emotion itself.
There has been a push towards obliterating shame from our vocabulary, and our psyches altogether, except to highlight its futility. On the one hand, shame is seen as useless and unkind; we cannot improve the self with its shadow hanging over us. Parallel to this, people are holding on to the word through a collective complaint that people simply have no shame any more; a somewhat desperate appeal to take its role in private and public life seriously. It seems to me that despite attempts to deny shame its complexity, shame goes beyond categorization. What do you think it is about shame that makes it the major emotion of our time?
Frédéric Gros: I believe that the main ambition of my book was to multiply the meanings of what we call shame, drawing on the uses of the word in everyday language. What seems essential to me today, in the world of crises and wars in which we are immersed, is to preserve polysemy, to save the generosity of language, which consists of juggling words with multiple meanings or ambiguous meanings. We know we are in the realm of human language when we are not entirely sure we understand what is being said to us and not entirely certain we have mastered what we are saying ourselves. Violence always uses words that are devoid of nuance. As soon as a word has a single meaning, it can become an order or an insult. My first effort was therefore to multiply the meanings of shame, to bring out, for example, shame-sadness, shame-anger, shame-demand, etc. What threatens us today is accepting that words have only one meaning, because then language becomes strictly functional, serving only to exchange information. But it is only when language allows interlocutors to test their doubts and hesitations that it becomes human and peaceful.
As for the relevance of shame today, it seems to me that it is indeed very strong, but again in several senses. Firstly, because the humanitarian situation in Gaza or the Russian strikes on Ukraine are a shame for humanity. To speak of shame in the face of the massacre of civilian populations is to express both strong indignation and rage at one’s own powerlessness. But on the other hand, one could say, on a more societal level, that shame has become a major emotion of our time because of contemporary narcissism, which is a narcissism without love and without joy, a sad and tiring narcissism because it is about showing at every moment that one is happy and in good shape. We risk becoming slaves to shame and also of losing any possibility of retreating into our inner world.
Tehrani: You highlight the distinction between guilt and shame, and question the attention paid to the former at the expense of the latter. I think when we talk about guilt it is often being used as a synonym for shame, and vice versa. You say that for you, Kafka and Dostoevsky are all about shame, not guilt. It’s difficult to imagine a push to do away with guilt altogether, as we see with shame, or on the other side, an appeal for people to have guilt. There seems to be an important relationship to temporality in this equation. You recount the story in Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who falsely accuses the cook, a servant girl, of stealing a ribbon, when he was in fact the culprit. Rousseau keeps his hand firmly gripped on this lie, precisely because he would prefer eternal guilt or even death to a brief moment of shame.
It made me think that in this narrative, being damned to guilt is somehow not the real thing. Guilt is a way of cheating the real damnation, which is in fact shame. Is it easier to talk about guilt because there is some underlying assumption that no matter how difficult of an emotion it is, we might one day be rid of it? As you characterize it, the feeling of shame is primarily about the self and not about what we have done to the other. Almost as though we might carry guilt around with us, but shame is related to an ontological fault within us.
Gros: I agree with you that shame and guilt are often considered relatively interchangeable emotions of sadness. The big problem for me has been understanding the difference between shame and guilt. Initially, a whole moral and philosophical tradition consists of constructing shame as a feeling of sadness caused by a disparaging external judgment, by social contempt. This means that shame is a feeling that makes us dependent on others. Guilt, on the other hand, is an internal feeling that confronts us with our freedom and how we use it.
However, it seemed to me that this opposition was inaccurate. In fact, we always feel guilty in relation to another person: guilt is always about what we may have done to someone else. Shame, on the other hand, is an obsession with self-image: what will people think of me? In our contemporary world, the constant promotion of self-love (the widespread idea that mental health depends on self-esteem, that you have to love yourself in order to love others, etc.) leads to a widespread rejection of anything that might appear to be a negative feeling that could undermine self-affirmation.
The end of shame, or rather the demand that it “change sides,” has therefore become a political slogan that is at once important, necessary, and ambiguous. The rejection of guilt has become a therapeutic injunction: we must stop feeling guilty because guilt is a slow form of self-destruction. We no longer understand that these feelings can also be instruments of revelation and moral spur. Guilt makes me understand that I must make good use of my freedom. Shame, on the other hand, can help me, by internalizing the gaze of others, to force myself to behave correctly.
Finally, I would note that your question contains an unanswerable metaphysical dimension that great philosophers and writers have explored without finding a definitive solution. Is there such a thing as original guilt, which precedes any actual wrongdoing and is confused with the very fact of existing? Can we talk about an original shame that is confused with the discovery of one’s social existence? Do I begin to exist for myself in and through shame or in and through guilt?
Tehrani: You touch on social media in your book, questioning the opposition between the virtual and real world, where the powerful drive behind the former is continuously producing real affects. I found myself thinking about social media at the points where you weren’t discussing it, particularly within this concept of shame-based communities. The following stood out to me: “And the cruel pleasure felt by all the others in being out of the firing line. The secret relief that I am not in the other’s shoes, because I am acutely aware of how similar we are. And I join in with the chorus of jeering to suppress the feelings of distress this spectacle awakens within me.”
We often talk about the extreme examples of public shaming or pile-ons, when the quieter, subtle shaming is in fact what’s interesting. Sometimes contributing a simple ‘like’ says just as much as a written comment. And there is certainly a cruel pleasure in it. No wonder people have an inclination to jump on someone’s mistake more easily than they would readily admit. It also gets incredibly boring to keep saying well, I’m not like those obnoxious people online, instead of admitting that we all throw our hat in the ring and join in with the spectacle at times. What do you think it is about social media that makes it so complementary to forms of exclusion masking as inclusion?
Gros: I think you could write a whole book about shame considering only its transformation through social media and the importance this has taken on for younger generations. As you say, I have only taken extreme and almost caricatural examples: those of media lynching, which effectively create communities based on rejection, ostracism, and exclusion. We mock, condemn, and stigmatize an individual who is offered up to public condemnation. It seems to me that social media effectively enables and facilitates these hateful media outbursts. I simply believe that the pleasure we can derive from participating in them is murky. There is undoubtedly cruelty, but there is also the relief of being on the right side. In your question, you emphasize the forms of discrediting that are prevalent on social media, which are more subtle and discreet but also much more numerous. I think you’re right, but I must admit that I don’t use social media and so I’ve only been aware of extreme forms of stigmatization.
I think there’s also a generational issue here. I was born in the mid-1960s, so I spent my entire adolescence without a cell phone, a computer, or the internet. These technologies were only just beginning to spread. It seems to me that today, identity construction and self-formation largely involve sharing images of oneself and circulating one’s ideas on social media, which have become a terrible source of narcissistic satisfaction, but also of anxiety and distress for younger generations. A dynamic private life, rich personal reflection, and inner strength are qualities that can protect us from the terrible wounds of shame.
These qualities have become more problematic today because our minds are preoccupied and our brains are occupied by messages that are received or sent continuously throughout the day. So there is this immediate reactivity to what I say or what may be said about me, coupled with indefinite dissemination to all my followers. And finally, the absence of that long, empty time that could feed oblivion or indifference puts us in a state of permanent stress and nervous fatigue that makes moments of shame much more intense and difficult to live through.
Tehrani: As I was reading your book I kept thinking about a notion of inheritance. Shame can be something we inherit, and therefore can be ours while not belonging to us. You share a poignant quote from Fanon: “I felt unburdened and alive ‘at the origin of the world,’ and now here I am, all of a sudden, relegated to my allotted place.” Social contempt, experienced by marginalized and poor communities, makes its way in through self-denigration. And through our personal experience in the family, we are given a place and a position, not through our own doing. There is also the shame of our desire, which we tend to know nothing about and yet still it says something about us in our utter individuality.
