Shame in the philosophical narrative of Being and Nothingness

Abstract

This paper discusses the relevance as well as the conceptual place, within Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, for the fleeting impression of shame that reverts the threat of solipsism looming over any project of transcendental philosophy. In reading Sartre’s masterpiece, I underline two methodological points, which tend to be bypassed in standard interpretations or lengthy discussions of the book. On the one hand, I safeguard the strictly descriptive core in Sartre’s presentation of an impression of shame, and what it reveals about the formal structures of the cogito, as Sartre understands it. On the other hand, my analysis keeps abreast of the different phases in the (conceptual) narrative of the For-Itself, which Sartre inherits from the Idealist tradition in modern philosophy and applies to the concreteness of a phenomenological description of the main stages of one’s experience of the outside world. The paper is thus keen on being faithful to the description of the precise role Sartre ascribes to shame within his conceptual narrative of the different stages the For-Itself undergoes, while examining the details of the impression thus described and how it fits with both intuitive and theoretical accounts of this highly nuanced moral emotion.