Should a Stoic feel the emotion we call “shame”?

Should a Stoic feel the emotion we call “shame” (or perhaps any related emotions, like embarrassment, guilt, regret, or remorse)? That is a question that often arises among students and practitioners of Stoicism. In reading and discussion groups, I’ve seen it come up precisely because a person does feel one of these emotions, admitting that they found themselves too preoccupied to prepare or practice between sessions. Or in recounting some perceived (and perhaps real) failure to stick with their commitments to Stoicism. Perhaps when they discover they have misunderstood some principle or practice. They might express shame over the current state of their character, mindset, and habits, or even over having only come lately to care about those matters.

Cherry-picking from Stoic texts

In any of these cases, one could cherry-pick a few ideas from Stoic texts and provide them to the person feeling shame. Realizing shame gets identified as one of the negative emotional states (classified under the category of fear), and that those passions or perturbations are considered always bad might lead one to think they should just stop feeling it or get past it as quickly as they can. If it stems from past matters, one could connect the truth that the past is immutable with passages saying, since this is the case, there’s nothing to feel bad over. One might even bring up suggestions one ought to be forgiving towards oneself. Or since shame is often forward-looking as fear, and likely concerns how the person feeling it will be perceived by others, one might advocate not worrying about reputation as something not in our control.

There’s nothing inherently wrong or false to such a “Stoic” approach, but there is a lost opportunity for going further and deeper in ways that have real potential for more lasting change. What would that look like or involve? As with any of the emotions, genuine Stoicism does not advocate simply denying or repressing what one is feeling.

Being attentive to your feelings

If you are feeling shame over something that, strictly speaking from a Stoic perspective, it isn’t reasonable or right for you to, it’s good that you can make that judgment about its disvalue correctly, but you are indeed feeling it. If you do allow yourself to feel the emotion, and you also direct your attentiveness not just to the feeling (which is probably not a good one) but to the equally important cognitive, narrative, habitual, and volitional dimensions of that emotion (which are just as real as the affect itself), then you create the possibility of changing how these matters play out for you.

Emotions are not just judgments for the Stoics, but every emotion does involve several judgments on our part, some of which might be erroneous. Emotions falling under the classification of “fears” stem from a judgment that something bad is approaching, threatening, or even potentially to be encountered. And a judgment like that, you notice, involves several others as its components. The person feeling shame over something concerning themself judges that something to be bad, which might or might not be true. They also judge that the consequences of that something being exposed or revealed to other people would be some sort of loss of esteem, respect, social status, perhaps even of a relationship. There might also be judgments about how likely or threatening this is. For some people, any chance however small of some bad feature being revealed to others makes them feel shame.

There are additional judgments at work, for instance, the one that this emotion is an appropriate, reasonable, useful response to the situation, probably not the case. By sitting attentively with an emotion like shame, and unravelling the different threads entangled within it, comprising judgments, assumptions, lines of reasoning, storytelling and interpretations, one’s history and background, and habits a person has developed, one can bring the emotion, gradually to be sure, within the scope of one’s own power to decide or determine.

How Stoicism can help

Does Stoic philosophy help with this? It certainly can. In fact, understanding emotions in general and working on one’s own is one main aspect of the first of the three fields of study Epictetus identifies, that of desire and aversion. But any real and robust help it provides, for addressing an emotion like shame, will involve taking Stoic principles and applying them in coherent, attentive, well-informed ways, and perhaps even benefit from including another person in the process.

Greg Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a member of the Modern Stoicism Team, an APPA-certified philosophical counselor, and teaches at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

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