All of this is to say that throughout the book you’re exploring the interwoven nature of the personal and the social. It was difficult to disentangle the two whilst reading, though I think that’s the point. I wanted to ask what you think about the difficulties in grappling with and talking about the personal and the social? It feels to me that these debates are increasingly maddening. I like that your book found space for both. Nowadays, if you talk about one people think you’re cancelling out the other. You talk about the self, you’re betraying the concept of a group. You talk about the group, you’re denying your agency.
Do you believe there are ways to move beyond this? One of your chapters is titled “Philosophy as the Great Shamer.” You claim that in a provocative turning of the tables, philosophy asks us to be ashamed of our knowledge rather than of our ignorance. That’s quite the antidote to our modern discourse, which is driven by a relentless need to prove how much one knows. It is a contradiction, that no one knows what to think anymore and yet there is a lot of certainty. What do you think it is about certainty that functions as a response to the fear of not knowing?
Gros: I would like to distinguish two things in your question, both of which seem to me to be important and undecidable. The whole problem lies precisely in this “important and undecidable,” and I believe that what is profoundly tragic and desperately light in philosophy is that it asks questions that are essential and unanswerable. One could say that questions that have a single, definitive answer are not philosophical. The first concerns the difference between the personal and the social, between the individual and the collective. It’s true that I constantly mix the two, but that’s because the feeling of shame lies precisely at the interface between oneself and others. To be ashamed is to suffer from what others might think of me, to imagine what others might say about me, to picture others mocking me. To be ashamed is to always allow the ghosts of others to exist within me. Shame is the effect, the trace, the mark of society on my intimacy, and it is the revelation that my inner world is in fact never internal, but populated by externalities.
Shame is also a story of assignment, of place. Society is not a happy coexistence; it is above all a hierarchy, a system of classifications and assignments. From this perspective, the experience of shame can be twofold. It is both the feeling of being relegated to an inferior place (the shame of the poor who try to hide their misery) and sometimes the feeling of never fitting into the place that society assigns to me (impostor syndrome). This is why talking about shame always means talking about both the individual and the group, because shame always lies at the point where they are indistinguishable.
Secondly, I believe that philosophy effectively constructs the idea that knowledge as an acquisition, as a possession, is an illusion. It is above all a matter of seeking the truth, because it is this search that can bring us together through dialogue. Nietzsche wrote: it is not doubt, but truth that drives us mad. I believe that truth, in the obviously very narrow sense of dogma, is above all what makes us violent and intolerant. However, this does not mean being relativist or skeptical. Socrates’ exercise consists in shaming those who believe they know something, whereas what is solid and authentic is a search for truth that begins by denouncing the limits of established knowledge.
You can see that what I am denouncing is the idea of comfortable certainties and soothing convictions. Truth is not what should give us rest from the search for truth, but what should stimulate it. Stupidity is not quite the same as error and ignorance. Stupidity is the refusal to engage in any discussion based on the certainty of already knowing better than others. This stupidity is dangerous. And just as art shames ugliness, philosophy shames stupidity.
Tehrani: I liked the vignette you shared of the relationship between Socrates and Callicles. When Callicles declares that rhetoric is nothing but the art of using language for the purpose of power, Socrates feels he has finally found a worthy interlocutor. As he backs his sparring partners into a corner, making demands for further precision in their speech, they are left feeling defenseless and ashamed, their soul laid bare when confronted with the contradictions in their assertions. This access to shame is a positive sign, you say, resulting in a liberation, where knowledge becomes more than mere rote learning or convictions borrowed from family and friends, now instead a proof that one’s ideas are deeply ingrained in one’s soul because they are the fruit of one’s own thinking.
It is interesting that in contemporary culture the consensus is often that if you were to feel ashamed in front of someone, that means you can’t be your true self with them, or that they are not a true friend. I do find myself thinking that that’s sort of bullshit. I think that to feel hypothetically ashamed in front of a person, is in one sense, an expression of a capacity for love. These exchanges with Socrates were valuable, even if Callicles and others were a little scared of him.
