Travelling with a new book on shame in my bag, I am reading an English newspaper. Suddenly my eyes fall upon the title: ‘I didn't hit puberty until I was 19’. A man is interviewed and tells us: ‘As a kid, I was always small and never as strong as my peers, but what set me apart was that I had no sense of smell. At school, if somebody farted in class, I would be the only person who remained oblivious. Consequently, I always got the blame’. This small biographical fragment is full of hints about shame, shamelessness, and blame. By a physical developmental disorder he remained for many years a young boy, and contrary to the general opinion that staying young is wonderful, he got into all sorts of problems. Somewhere in his thirties, having his first girl-friend, he feels ashamed of telling her about his disease.
With this history on my lap, and not at all tempered by the virtue of prudence, I took The Praiseworthy Passion of Shame in my hands and started reading. Quite a confrontation, this dissertation of 421 pages, leading to all sorts of moral questions for somebody who has worked so long in clinical and forensic practice. In particular when a book about the praiseworthiness of shame brings back to memory all those people for whom shame is in the first place a nasty result of being blamed from early childhood on.
However, as always, Aquinas's positive attitude inspires. Kristanto gives us a balanced book, in which the multifaceted elements of all sorts of negative, positive, overwhelming and less overwhelming shame are thouroughly discussed in the light of Aquinas's philosophy of emotions and virtues. Shame, according to the Indonesian Jesuit who wrote this dissertation, is in Thomas's view not a virtue, but an emotion, a passio; more particular, shame is a species of fear in response to some perception of disgrace spoiling one's reputation. But some passion of shame may have a positive moral value, and as such it might be called virtuous in the loosest sense of the term. Although it is aroused spontaneously, without interference of free will, its occurrence attests to one's good will (bona voluntas). Spinoza is quoted to underline this last point: ‘alhough the man who is ashamed of some deed is in fact pained, he is nearer perfection than the shameless man who has no desire to live honorably’. Yes, that may be true. But shame can also become a hindrance in the development of one's own identity, in particular when continuous blaming has started before a child has developed enough identity and capacity to defend itself – as in the example above form the newspaper story.
The strength of Kristanto's work is the very thorough and clear elaboration of Aquinas's thoughts on the shame-related words of verecundia, erubescentia, confusio, pudor, and turpitudo. In particular the connection between the emotion of shame and the virtues of prudence and temperance is a very interesting and important one. It is not Kristanto's fault that the English word of shame misses the rich variety of unconscious, semi-conscious, or conscious experiences to which the (at least) five different Latin words may refer.
Modern science still uses many Aristotelian concepts, and it may therefore be no surprise that Aquinas's theory of shame (verecundia) corresponds so well with relatively recent psychological theories like those of Erik Erikson, Piers and Singer, and Helen Lewis: emotional and cognitive elements are mingled with each other in the course of moral development. It is a pity that Kristanto only passingly mentions a few researchers, but does not go deeper into, for example, the interesting empirically based theory of Tangney on shame and guilt. Now he finds support in Stump's excellent philosophical reading of Aquinas (in her Wandering in Darkness) of both guilt and shame, in which shame is seen as an anticipation of rejection and abandonment by real or imagined others, while guilt is an anticipation of a response of anger or punishment from real or imagined others. By the way, the reader looking for the word ‘guilt’ realizes that an index is missing in this book.
Despite the correspondence with recent psychological theories of shame, and although Aquinas teaches that ‘we are more ashamed by persons to whom we are attached, and with whom we have a continuous contact’, he does not seem to have the notion of the crucial importance of early infant development which we have today. Shame is not the same when it pops up for the first time in the behaviour of a baby of 8 months who has been reprimanded by its mother, as it is in the social turning away from a politician who has been a public scandal. But even if we are thrown out by an impersonal political system when we are fifty years old, our earliest experiences and coping strategies with shame play a role. It is important that philosophers and theologians throw their special light on (neuro)psychological findings in the area of moral emotions and cognitions. For example, what role does the triad of intellectus, memoria, and voluntas play in the course of development and what does that tell us about the (dis)integration of the moral self? Shame is probably the first emotional experience of a vulnerable self, of threatening disintegration and loss of identity, and therefore remains very important during one's whole life. From an evolutionary point of view, shame might be a turning point in the development of human experience.
At the end one realizes that all these remarks are motivated by a praiseworthy piece of work, in which Kristanto has laid a Thomistic foundation for further interdisciplinary dialogue on moral emotions and cognitions, in particular on shame and guilt.
