I, on the other hand, have no such reservations! Abandoning moral principles that shame you for your thoughts is one of the nicest things you can do for yourself, and I recommend that everyone do so immediately. These principles and the reaction of shaming yourself are pretty ingrained, so it takes some time to extricate the shame, but it's so worth it. You can even leave the rest of your morals untouched, since desiring doesn't affect the world around you or the people in it. Elizabeth accepting that she desires her brother-in-law doesn't mean she has to act on that desire. We all have dozens of desires every day that we don't act on for some reason or another. There is the argument that acknowledging your desire makes you more likely to act on it, but since both steps are fully under your control, that's a slippery slope argument.
Pre-Definitions
I'm going to be using the following terms to mean something outside of their normal usage. I'll define most of them in more detail later, but I also want to describe some in terms of others, so here's the quick definitions. Also, I like using scare-quotes for when I have to use a word I disagree with, so to separate them from normal quotations they will be in "spoooky blood red."
| Shame | Spook | Mastery |
|---|---|---|
|
Shame is the emotion you feel when doing something you're "not supposed to." It's generally felt during or after the "bad" act. I differentiate it from regret, which is being upset about having made a poor choice, and guilt, which is always retroactive but is otherwise pretty similar to shame. |
I'm taking this term from The Ego and Its Own, by Max Stirner. It refers to some belief you hold "above yourself," or in other words, a restriction you choose to place on yourself. Classic examples of spooks include religion (think ten commandments), property rights, moral systems, patriotism, and most "ought" statements. Non-spook beliefs are ideas that serve you, for example that "The cafe serves good stir fry on Thursdays", "I like stir fry", or most statements of fact. |
Mastery is a term from Julietta Singh's Unthinking Mastery, which she pointedly refuses to define. I will also be avoiding a definition, but to understand the term think of the meanings of "master" as both a position of physical power over another (master and slave), and as a position of intellectual or practical authority (master and apprentice, master pianist, master's degree). These are deeply related, as Singh points out: "a colonial master understands his superiority over others by virtue of his ability to have conquered them materially and by his insistence on the supremacy of his practices and worldviews over theirs, which renders 'legitimate' the forceful imposition of his worldviews." |
| Action Desire | State Desire | Repression |
|
A desire is when you want something, a concept so basic it's hard to define in terms of anything else. In this guide I make a distinction between "action desires" and "state desires." An action desire is a desire to do something immediate, like scratch an itch or eat stir fry. They tend to be related to basic needs (food, water, etc.) but can also include other impulses, like wanting to play Smash or check Twitter. |
A state desire is a desire for the world to be a certain way (in a certain state), such as a desire to be rich or to be done with your homework. For state desires there will normally be many ways to achieve the desired state, like winning the lottery or marrying rich or selling an app that lets you make it look like your pets are wearing your clothes to Facebook, and you don't necessarily care which path you take, just that you end up at the destination. I find this diagram to be a helpful visualization, all that matters is getting from A to B. |
Repression is used in the standard Freudian sense. The wikipedia page is pretty good, but if clicking that link is too much work, you can think of it as forcibly denying the existence of some facet of yourself. I'll be working through an example of repression later, so don't worry about fully understanding it now. |
Desire Shame
For this section, whenever I use the word "desire," I mean "action desire."
In Sigmund Freud's 1892 Studies in Hysteria, he discusses the case of a woman called Elizabeth von R. Elizabeth comes to Freud with the issue of a debilitating pain and soreness in her leg, which often hurts so much she can't walk. Freud quickly finds that her pain is psychosomatic (he calls it "hysterical"), meaning it's a physical pain replacing mental distress of some kind, often as a "symbolic expression of [the patient's] painful thoughts" (Freud 152). After a lengthy study and questioning, Freud and Elizabeth find that the primary cause of her pain was that she felt attraction to her dead sister's husband, and repressed that attraction as hard as possible. An extended quote from page 157 is useful here:
This girl felt towards her brother-in-law a tenderness whose acceptance into consciousness was resisted by her whole moral being. She succeeded in sparing herself the painful conviction that she loved her sister’s husband, by inducing physical pains in herself instead... The resistance with which she had repeatedly met the reproduction of scenes which operated traumatically corresponded in fact to the energy with which the incompatible idea had been forced out of her associations.
...The recovery of this repressed idea had a shattering effect on the poor girl. She cried aloud when I put the situation drily before her with the words: 'So for a long time you had been in love with your brother-in-law.' She complained at this moment of the most frightful pains, and made one last desperate effort to reject the explanation: it was not true, I had talked her into it, it could not be true, she was incapable of such wickedness, she could never forgive herself for it. It was easy to prove to her that what she herself had told me admitted of no other interpretation. But it was a long time before my two pieces of consolation—that we are not responsible for our feelings, and that her behaviour, the fact that she had fallen ill in these circumstances, was sufficient evidence of her moral character—it was a long time before these consolations of mine made any impression on her.
