Shame as Joy's inverse

Streetlight

On the back of a recent discussion I was thinking a little about joy, and especially adversarial joy, the kind one gets when say, bullying someone else, putting another down, or just making fun of someone. And it got me thinking that the opposite to this kind of joy is not sadness - which is joy's traditional 'other' - but shame. To put another down, and to enjoy it, especially in front of others involves a certain shamelessness; and inversely, nothing saps joy faster than experiencing shame for that joy, in the wake of someone pointing out, say, your meanness.

Levinas once wrote - perceptively - that shame is the experience of being unable to escape oneself, of being riveted to one's own presence despite wanting to desperately take leave of oneself: "Shame arises each time we are unable to make others forget our basic nudity. It is related to everything we would like to hide and that we cannot bury or cover up... What appears in shame is thus precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself, the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself. ... It is therefore our intimacy, that is, our presence to ourselves, that is shameful." (Levinas, On Escape)

But one thing that struck me is that joy can in turn be understood as the exact inverse of this: of not wanting to escape one's 'presence to oneself', of instead, wanting to bask in it, to dwell in one's beatitude in that moment; if shame disactivates joy, it seems equally true that joy can disactivate shame: to laugh with (and not at) another in the face of their shame is a powerfully comforting move. Anyway, it just seems interesting to me to take the couple joy/shame over the traditionally paired joy/sadness as a more intimate paring. It changes, if one is willing to accept it, the usual 'topology' of emotion. But I do wonder where this leaves sadness, and if there may be analogous remarks made for it. Anyway, just a random musing I thought I'd throw something up about.

Number2018

↪StreetlightX

What appears in shame is thus precisely the fact of being riveted to oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeing oneself to hide from oneself, the unalterably binding presence of the I to itself. ... It is, therefore, our intimacy, that is, our presence to ourselves, that is shameful." (Levinas, On Escape) — StreetlightX

It looks like Levinas's ethics does not work anymore...The relation of self to oneself has changed dramatically,
it is mediated by numerous collective apparatuses aimed at preventing one to stay with oneself...
For Primo Levi, "the shame of being a man" was a central existential meaning of life after surviving
The Holocaust; today it is almost impossible to understand it.

Streetlight

↪Number2018

I have no interest in discussing Levinas' ethics, I just found his formulation of shame to be particularly appropriate.

All sight

It's pride that one is basking in, not joy, and the higher the pride, the deeper the shame. Basking in ones strength, beauty, goodness, superiority, and then to have this challenged or brought into question transforms it to shame. The greater the pride, the deeper the shame.

The deadly sins. One reduces their levels of shame, by not succumbing to the joys and sirens of pride.

fdrake

I think adversarial joy and shame have a coimplication. Joy is an extreme state of comfort and satisfaction with a state of affairs, a person loses themselves in whatever they're doing and everything feels right. In shame, a person and their activity sticks out like a sore thumb, inviting their identity to become pained in contrast to the reality of their decisions.

I imagine that the success of consciousness raising political activism has produced a counter ideology that seeks to eliminate shame, which renormalises that which has been exposed as a problem. The transformation of political debate on the internet into manipulating the attention economy (and thus the Overton window) has this as a component, strategies which allow indifference and immediate rejection of criticism based on a problematised identity spread as a salve for an ego which didn't know how deeply it could be hurt.

Instead of trying to sublimate that pain into a greater sense of decency and fraternity, it is very tempting to insulate ourselves from what we see as the sources of those slights - the people who are identified as the kind of people who raise such things as problems.

Deleteduserrc

It's pride that one is basking in, not joy, and the higher the pride, the deeper the shame. Basking in ones strength, beauty, goodness, superiority, and then to have this challenged or brought into question transforms it to shame. The greater the pride, the deeper the shame. — All sight

I think this is right, Pride/Shame, 'sinful' pride anyway.

The pride you're talking about is very very conscious of the threat of shame. The virtues identified with are used as a sort of protective amulet. Or like an internal song you sing to yourself to stave off anxiety. Singing real loudly is a sign that you're particularly susceptible to what should happen if the song is muted, or amulet is lost.

Prideful people have a background awareness of a shame-inducing gaze that never quite turns off. It's a gaze that demands that, at any given moment, there must be someone subjected to it. Putting others down (i.e. shaming them) is like offering up a sacrificial victim to the gaze, buying you a little more time, and temporarily reinforcing your belief in the power of your amulet, or song : It must be working, since the gaze took someone else.

