Shame and Guilt

We recently wrote a fragment on the negative dialectic of freedom in the positivist world of appearances, essentially an appropriation of the Frankfurt School's bashing of positivism we've all come to appreciate so much. After the usual historical outline of the emergence of institutional ideology via positive philosophy, we introduced the notion of "shame" and "guilt" ("bürgerliche Scham") to account for the refusal to perceive and act beyond the phenomenal cage of the merely given. In addition, we made use of Freire's treatment of the master-slave dialectic to highlight the layers of alienation through prescribed ideals, clouding the minds of both oppressor and oppressed. In "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" he writes:

"But almost always, during the initial stage of the struggle, the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors [...]. The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity [...] at a certain moment [they] adopt an attitude of "adhesion" to the oppressor. Under these circumstances they cannot "consider" him sufficiently clearly to objectivize him - to discover him "outside" themselves."

What seems to be happening in the epistemic outlook of the oppressed, in terms of the master-slave construct, is a positive acceptance of the ideological conceit which has put him in this situation. The slave is not able to think of himself beyond the positive institution, wherein the notion of freedom can't be critically reflected upon. Thus the slave has no desire to be free, instead, his only ideal in life is to be a master himself. He equates "Freedom" with "the power to oppress", via property and consumption. This equation of freedom seems to be widespread in advanced industrial society. Added to that, there is again the notion of "shame", corrupting the notion of freedom. Ashamed to belong to an inferior class, the slave wants to escape his self-hatred and bathe in the illusionary freedom of consumption. As an allegory: ashamed to drive a beat up vehicle, the corporate slave wants to escape his sorrow state by buying an SUV after promotion.

A first look: two emotions, "shame" and "guilt" seem to prevail here. An early intuition points to the christian ethic. Also a useful feel, the categorical imperative in the sense of normative pressures, and Weberian rationalization in the sense of these emotional responses deriving their power from a certain degree of "Zweckrationalität". "Guilt" seems to imply a juidicial framework, or at least a situation of collective morality (christianity for example), where the subject is "guilty" of something he should be "ashamed" of. In the sense of these thoughts, we will try and have a look at these two notions, isolate them lexically, and take a look at their mechanisms in situations of ius and ethica. Given the constitutional importance of Kantian moral philosophy, at least in continental Europe, we feel that the contractual nature of his philosophy as derived from reason apriori, is most interesting when trying to expose instances of functional rationality in the positive instititutional sphere, which is fundamentally Kantian in terms of descriptive method or normative structure. In this sense, Kant ought to be regarded as the first positivist, with Hegel's Philosophy of Right exposing the instrumentality of reason itself ("was vernünftig ist, ist wirklich und was wirklich ist, ist vernünftig"), making this, yet again, a rich junction in the history of ideas. So, well aware of the monumental difficulty and scope of such an outline: by inserting this problematic in a Kantian framework we hope for a Hegelian "Aufhebung", which will enable us to talk about the extent to which the notions of "shame" and "guilt" contribute to the ideological encagement of the knowing subject in the epistemic authoritarianism of positivist ideology today.