The formative power of everyday language on
our longings, passions, feelings, imagination, motives, intentions, judgments
and actions has long been recognized.
But Nietzsche was the first to emphasize the fact that the formative
power of languages generated by a dialogue of text with text textures
experiences in distinctive ways. Decades
later, Heidegger incorporated Nietzsche's insight in a hermeneutical theory
designed to reveal the historicity of these experiences, while Wittgenstein
echoed it in intriguing ways in the passage which compares words referring to
experiences (and entities) to ropes woven from many strands, with no single
strand running all the way through.
An analysis of the experiences of shame
and guilt illustrates the validity of Nietzsche's insight and Wittgenstein's
analysis of the workings of everyday languages.
As terms in the English language, shame and guilt refer to
distinguishable experiences. However,
since there is considerable over-lap among the literary conventions woven into
these rope-like words, an analysis which attempts to distinguish sharply between
them succeeds only in showing that their meaning in any instance depends on the
purpose for which they are used.
My interest in the distinction was
triggered by discussions with colleagues in the Theology Department at Quincy
University. They argued that guilt was a
more positive experience than shame, since it voices a call for
conversion. My reaction was informed by
personal experiences and by compassionate involvements with wounded
individuals. In my journey into the
unknown, guilt was crippling because it called me to conformity to dictates of
an interiorized committee in my head, while experiences in which I felt and
owned a suffusive shame called me to live with personal integrity.
As I reflect on these discussions, I turn
once again to my reading of the Hebrew narrative tradition. Quite clearly, when the story of Adam and Eve
is read as literature rather than history or theology, it reveals (1) that an
existence defined by a power-structure stifles communication between human
beings, (2) that existence in a power-structure breeds loneliness and, in Eve's
case, boredom as well, (3) that an eruption of self-consciousness requires a
transgression of the dictates of a prevailing power-structure, (3) that this
eruption evokes the sort of shame encoded in that passage which notes that Adam
and Eve became aware that they were naked.
This reading evokes a felt experience with
universal application, yet defies any effort to abstract from the story a clear
definition of the experience of shame.
Thus, efforts to imaginatively reconstruct the first time I experienced
an eruptive self-consciousness lead me to suspect that it emerged as a
resounding No. If so, this No voiced a
self-assertion which could only find expression as a protest against efforts of
others to control my behavior. As the
other side of the coin, however, the experience was surely impregnated with a
sense of total vulnerability, a feeling of helplessness and a fear of
abandonment, since I did not know who I was, what I wanted, or how to respond
effectively to the situation at hand.
And as it was repeated, it surely evoked the anxiety of authorship
inseparable from a healthy urge to become the author of my own personal
history.
Here, again, the Hebrew narrative tradition
generated stories which reveal common efforts to diminish the anxiety of
authorship. Thus, storytellers in the
Deuteronomic strand of the narrative tradition posited the so-called Mosaic Law
as a mediator between Israel's God and individual Israelites which would
transform shame into guilt.
(Aside: This dynamic is repeated in marriages in
which individuals marked by every event in their personal histories commit
themselves to a shared quest for ever-deepening person-to-person
involvements. As intimacy deepens,
interactions tap deeply buried feelings.
Since neither spouse can identify those feelings, both resort to
judgments designed to express and evoke some emotional response. But judgments cannot and do not evoke
vulnerable self-revelations which alone voice their deepest longings. And if the couple are to find their way
through these misplaced debates, they must abandon the prescriptions and
prohibitions voiced by the interiorized committee in their heads and experience
the shame inherent in standing naked before each other, without self-protective
defenses, socially acceptable rationalizations, and self-deceptive excuses.)
In this regard, the recourse to a Law
supposedly given immediately to Moses in theophanies resembles the
restructuring of thought in the Hellenic literary tradition. This tradition interiorized the detachment
inherent in writing and reading as an interrogatory stance rather than an
eruptive self-consciousness. To justify
the imposition of closure on endless questioning, its strong authors forged a metaphor
of power and judgment which successfully transformed endless questioning into
focused inquiries designed to reveal the dynamic operation of a finite universe
and every entity in it.