Can shame move us towards the truth, and is it in any way related to moments in which we feel exposed by a person’s knowledge of us? These moments don’t seem dissimilar from this gap in the unconscious, which opens and closes. It made me think of a quote attributed to Wilfred Bion, that lies have not been sufficiently studied because they contain within them so much unspeakable truth.
Gros: We are not used to considering the issue of truth in relation to shame. It is true that Socrates’s very particular examination of his fellow citizens in Athens (maieutics) was unpleasant for those who were subjected to it, but at the same time liberating. It is indeed a matter of freeing oneself from a whole host of knowledge and truths that have never been questioned. Such discourse may be the passive result of family, religious, or school education, or the expression of conformism, but it may also be “politically correct” or demagogic discourse, discourse that is uttered without belief and is pure social hypocrisy.
When asked “what is rhetoric,” Polus and Gorgias gave hypocritical and conventional answers. Callicles shows provocative frankness by saying: don’t listen to them, they don’t even believe what they’re saying; in fact, I’ll tell you what no one dares to say publicly. Rhetoric is the art of manipulating minds and enriching oneself, with complete disregard for the truth. Socrates replies: “At least with you, I will be able to have a serious discussion.”
You also address the relationship between friendship and shame. Basically, as you suggest, we often say that a friend is someone we don’t feel ashamed in front of, precisely because we don’t see them as a representative of a judgmental society, but as a true friend. And here you say that it’s not that simple. I think you’re absolutely right. In fact, a friend is someone in front of whom we’re not ashamed to be ashamed, that is, someone to whom we can confide our distress, the situations we’ve experienced as humiliating, or even traumas that fill us with shame when we talk about them. Because shame is also what we hide, what we keep secret, what we don’t tell anyone.
But as you point out at the end of your question, these shameful things say something about our inner truth. You can ask someone about their tastes in music, literature, clothing, etc. You will only get their social and superficial truth. Ask them what their greatest shame is, and they will reveal their deepest truth, but they will only answer if they feel friendship towards you.
Tehrani: Something I really want to talk about is this idea of shame as an ethical cornerstone. It would be an understatement to say that for many of us, it feels that there is a vast amount to be ashamed of in the world at this moment in time. And although there has been a move away from seeing shame as related to ethics, ethics is quite clearly present in appeals for humanity in the face of widespread cruelty.
You share words from Primo Levi in your book, including the shame of having survived the concentration camps, the painful question of whether by surviving you are taking someone else’s place. And perhaps what is difficult for a lot of people to bear with the horrors in Gaza is this idea that each time we, as a society, say that something has left an irreversible stain on mankind, it repeats itself incessantly. The stain begins to lose its power, and I think it may pose an existential threat to shame.
If we were to talk about groups here, I don’t think it would be one group of shameless people, and another group of ethical people, in extremely neat categories, although it is of course tempting to try and make sense of what is happening by thinking in these terms. Perhaps it might be something closer to a group who disavows shame and another group who recognizes it—who recognize that we need shame. To attempt to cut oneself off from shame altogether seems to be an attempt at cutting oneself off from our fellow human beings. And we see this with those in the highest positions of authority; the concept of responsibility, where it is desperately needed, almost immediately ceases to exist.
You talk in the book about the philosophical model of a shame-based ethics. I wanted to ask if you think that regardless of whether an ethics based fully on shame is productive or resonant for our present moment, that ethics has to at least pose us with a question about shame?
Gros: You are right to point out that shame cannot be reduced to psychological distress. It is not just a psychological problem linked to a complicated family situation or excessive shyness. Shame has an ethical and psychological dimension. Today, especially with the proliferation of wars and massacres from Ukraine to the Middle East, we can feel ashamed of humanity. When I feel shame in the face of flagrant injustice, in the face of an intolerable situation, what is humiliated is my sense of humanity.
Shame, then, is not linked to sadness, but to anger. I am angry because I tell myself that what I am witnessing is intolerable and at the same time I feel powerless to prevent it. It is this rage at powerlessness that produces political shame, which is therefore very different from social shame. It is important to understand what is valuable in this feeling of shame, when what produces the shame is not a personal experience but the state of the world.