Streetlight

I imagine that the success of consciousness raising political activism has produced a counter ideology that seeks to eliminate shame, which renormalises that which has been exposed as a problem. — fdrake

Yeah, this is something I've noticed recently - a tendency to translate political problems into psychological terms (and thus take them out of the running from political contestation): "I am so over being made to feel bad about who I am, and I'm going to believe in myself and find my happiness; I will enjoy myself in the face of your attempts to guilt and shame me". But this is never at issue in 'consciousness raising' (or at least, it shouldn't be). Reminds me of a Guardian article a while back about the 'potent tears of white women' (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/08/how-white-women-use-strategic-tears-to-avoid-accountability):

"Almost every BW (black woman) I know has a story about a time in a professional setting in which she attempted to have a talk with a WW about her behavior & it has ended with the WW (white woman) crying,” one black woman wrote on Twitter. “The WW wasn’t crying because she felt sorry and was deeply remorseful. The WW was crying because she felt “bullied” and/or that the BW was being too harsh with her.”

Or else in the 'argumentation' thread, there were a few people who said that those who would shut down certain debates feel their 'identity threatened' or don't feel 'confident' or whathaveyou. Again, a case of political action being translated into psychological categories and 'feelings': "you only say that because your joy is being infringed upon". Which again, I think is just nonsense. And of course, something dreadful happens when this feeling is taken up as a theme in it's own right and made into an object of political affirmation ("I'm sick of being made to feel bad - never mind that my feelings are not the point; I will band together with those who feel as I do, and we will make a thing out of this"; It's reactionary (non-)politics through and though).

It's hard to blame anyone for this in particular, even those who actually engage in such mistranslation. Our political vocabulary is lacking, woefully. And feelings are easy, and shame and joy are particularly potent and easy to rally around.

All sight

↪csalisbury

That's an excellent way of putting it. As if the balancing shame generated by, or that the pride is a response to continually needs ventilation, or something to be consumed in order to sustain the pride.

Streetlight

It's pride that one is basking in, not joy, and the higher the pride, the deeper the shame. Basking in ones strength, beauty, goodness, superiority, and then to have this challenged or brought into question transforms it to shame. The greater the pride, the deeper the shame. — All sight

I didn't think about pride, despite it being the natural paring to shame, actually. But considering it, it actually does seem like an interesting candidate to pair with sadness: if joy and shame are inversely related, pride and sadness might make a nice corresponding pair as well. Would have to flesh that out a bit, but preliminarily I don't see anything wrong with pride, prima facie. Pride, rightly wrought, strikes me a beautiful antidote to sadness. The 'sinfulness' of pride seems to me to be a particularly Christian POV, which is more than enough to render that framing utterly bunk, I think.

There are also issues of class I have in my head swirling around here; shame has always been the lot of the poor and the aspirational; it has an repressive effect. Those in power seem to rarely display shame; there's a reason why LGBTQ movements often fly under the banner of pride: there's a cooption of pride that is necessary and powerful, and it's a shame - hah - that it has the negative connotations that it does.

All sight

↪StreetlightX

All things in measure, perhaps? Excessive pride, hubris, or arrogance is considered negative everywhere, but there are some small prides, related to belonging, a satisfactory job, a joy generated by the right doing of a relative, or comrade.

There are some cases, where humility, or modesty seems almost insulting as well. If you are competitive with someone that is far superior skilled, and they say "it's nothing", "no big deal", and talk of how they could have done better, when it was far superior to your performance seems almost incendiary.

I think that the duality holds, but as we approach the center, or different contexts, the movement in either direction becomes more or less appropriate, but excess in either direction, I think that we could agree, is rarely justified.

I would also add that excesses of shame, unless projecting, is rarely alluring, and is therefore less necessary to guard against, or watch out for.