There's a lot to unpack! The main thing that's relevant is how Elizabeth's physical pain came about because it was less painful than the contradiction between her desire for her brother-in-law and her morals. Freud rephrases this elsewhere, saying if not for repression "she would also inevitably have become conscious of the contradiction between those feelings and her moral ideas and would have experienced mental torments like those I saw her go through after our analysis" (Freud 165). The torment of that contradiction is the pain of shame. In the brief moment when Elizabeth felt her attraction before repressing it, she must have felt immensely ashamed of herself. What is the purpose of this shame? Why this reaction to her desires?
I propose the function of shame is "a way of punishing yourself for failing to live up to a spook." In Elizabeth's case, the spook is her moral principle that "thou shalt not covet," which she fails to live up to because she felt a desire for her brother-in-law, and the shame she inflicts on herself as punishment is so terrible that it (indirectly) causes her so much pain that she can't walk. Shame is quite literally harming yourself. Viewing this in the best possible light, the process of shaming yourself can be thought of as an attempt to condition yourself (think Pavlov) to obey the spook. In the field of operant conditioning, which studies how animals, including humans, change their conscious behavior based on reward or punishment, this type of conditioning is called "positive punishment." Studies in operant conditioning have found that punishment is part of effective learning, which seems to point to shame as being useful for getting rid of unwanted desires. And while, for Elizabeth's example, most of us in the 21st century wouldn't view desire for your dead sister's husband as a strongly unwanted desire, there are plenty of desires we can imagine wanting to get rid of, like the desire to check Facebook, gamble, or live up to impossible beauty standards. If shame can help us there then why abandon it? It might be painful for a bit, but it helps in the long run to get rid of those "bad desires."
However, our friend Sigmund Freud has already seen the lie here. Operant conditioning studies conscious and voluntary behavior, but as Freud tells Elizabeth, "we are not responsible for our feelings." Desires are created on sub- or pre-conscious level, so they can't be trained in or out of existence. This matches up with anecdotal evidence from my own life and from people I've asked, as well as Elizabeth's example. Her painful shame nearly cripples her, and yet the desire that she's so ashamed of persists. All she manages to get from her pain is the repression, which means that she can live unware of her desire. It's important not to confuse this with the actual elimination of the desire, since all she's done is remove her awareness of that desire. Had she not re-realized the existence of her desire, she probably would have lived with the pain caused by its repression for the rest of her life. Put simply, shame doesn't work (at least for desires). Shame is harming yourself for no benefit.
In that case, what should one do about "bad desires?" Let's start by examining Freud. I'll draw out a few key facts he believes:
Immense pain is caused by contradictions between morals and desires ("a tenderness whose acceptance into consciousness was resisted by her whole moral being", "the contradiction between those feelings and her moral ideas... mental torments like those I saw her go through after our analysis.")
Humans have no control over what they desire ("we are not responsible for our feelings")
Therefore suffering horrible pain is evidence of being a good and moral person ("the fact that she had fallen ill in these circumstances, was sufficient evidence of her moral character")
Freud's logic here is correct, but I find his values somewhat warped. He's a doctor, so why is he exalting his patients' suffering? Freud is betraying his embeddedness in the values of his time period. As a reminder, this paper was written in Vienna, Austria, in 1892. The default morality saw a wide variety of behavior as sinful, but also asserted that even thinking of—let alone desiring—those sins, was a sin in itself. This comes from the Catholic counter-reformation expanding confessional to emphasize "all the insinuations of the flesh: thoughts, desires, voluptuous imaginings, delectations... shifting the most important moment of transgression from the act itself to the stirrings—so difficult to perceive and formulate—of desire" (Foucault 19). Regardless of Freud's personal views (his secular Judaism and later-life statements imply he may have thought more negatively about traditional morality than he lets on here) he probably didn't want to turn his "apolitical" case study into a far-reaching societal critique.
However, this is a deeply political topic. To counter the "western culture" Freud cannot escape, I find it helpful to turn to postcolonial theory, specifically Unthinking Mastery and its analysis of the notion of "Man". Singh writes that "Man here is defined as the being who is, or who can be, 'Master of himself.' He is not thinkable without this practice of mastery that inaugurates him as 'proprietor' of himself, who as Man becomes master of himself as property. This would mean that before 'Man' can mark himself out and become master/proprietor of himself, there has to be something ('himself') more primary, more diffuse, that enables the mastering but cannot be reduced to it" (Singh 13). I propose that the primary, diffuse "self" that is mastered is the full mind, conscious and subconscious, and every stray thought and desire it produces. Through shame and repression, this primary "self" is mastered, allowing only certain thoughts to rise to consciousness and be acknowledged. In fact, the language Singh uses to describe the creation of mastery is very similar to the language Freud uses to describe repression. Singh writes that "mastery involves splitting in either the sense of carving a boundary or an infliction of mutilation" (Singh 12) and that "mastery requires a rupturing of the object being mastered, because to be mastered means to be weakened to a point of fracture" (Singh 10). Freud says of Elizabeth, "her love for her brother-in-law was present in her consciousness like a foreign body, without having entered into relationship with the rest of her ideational life. With regard to these feelings she was in the peculiar situation ... in which a psychical group was cut off" (Freud 165), and even refers to repression as "splitting of consciousness" (Freud 167). The shameful desire is not part of the mastered self, the controlled "Man," and so it appears to be a foreign body despite having come from within Elizabeth's mind. In order to maintain self-mastery, Elizabeth fractures her mind, splits her consciousness. Elizabeth is master of herself both in that she wields psychic power over her thoughts, and also in that she holds a definitive knowledge of who she is and what thoughts/desires she has. The latter claim is supported by Elizabeth's flat-out denials to Freud: that "it could not be true" and "she was incapable of such wickedness." She holds a fixed image of herself and refuses to act outside of it or accept any facet of her "self" that doesn't fit (this is the concept of "bad faith" for those familiar).
Say That All Again But In English This Time Please
A lot of common moralities view having certain desires as bad, even if you don't act on them. This makes a lot of people feel ashamed of themselves for wanting to do certain things, even if they don't do them. For example, take two friends, Val and Lexi. Let's say Val gets mad at Lexi and wants to hit them. Even though Val doesn't actually hit them, because Val's desire to hit them is weaker than her desire to see Lexi happy, Val still feel ashamed of herself. This shame just hurts Val, and for no benefit. It isn't what prevented her from hitting Lexi, it doesn't get rid of her desire to hit Lexi, and it doesn't make her less likely to want to hit Lexi again at some point in the future. Val should therefore try to stop herself from feeling ashamed about this, by abandoning her principle that "it's wrong to want to hit someone." Remember that this is not the same thing as abandoning the idea that "it's wrong to hit someone."
Rooting Out Shame
You might remember the action desire/state desire distinction from the start of this page. It seems like so far we've been exclusively discussing action desires, since Elizabeth's attraction to her brother-in-law is an action desire to be intimate with him, and Val's desire to punch Lexi and their desire to see Lexi happy are both action desires. However, the state desires have been hiding in plain sight! All spooks are state desires, because to follow a spook is to desire yourself to be in a state of obeying that spook. A spook in the form of "thou shalt not X" creates a state desire to "be a person who does not do X." Elizabeth's morals are a state desire to be in the state of "being a morally upstanding woman," and Val's principle that "it's wrong to want to hit someone" is a state desire to "be a nice person" or maybe to "be a moral person." With this, we can rephrase the advice to abandon shame about desires as "abandon your state desires that are incompatible with you feeling certain action desires." This might seem contradictory, since so far I've been pretty insistent that you don't choose your desires. However, it's just action desires that are pre-conscious. We consciously choose what moral system, if any, to follow, what goals to have in life, and what religion to believe in. Many of these things may have been copied from parents or unquestioned. However, that doesn't mean one can't start questioning them now! Go crazy and have a wild night reading a bunch of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy pages on morality and ethics.
As a start to avoiding state desires that make you ashamed, it's helpful to figure out which state desires you even have. The best way to do this is to revert to being 3 years old, and ask yourself "why" over and over again every time you feel a state desire. For example, say you feel a state desire to have your homework done. Is desiring to have this homework done a core belief, a moral pillar on which you build your world? Probably not. A likely chain is:
I want my homework to be done.
Why?
Because I want to pass this class.
Why?
Because I want to get my degree.
Why?
Because I want to have a good job.
Why?
Because I want a stable adult life.
Why?
I dunno, just because.
So the state desire underlying your homework is the desire to "have a stable adult life." For Elizabeth's case, we can do a shorter chain:
I want to be in a state of not being attracted to my brother-in-law.
Why?
Because it's wicked to be attracted to your sister's husband.
Why do you care about being wicked?
Because I want to be a morally good person.
Why?
Because I do.
So while our analysis so far has mostly focused on letting go of the belief that "it's wicked to be attracted to your sister's husband," Elizabeth could have also avoided her pain by letting go of her desire to be a morally good person.
Wrapping Up
In the spirit of Unthinking Mastery, I offer this writing not as a set of principles or as an expert's advice on life philosophy (certainly not that lol), but as my attempt to share some things that helped me and my friends. Although I'd be flattered, making "obey Lacuna's Guide to Escaping Shame" your sole remaining state desire is an awful idea. Do with this writing what you will!
Sources
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Pantheon Books, 1978.
Freud, Sigmund, et al. Studies on Hysteria. Basic Books, 2000.
Singh, Julietta. Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements. Duke University Press, 2018.
Thanks also to C., L., and P. for talking through these ideas with me!