Here, I suggest that trust in the
revelatory power of the metaphor of power and judgment is fruitful in probing
forces which operate with a necessity of nature, but misleading when morality
is centered in the person-to-person interactions explored in the Yahwist's
story of Adam and Eve. Tragically, an
elderly Augustine's violent misreading of the story of Adam and Eve lent his
authority to a conception of God indebted to the Hellenic metaphor of power and
judgment. In his earlier Confessions, however, Augustine had
supplemented the eruption of self-consciousness recounted in the story with a
revolutionary inward turn. This inward
turn served two purposes, one, to probe the glimpses of human beings endowed
with unfathomable depths and a mysterious freedom offered by the Yahwist's
stories of Israel's patriarchs and matriarchs and, two, to set the stage for
pleas that only God could understand the murky depths which led Augustine to do
the evil he would not do. In the
doctrine of original sin which Augustine extracted from the story of Adam and
Eve, however, the God who understood his inner turmoil was also a God of power
and judgment. And the tragedy was
compounded when both Catholic and Protestant theologians used this harsh
doctrine of original sin as a shared starting point for a misplaced debate
revolving around a polar opposition between faith and works. (In that debate, both sides assumed that an
interiorized god-like perspective revealed the selfishness inherent in any
inward turn. And both framed that
assumption with a theology of transcendence which decreed that one's longings
and aspirations ought to be fixed exclusively on God.)
Though this background material may seem to
go far afield, it indicates some of the literary origins of the internalized
perspectives which evoke guilt and shame.
The metaphor evoking guilt is quite straightforward. It functions as an internalized judge who
subjects actions to codified systems of prescriptions and prohibitions designed
to promote some "common good." In everyday English, it clothes its
judgments in a language of "should" and "should not,"
"ought". "duty" and "obligation". And since it seems to speak from nowhere, it
seems to texture its judgments with divine authority. But, as Heidegger's analysis of the
historicity of experience implies, this language is really the voice of a
committee in one's head which activates memory traces of judgments imposed on
us by significant people in our lives, and its formative power re-enforces
their sad belief that a system of rewards and punishments will succeed in
producing moral individuals.
(Aside: When I met with couples who were locked in
futile struggles, I introduced a gimmick.
Whenever I heard a "should" or "should not", I would
ring an imaginary bell. The person who
used the forbidden word had to begin again, this time with an honest effort to
say what he or she was feeling and thinking.
Gradually, the couple would see how wounding their judgments were and
how fruitful vulnerable self-revelations to loved ones can be.)
Shame is also evoked by an internalized
perspective, but formulating a metaphor which distinguishes between toxic and
life-giving shame is more difficult than tracing guilt to an internalized
judge. Thus, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre offered an extensive analysis of
self-consciousness which differs radically from that of the Yahwist. As the champion of Cartesian rationalism in
the twentieth century, he located the eruption of self-consciousness at the
center of an unbridgeable chasm between subjectivity and objectivity. To dramatize the unaccountability of the
eruption, he traced it to a double nihilation which reveals that we are neither
the immediate object of consciousness nor our initial response to that
datum. In his pregnant formulation,
"we are not what we are, and we are what we are not." On the one hand, we are pure and unbounded
subjectivities. On the other, the
all-pervasive shame we seek so desperately to hide is triggered by the Look of
the Other which objectifies us. Forever
thereafter, shame is an authentic, if toxic, sign of our inability to escape
from such objectifications. And the
all-pervasive shame evoked by this sense of vulnerability is enhanced when we
realize that we are futile projects to be God.
Clearly, Sartre's use of the metaphor of
the Look traces shame to sources outside the individual. And I suggest that the metaphor can be used
to expose insidious ways that shame can be toxic. But my analysis of the life-giving thrust of
shame locates the perspective entirely within myself. To frame this analysis, I project a metaphor
which enables me to witness the murky depths, tangled feelings, self-protective
urges and massive self-deception which my customary excuses and socially
acceptable rationalizations obscure. And
this metaphor implies that I have internalized a mirror that only I can hold
before me when I dare to face me as I am.
In recent years, I have found my ability to
identify, feel and own experiences in which I am suffused with shame far more
fruitful than efforts to conform to the dictates of an internalized Judge who
burdened me with "good old Catholic guilt" or agreement with Sartre's
more generalized obsession with a universal inability to live with absolute
purity. In sum, this witness exposes my
occasional lapses into cowardly silence, my fear of being vulnerable and my
craving for instant intimacy in a way that calls me to live with personal
integrity. And responding to that call
plunges me into a far more challenging quest than the call to conform to Law
(or to an objective moral order) could ever do.
In the end, however, I cannot accept a
moral discourse framed by a polar opposition between guilt and shame. I identify with the analysis of the role of
law in the developing awareness of my tangled depths found in Romans, chs. 7- 8. In ch. 7, Paul invoked a Jewish tradition
which presents covetousness as the root of all other evils. In so doing, he implied that he regarded
unrestrained desires as natural until he was confronted with the commandments,
"Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods or his wife." Immediately, desires became a source of inner
turmoil.
