Dynamic Transcendentals: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty from a Thomistic Perspective

6. The Experience of Vulnerability and Shame

108  Beauty, Order, and Teleology 108   The Experience of Vulnerability and Shame Since 9/11 in New York we have learned in an unexpected and tragic way what it means to be vulnerable, and perhaps this experience has allowed our country to come of age, so to speak. While vulnerability and dependence form part of human existence , few philosophical studies throughout the course of historyhaveaddressedtheseaspectsofourfragilecondition .Western moral philosophy, as Alasdair MacIntyre remarkably advances in Dependent Rational Animals, generally depicts moral agents as though they were always rational, healthy, and untroubled. To cite a case in point, MacIntyre refers to Adam Smith who in his Theory of Moral Sentiments asserts that the “pleasures of wealth and greatness ... strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful,” while in instances of illness and old age we are more apt to recognize the false illusions and deception to which such pleasures lead.1 Rather than embrace a “splenetic philosophy,” however, Smith concedes that the illusions about the acquisition of wealth and greatness, fostered by the imagination of those in good health and humor, are “economically chapter 6 1. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), 2. Vulnerability and Shame  109 beneficial illusions” and “keep in continual motion the industry of mankind.”2 So, rather than confront the transitory character of extrinsic goods such as money and fame, and acknowledge the vulnerability and affliction that mark the human condition, we generally prefer to forego such considerations and thus continue to live by imagination and illusion—by that illusion that we are somehow self-sufficient and superior, as Aristotle’s megalopsychos .3 Such a way of understanding ourselves is highly inadequate, since the experience of vulnerability, the capacity to be injured or harmed, and to thus feel pain and suffering, can unveil to us a profound and essential dimension of human existence. In an essay titled “Self-Interpreting Animals,” Charles Taylor devotes particular consideration to the experience of shame: we may be ashamed of wrong-doing, but shame can also be caused by the lack of certain properties that are essentially attributed to human persons. Because of this lack, I would say that we are vulnerable, afflicted, and thus pained. According to Taylor , a man may, for example, be ashamed of his shrill voice or his effeminate hands: “A shrill voice is ... something unmanly , betokens hysteria, not something solid, strong, macho, selfcontained . It does not radiate a sense of strength, capacity, superiority . Effeminate hands are—effeminate. Both voice and hands clash with what I aspire to be, feel that my dignity demands that I be, as a person, a presence among others.”4 The experience of shame or humiliation thus shows us to have some degrading property, or to be base, dishonorable. The shameful or humiliating also refers to the way we see ourselves and to the way we are seen by others. As Taylor puts it, “Something only offends my dignity because it upsets or challenges the way 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Charles Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” in Human Agency and Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 53. 110  Beauty, Order, and Teleology 110  Beauty, Order, and Teleology I present, project, or express myself in public space.”5 There is then in this sort of experience of the shameful an aspiration to dignity or excellence, to the quality of being worthy or honorable , but at the same time the experience of reproach and disapproval —disapproval either by others or by oneself. What produces shame or humiliation is opposed to the “grand and beautiful” of which Adam Smith speaks; shame is rather always concerned with the ugly. The purpose of this essay will be first to consider the experience of vulnerability in reference to the beautiful and the ugly in their external and internal dimensions, and what such an experience can tell us about ourselves and about the meaning of different types of goods. Secondly, I will attempt to show that the vulnerability that is ours due to our bodily existence is surpassed by a vulnerability freely accepted for the sake of a greater good. This second type of vulnerability requires a certain maturity in freedom and the recognition that fullness of life is not contingent on what might be called the wisdom of the world. To this type of wisdom, we will contrast “the wisdom of the cross.” So, in the third instance in this essay I will explore what...