Shame and self-image in Sartre and Bernard Williams

Abstract

Analysis of the feeling of shame plays a crucial role in classical phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity, and shame has increasingly become a core topic in Anglo-American moral philosophy since at least the publication of Bernard Williams's Shame and Necessity in 1993. While Williams's philosophical approach to the deep moral implications of shame was indeed groundbreaking, previous philosophical readings of the emotion were already in the offing, including Jean-Paul Sartre's prodigious representation of the moment shame reaches consciousness in Being and Nothingness, first published in 1943. This paper compares Sartre's and Williams's interpretive frameworks for understanding the rich (first-personal) experience of shame, explaining in detail how they not only complement but also illuminate each other, thereby offering a novel understanding of shame's relation to the moral, nonmoral, and ethical self.