Desire and the emotion of shame

This chapter offers a consideration of shame as an emotion that educates the desires by providing an interpretation of Plato’s Gorgias. In the dialogue, Socrates uses the emotion of shame in order to awaken the desire for the good at the expense of the desire for power as he questions his interlocutors about their conception of the good life. In doing so he provides the reader with arguments for the moral value of shame. Shame, in the dialogue, is understood both as conventional shame, in terms of the awareness of a discrepancy between one’s opinions and the norms of the polity, and as moral shame, in terms of the experience of an internal contradiction between one’s desires and the innate desire for the good. Socrates rehabilitates conventional shame in the face of the sophistic argument that it is a disingenuous emotion. He also relies on moral shame as part of the elenchus which is his mode of questioning that is meant to promote self-knowledge and help the interlocutor not to live at odds with himself. The chapter argues that the understanding of shame in Plato’s Gorgias provides an interesting corrective to liberal theories of shame that can be found in the philosophies of John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum.