Abstract

This essay is broadly conceived as a study of how the emotional experience of shame can play an important role in the construction of personal identity. It considers, on the one hand, the way in which Greek culture conceives the social meaning of this emotion and, on the other, the double representation that Plato provides in the Symposium of two very different forms of pedagogy of shame. Using the Platonic text as a phenomenological source, the author discusses the general validity and relevance to the Greek world of the anthropological scheme that opposes «shame cultures» to «guilt cultures», attributing evolutionary primacy to the latter in terms of the acquisition of individual moral autonomy.