(Aside: Today, many Republicans regard Capitalism as
God's greatest gift to humans and view government regulation as human
interference with God's activity in human history. But their rhetoric justifies their refusal to
listen to the cries of the poor and marginalized by disguising covetousness (in
the form of greed) as a God-given imperative to act out of enlightened self-interest.)
My experience of the value of law concerned
the issue of violence, not the issue of covetous desires. I am quite sure that I did not become aware
that my treatment of my youngest brother hurt him whenever I treated him as
other children (and adults) treated me until my mother made clear that she
would not allow me to hit or torment him.
As Paul notes, however, this prohibition merely set me up for situations
in which I did the evil that I would not do instead of the good that I wanted to
do, but I tried to do so in ways that she would never notice.
Initially, Mother's prohibition did not
evoke more determined efforts to do the good or teach me how to listen to the
movement of the indwelling Spirit in long-buried and crazily tangled longings
and passions. To learn that lesson, I
had first to learn how to sort out these feelings, hear the voice of my longing
for intimacy, identify and feel the buried feelings that distorted my
person-to-person involvements, abandon the temptation to view myself as the
innocent victim of villainous action on the part of others, and entrust myself
to the love of a triune God. But that
process, I insist, bore fruit when I could embrace an elusive longing to live
with personal integrity in my interactions with those I loved and those who
entered by life as a priestly representative of God's all-inclusive love.
Addendum:
I had finished this reflection before a student came to talk with
me. A professor whom he admired and
respected discovered that he had cheated on an examination. As he talked about his inner turmoil, he
blurted out: "I'm so ashamed; I violated a trust." And I wanted to cheer. The personal dimensions of the failure, not a
confession of guilt for violating a moral norm or academic prohibition.
This encounter evoked a comparison
between a Kantian ethics and an ethics of intimacy. In his Foundations
for a Metaphysics of Morals, Kant located moral issues in the internal
turmoil so vividly evoked in and through Augustine's Confessions. To frame his
analysis of this turmoil, he accepted the Hellenic assumption that reason must
rule disruptive passions and desires, reduced passion and desire to natural
motivations which could have no moral import, and invoked the conception of
reason developed in his Critique of Pure
Reason.
That Critique was a determined effort to recover rationalism from Hume's
empirical critique. Hume's critique
revealed that an analysis of a single experience cannot yield certain knowledge
of how the entities involved would react to changed conditions. To counter that critique, Kant accepted
Newtonian physics as the paradigm example of the use of reason. One feature of Newton's theorizing was
especially influential. On the
foundational level, he grounded his mechanics in idealized Laws of Motion which
enabled scientists to discover how gravity worked without knowing what gravity
was. In Kant's analysis of morality, a
maxim (principle), "Always treat rational beings as ends, never merely as
means," functioned in the manner of Newton's Laws of Motion. Presumably, its application enabled rational
beings to master passion and desire without the need to understand their
tangled contributions to internal turmoil or to predict the consequences of
their moral actions.
The analysis as a whole can be
succinctly sketched. Morality resides in
disinterested, dispassionate judgments.
Indeed, since passion and desire are natural motivations, acting from
compassion is immoral because it deviates from the impartiality dictated by
reason. As a result, a Kantian morality
privileges guilt over shame and impersonal judgments over intensely personal
involvements. And the most that it can
promise is a freedom consisting in mastery of an inner turmoil that effectively
silences any call to sort out tangled motivations and assess possible
consequences.
Note, however, that Israel's
prophets also invoke internal turmoil as the source of moral issues. But they do so by centering the call to respond
morally in tangled and often inarticulate cries of pain, rage, shame, care,
concern, compassion, longing and aspiration.
Quite obviously, a moral discourse centered in these cries privileges a sympatric
[sic] imagination over a fictive voice of reason and, by extension, shame over
guilt as a motivation for a quest for a fully human and uniquely personal
existence that can only be realized through intensely personal involvements
with other honest searchers.
In sum, guilt is triggered by a fear
of judgment, while shame is rooted in a longing to live with personal
integrity, (For the sake of
completeness: Individuals who are
violated by another are plagued by a toxic shame. This shame is triggered by a sense of
helplessness which takes the inescapable vulnerability of human existence to an
excruciating extreme. As such, it is a
distortion of the longing to live with integrity.)
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