In his remarkable book, “The Philosophy of Shame: A Revolutionary Employee”, which was recently translated into English*, the French philosopher Friedrich Gro is a unique intellectual adventure: restoring shame from the shadows of psychological and societal contempt, and researching it as an ethical, political and liberal power. Since the beginnings of modernity, the shame in the Western philosophical and psychological discourse has remained either marginalized or dispensed as one of the pathological symptoms, while Gro is proposing a new reading of it, restoring his ability to ignite vigilance, reveal contradictions, and pushing the self and group towards recognition, transformation, and change.
The book stems from a precise foundation to understand shame, by distinguishing between it and the feeling of guilt; Where the feeling of guilt is associated with a wrong act towards the other, it can be justified or atone for it, while the shame is related to the same, its identity, its entity as the other sees it. The guilt says: “I have made a mistake.” As for shame, he whispered: “I am wrong.” He believes that this radical difference is what makes shame more severe, and more difficult for treatment, but it is also more honest; Because it reveals the fragility of man in front of society and standards, and in front of what one thinks about himself when it is placed in the eyes of others.
The philosopher of his readers draws a historical map of the transformations of shame from traditional societies in which he was a collective feeling linked to the concept of honor and dignity, to modernity when the group was dismantled and turned into a special feeling that is linked to individual failure, or deviating from the criteria formed by the elite. This indicates that this (privatization) was not a liberation experience, as much as it was a new means of social control; Especially in the bourgeois societies that reproduced it within the family, through the official religion, psychotherapy, and education, so that women, the poor and immigrants become more vulnerable to it, not because of the actions they committed; Rather, because of what they are: their identity, the color of their skin, their appearance, their visits, their voices, their tendencies, etc.
Gro is devoted to his text as a chapter to talk about shame in the digital age, and believes that social media has reproduced it, but in a superficial and disposable way, through what has become known as the “culture of cancellation”, which is an expression of a desire for moral retribution, but it often turns into a mass festival of ridicule and defamation, the purpose of which is the humiliation of the “other” in the public space, not to hold it actually, what makes it more like it is more like it Collective: An effective tool for moral bullying to keep out of ourselves the danger of accusation, by directing it to a supposed side, so we remain “we” are immune to suspicion. Thus, shame has become a tool for enhancing false individual identity, not to build real solidarity.
In one of the most controversial chapters, Gro is suggested to re -directing this shame instead of escaping from it; It can be a source of creative anger resulting from a feeling of incompatibility, and the feeling that what is happening cannot be tolerated. Therefore, it is a feeling that does not kill us; Rather, it leads us to expression, to action, and to say “no.” From this perspective it is not an end to awareness; Rather, the moment of his birth: when realizing that silence is no longer possible, and that endurance is no longer an option, and so on, it becomes a starting point for change, not a psychological disaster.
The relationship between shame and language is an essential axis of Gro’s thought. He believes that he is able to professionalize silence and muzzle mouths, but at the same time generates a desire to disclose. And between silence and saying the space of the transformation lies: Either it closes the mouths forever, or it is a revolutionary motivation for revealing, revelation, and permit.
In this context, Gro is martyred by the experience of French writer Annie Erno- Nobel Prize for Literature 2022- which turned him into a literary and political project, in writing about poverty, desire, abortion, and class relations, so I made from the experience of feeling a self-testimony, the pain of pain in the heart of the language.
One of the basic proposals in the book is that shame is not necessarily the result of a committed act; Rather, it can be something that a person is born with; Children inherit him from mothers, and the poor carry it without necessarily knowing its causes, and societies put it in the neck of the entire minorities. This is what Gro called “the inherited shame”, which is an unworthy shame, but he pursues his companions as eternal curse. From this entrance, an existential, not circumstantial experience, and a point of intersection for the individual in the collective, and the psychological politician, and the self -social.
Gro says that shame is criminalized in the time of formal happiness, and the culture of “self -development”. Because people lose their feelings of false perfection, but this is a betrayal of the inner sound that soon says to one that there is an inability to be there, and what cannot be tolerated. In this sense, the feeling of it is a rejection of surrender, and anti -habit. Therefore, the text proposes to adopt new ethics in exchange for that list on punishment or reward, starting from feeling shame, not as a break; But as a sense of responsibility, not only towards the law; But towards others, and towards the self. With this logic, it is no longer a feeling that must be eliminated, but a period of thinking, reflection, and reconsideration. Whoever feels it, a person whose heart has not yet died, is alive enough to get angry, to refuse, and to ask, and perhaps change and change.
Perhaps the creativity of those related to friendship; Where the real friend is not only the one who does not be ashamed in front of him; Rather, he who is able to be ashamed in front of him, and he will reveal to him a shame without fearing an absolute judgment or condemnation. And it goes further, to redefine the same philosophy as “the great shame”: philosophy – as Socrates practiced – is not an education; Rather, confusion, not an answer; Rather, embarrassing questions; As it makes us ashamed of ignorance, lying, and from the empty slogans, and leads us to tell the truth, even before the mirror of ourselves. Hence, the feeling of shame as the gateway to hope, the promise of salvation, and the horizon for a more white tomorrow.
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