Catholic Metanarrative

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Focused Link: Shameless and Loveless

If you're interested in understanding the concept of shame, you can try this article by Roger Scruton. It's a simple piece, but the more serious people should read Karol Wojtyla's "The Metaphysics of Shame" in Love and Responsibility. Coincidentally, it seems the approach of Roger Scruton is very much personalistic, like that of Wojtyla, but I'm not sure how similar.

http://catholiceducation.org/articles/sexuality/se0121.html

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When you do something wrong and are discovered you feel ashamed of yourself. This kind of shame is a moral emotion, founded on the thought that someone else is judging you. But it is not what is referred to in the verses quoted, which are about sexual shame. Sexual shame differs from moral shame in two ways. First, it is not a confession of wrongdoing: on the contrary, it testifies to the reluctance to do or suffer wrong. Secondly, it is not troubled, as moral shame is troubled, by the thought that you are being judged as a self, a free being, a moral subject. On the contrary, it arises from the thought that you are being judged as a body, a mechanism, an object. Hence the German philosopher Max Scheler described sexual shame as a Schutzgefühl — a shield-emotion that protects you from abuse, whether by another or yourself. If we lose the capacity for shame we do not regain the innocence of the animals; we become shameless, and that means that we are no longer protected from the sexual predator.

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