Abstract

The objective of this investigation is to examine and analyze the motivational aspect of shame with respect to the process of self-transformation within the general framework of the Virtue Ethics tradition. Shame is often regarded as a moral emotion of self-assessment and self-protection. Some of its salient characteristics include: failed expectations, the inability to manifest the ideal self, sudden undesired exposure, the significance and nature of an audience , the metaphorical eye of shame, the underlying threat of loss and abandonment, and the tendency to withdraw from the company of others. Although diverse and various reactions to the experience of shame are possible, this research focuses upon one particular strategic and preventive response, viz., self-transformation through virtue acquisition. A philosophically based conceptual model of the self-transformational process is suggested. This model serves to elucidate some of the cognitive processes, mechanisms, and multi-ordered conceptual structures that underlie the process of self-transformation. In effect, the experience of shame can trigger an integrative reconfiguration process that promotes a more cohesive, meaningfully integrated self, or it can trigger a disintegrative reconfiguration process that results in a more internally conflicted, less cohesive, dissociated sense of self. Thus, given shame's conceptual and psychological relationship to self-evaluation and self-identity, the moral agent is motivated to recreate or transform the self through a dynamic psychological process of cognitive reconfiguration and structural reorganization