Deleteduserrc

↪StreetlightX

I wonder if there's two separate emotions or states that have been lumped under a single word. I think there's a type of pride that is something like identification with a covetable virtue or characteristic because its covetable. And then there's another pride that is something like the ability to stand in front of oneself or others without concealing onself - kinda like the opposite of what Levinas identifies (correctly imo) as the essence of shame. Or maybe its that all good things also have a distorted shadow version of themselves, so you'd have authentic pride as well as 'sinful' pride. (Feel like sin's ok as a concept if you think of it a state of being inimical to true flourishing, rather than a shameful stain. Tho Of course its been cast as the latter by those in power for a long time)

Streetlight

wonder if there's two separate emotions or states that have been lumped under a single word. I think there's a type of pride that is something like identification with a covetable virtue or characteristic because its covetable. And then there's another pride that is something like the ability to stand in front of oneself or others without concealing oneself - kinda like the opposite of what Levinas identifies (correctly imo) as the essence of shame. — csalisbury

This seems a good way to put it, though the reference to flourishing makes me think that 'negative' pride is pride loosened from its object; where one has pride in one's skills, one's accomplishments - pride to the extent that one has enabled, furthered, and contributed something to and of the world; when this pride becomes 'separated from what a body can do' and monumentalized into sheer memory ('representation'?) - that's when pride slips into its negative ("he lives in poverty, but he refuses to do work he considers beneath him; he was once a captain in the army, see...").

Also, situating pride as the opposite experience from shame qua Levinas ("the ability to stand in front of oneself or others without concealing onself") makes me need to refine the OP a little; if I want to say shame is the natural paring to joy, then I need to refine the phenomenology of joy insofar as joy is - and I'd be open to correction here - something that deindividuates: one loses oneself in joy, one forgets, in some manner, that one is a self; beatitude evacuates our person-ality, it's just smiles and warmth and the repose therein (pride, on the other hand, in maximally individuating: I am proud of what I have done or of who I am in having done the thing, 'without concealment'. Adorno once wrote a passage that still haunts me to this day:

"To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it. Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no-one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy. The only relation of consciousness to happiness is gratitude: in which lies its incomparable dignity" (Adorno, Minima Moralia).

There's something both terrible and lovely in this, I think, even if a bit of an idealization.

Streetlight

All things in measure, perhaps? Excessive pride, hubris, or arrogance is considered negative everywhere, but there are some small prides, related to belonging, a satisfactory job, a joy generated by the right doing of a relative, or comrade.

There are some cases, where humility, or modesty seems almost insulting as well. If you are competitive with someone that is far superior skilled, and they say "it's nothing", "no big deal", and talk of how they could have done better, when it was far superior to your performance seems almost incendiary. — All sight

I'm very weary of the Goldilocks moralizing impulse ('not to much, not too little, just right') because it strikes me as overly abstract. What is too little, what is too much? I think these 'metrics' of affect need to be tethered to something; what is it that one has done or is that one can take pride in it? And so with shame and humility: What are you ashamed of? What are you being humble about? As I said to Csal, I think these affects become 'negative' when decoupled from their object and are taken to be reflexive objects of their own standing: one defends one's pride ... for the sake of one's pride. This seems to me to better locate the danger of pride than the Goldilocks framing. I think even massive, excessive, glowing pride, is fine: if one's earned it.

A while back there was an interview with the musician Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), where he talked about a small debate he had with Kanye West over the value of humility. I remember the lines quite fondly: “I got in a friendly argument with Kanye West about the word humble once,” he recalled. “He said, ‘Have you ever looked up the word humble?’ I was like, ‘Actually I don’t know if I have.’ And he showed me the definition of it, and it’s far more self-demeaning, kind of the problematic Midwestern ‘Sorry!’ mentality, than I realized.” He continued, “I took a lot out of that conversation. Ultimately, I think it’s great to serve others and everything, but I think there’s a certain point where it’s diminishing returns for the people around you if you’re not showing up and being who you are.” (source). I found this supremely affirming, and still do - regardless of what Kendrick Lamar now says.

For reference:

All sight

Importance is relational, as in, one is of relative importance to other sentient things. So that, if I have a low estimate of my own importance, I by contrast show a high estimate of the importance of others, and vice versa. Not only do I of course (of course...) know the definition of humble, but it can be easily inferred from the definition of "arrogant". Far from surprising.

ar·ro·gant
ˈerəɡənt/Submit
adjective
having or revealing an exaggerated sense of one's own importance or abilities.
"he's arrogant and opinionated"
synonyms: haughty, conceited, self-important, egotistic, full of oneself, superior; More

Shame as Joy's inverse

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