On
pages 203-204 Nussbaum disagrees with William Miller about the difference
between humiliation and shame. Miller
argues that humiliation focuses on an almost comic circumstance of “mockery and
the deflation of grandiose pretensions.”
Nussbaum however believes humiliation to be just as damaging as shame
with many of the same intentions. I am
inclined to agree with Miller about these distinctions between these
functions. When one is humiliated is it
not normal to seek some sort of revenge and/or relish in your humiliators’
downfall should it happen? This is
because humiliation spotlights a power relationship where one party has much
more control than the other and uses this power to (usually unjustly) embarrass
and humiliate the lesser party. Shame works
in very much the same way but often without the power relationship. Shame seems to me to be a form of consensual
recognition of a wrong. The reason you
feel shame and not humiliation is because you agree whatever you did in order to
be shamed is indeed wrong. You feel humiliation when someone reads your
poetry without asking but you feel shame if the poetry they read is highly
racist. Just the fact that your poetry
is read without consent is humiliating and out of your control. The fact that you are then found out to be a
racist in modern society (where such a thing is now being made taboo) is
shameful. If this distinction is true
then it seems Miller’s theory of comical humiliation, although unrefined, is
true.
I find myself mostly in agreement, though I’m not sure that humiliation highlights a power relationship so much as it highlights differences between people. Humiliation, I think, is inherently alienating, but not necessarily hierarchical. I perceive a crucial difference between humiliation and shame: humiliation comes from other people, while shame comes from the self. When we describe ourselves as feeling humiliated, what we’re saying is that “I feel like other people find my actions ridiculous.” When we describe ourselves as feeling ashamed, we’re saying “I feel I have done something wrong.” I don’t think that you can be ashamed without your consent, i.e. you won’t feel shame if you don’t believe you have done something wrong. However, you can feel humiliated without consent, because humiliation relies upon the attitudes of other people. That feeling of humiliation is a recognition of your own alienation. Being humiliated can still hurt deeply of course, but for different reasons than shame. Humiliation is a severing of your connections to other people, whereas shame is the agonizing revelation that you have done wrong.
ReplyDeleteI think that there is room for crossover here, though. For example, humiliating someone may make him feel ashamed of his actions. In fact, I would argue that shaming someone is really just an amped up form of humiliating someone (call it humiliation plus). This gives us some insight into how we should be using these attitudes. Humiliation is a tool for highlighting the other, and may be a social attitude for removing behavior that is merely inappropriate. Shame, on the other hand, need be reserved for those occasions where some ethical breach has been made.