Shame vs guilt in Homer
/A helpful and important distinction in a chapter on glory and guilt in a “shame culture,” from Robin Lane Fox’s Homer and His Iliad:
Shame differs in two under-appreciated ways from guilt. It is not that guilt is a private, internal response, whereas shame always rests on the reactions of others: we can be privately ashamed of ourselves or secretly feel shame inside ourselves before an imagined onlooker. One cardinal difference is that we can be ashamed of something that is done or said by others to whom we relate, whereas we feel guilt only for what we ourselves have personally said or done. Teachers can be ashamed of what some of their pupils have done, but unless they instigated it, they do not feel guilt for it. Captains can be ashamed of some of their team members’ conduct, without feeling guilt, as they have not done it themselves. There is also a difference of scope and timing. We feel shame about something we might otherwise do and we are therefore inhibited from doing it. We feel guilt and have guilty thoughts only about something we have actually thought or done (or failed to do). The responses involve our sense of ourselves in different ways. When we feel guilt, we accept that we, our full selves, are fully responsible. We can feel shame, however, when we feel we have acted out of character, our true self, or fallen short of our best.
“[W]e can be ashamed of something that is done or said by others to whom we relate, whereas we feel guilt only for what we ourselves have personally said or done.”
As examples, Lane Fox brings forward Hector, who is ashamed of Paris and would be ashamed of himself if he hid safely inside Troy, Priam, who is ashamed of his surviving sons once Hector has been killed, and Achilles, who is ashamed of having let Patroclus die. None of these or any other character in the Iliad expresses what we would think of as guilt: “The Iliad has no word for it, but the absence may not be significant, because people can feel more than they express in words.”
Later in the chapter, Lane Fox answers this modern assumption by noting how, in contrast with some other historical aristocracies in which elites did not care what others thought of them, “Homer's heroes, by contrast, worry frequently what others may say of them, even people who are far inferior to themselves,” like Thersites. As if in answer to a modern assumption about the social aspect of shame, Lane Fox continues:
Are they, then, mere egoists? It is a mistake to regard shame as an egotistical or narcissistic response, as if all that matters in it is what others think of one. Shame is linked to the views of others, real or imagined, but it becomes an inhibition, ‘ashamed to’, or a reaction, ‘ashamed that’, only if these others’ views relate to actions and qualities which the person subject to shame values too.
Shame requires a set of shared virtues and the bonds of community. By contrast, virtually the only social dimension of shame that is recognized now is the act of “shaming”—as a verb—a person for something, which is automatically assumed to be wicked on the part of the shamer. (This, ironically, loads them with unforgivable guilt.) In a world with disintegrating community, the sense of shame imparted by the claims we make upon each other cannot be permitted. The assumption is that shame is a tool of malign control and we must be unbound, totally. And so the world demands shamelessness, with all that that entails.