Political shame expresses a feeling of unyielding solidarity with the state of the world. To say “I am ashamed of what is happening” is to say: it is impossible for me to remain indifferent, and even if I feel powerless, I cannot help but feel anger and express a certain indignation. That is why you are right to bring responsibility into the equation. If I am ashamed of an unacceptable situation, it is because I feel a certain responsibility. It is possible, even probable, that I will do nothing because it is too complicated or too far away, but my shame at least shows that I am not totally indifferent: it is a minimum requirement of humanity.
But on the other hand, as you suggest in your question, there will always be people who say that this shame is ridiculous, that it serves no purpose, and that we just have to accept that we cannot change the world and fight all injustices, and that we must resign ourselves to this. It is against this resignation that shame stands.
Tehrani: In its structure, your book actually seems to mimic some sort of working through of shame, as we move from the first to second half—a working with it, which is quite different to being rid of it. I recall something Adam Philips said in one of his book talks, which is that shame is the end of language. You hint at something not entirely dissimilar when you say that shame is mute in its suffering. It made me think about where the value in your book lies, and for me it’s in this idea that the way we talk about shame, and whether shame is able to respond in the form of a reply, is what’s at stake here. It’s not a given that shame ends language, although it is one formula: shame plus resignation seems to present us with an impossibility.
You spend some time discussing the role of psychoanalysis at various points in your book. As you point out, with regards to the alienating experience of our early years, the English word infant and the French word l’infant both derive from the Latin infans, meaning speechless or inarticulate. In your narrative, the possibility of articulating the different hues of sadness we find in shame, and turning the anger away from raging ambition (which you say is driven by self-interest,) transforming it into an anger that contains within it a demand for justice, holds some sort of key to change. Does your book caution against attempts to go around shame? An encouragement, perhaps, to walk straight through the fire instead.
Gros: There are many aspects to your question. Allow me to focus on the ones that I think are most important. Many coaching and personal development books present themselves as a means of emancipation from shame. They treat shame as if it were a toxic poison that must be eliminated, as if one had to go on a diet to expel it completely. This is a simplistic view, because shame is not a foreign body in our psyche. It is a way of being, a certain perspective, and even a certain intelligence. Of course, it can also become a handicap or a source of ongoing suffering, but in that case it needs to be worked on and explored rather than suppressed.
On the other hand, shame has a very paradoxical relationship with language. First, it is a negative relationship. Shame makes me lower my eyes and close my lips. I become silent about the object of my shame, which I try to hide. Shame is the realm of painful secrets. But this shame is also a source of speech and creativity, because it contains tremendous energy. This is the whole dynamic of the novels of Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Shame leads to a desire for revenge against the world, which can overturn everything.
Tehrani: In your book, the fear of shame can be the thing that stops one from acting. It seems to me that we carry shame around with us and it can debilitate us, but shame can also carry us somewhere if we choose to go down that road. There is the shame of cowardice, where shame itself can be a source of courage. Courage may not exist in the first place were it not for a prior experience of shame. I think I have some idea of your answer to this but at the risk of being presumptuous I wanted to end the interview by asking the following question. Do you believe that shame is on the side of hope?
Gros: I think that the nature of shame is profoundly dual. Indeed, as I said at the end of my previous answer, it is a form of energy. There is an element of anger and rage in shame. The Greeks placed it on the side of what they called the thumos (the heart), and therefore on the side of courage, as you so aptly put it. If this rage is used to destroy oneself, it becomes poison. But if it is shared and takes shape in collectives, only the ethical positivity of shame remains, and at that point I think, as you say, it can be hopeful. ♦
Frédéric Gros is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris XII and the Institute of Political Studies, Paris. He was the editor of the last lectures of Michel Foucault at the Collège de France. He has written books on psychiatry, law, and war as well as the best-selling Philosophy of Walking. He lives in Paris.