Damaging Self-Love, Pride and Shame

In the New Scientist of 28/04/12 Laura Spinney examines whether too high self esteem damages us. Self-love is related to though not identical to self esteem. In this posting I will argue some forms of self-love are damaging but not by being excessive like too much self esteem. Rather I will argue that damaging forms are in some ways incomplete forms of self-love. Before setting out I must make it clear I believe we must of necessity love ourselves to some degree. For instance Frankfurt believes caring about and loving are equivalent. (1) He suggests caring about oneself is necessary to be a person,

“perhaps caring about oneself is essential to being a person. Can something to whom its own condition and activities do not matter in the slightest properly be regarded as a person at all. Perhaps nothing that is entirely indifferent to itself is really a person, regardless of how intelligent or emotional or in other respects similar to persons it may be. There could not be a person of no importance to himself.” (2)

If we accept Frankfurt’s position, which I do, it follows a person must of necessity love himself. However if a person loves himself so much that he ignores or even harms those close to him his self-love is damaging.

Unfortunately the idea of love as based simply on ‘caring about’ isn’t a very useful concept in examining damaging forms of self-love. If we accept Frankfurt’s account of love then a damaging form of self-love is perhaps one in which someone simply ‘cares about’ himself too much. But Frankfurt’s account offers us no idea of how much self-love is too much. In order to overcome this problem I will turn to Bennett Helm’s account of love (3). I will argue that damaging forms of self-love are not defined by the degree of love but rather by a lack of something. I will argue that damaging self-love is deficient.

Helm holds like Frankfurt that if someone is to be considered of as a person at all he must of necessity love himself. However unlike Frankfurt he does not believe that everything someone cares about is a form of love and defines him as a person. Helm links our identity to the things we value, our values. It is important to note what we value need not be identical with the values we explicitly identify with. Cocaine may be of value to me but when I reflect I might wish it wasn’t. Helm believes valuing is not just caring about something a lot, it is caring about something which is connected to your identity. According to Helm,

“for something to have value for one is for it to be the focus of a projectible pattern of felt evaluations. Because what is at stake in one’s values are oneself and one’s own wellbeing as this person, and because values involve an implicit understanding of the kind of life it is worth one’s living, the felt evaluations constitutive of this pattern …. are emotions like pride and shame.” (4).

A felt evaluation is an emotion which is focussed on something linked in some rational way to other emotions with the same focus. For instance, if I feel anxiety focussed on driving in dense traffic then it is rational that I should feel relief when driving in traffic if the traffic is less dense than I had anticipated. Helm argues when my focus is on me, on my values, the felt evaluations are pride and shame together with some second degree emotions, emotions about emotions. Helm holds someone’s pride and shame are a kind of attention, a kind of vigilance, about himself and his identity and that this attention or vigilance is a form of self-love. I don’t want to go into Helm’s position in greater detail but I do want to accept that someone who cannot feel pride and shame cannot truly love himself.

Accepting Helm’s ideas about the importance of pride and shame means we are now in a position to be able to see why some forms self-love might be damaging. It might be suggested that if someone has too much self-love he has excessive pride. However if someone must of necessity love himself then from the above he must at least have some pride. Nonetheless it is clear pride can damage us. Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is a deficient character who is damaged by what most people describe as his excessive pride. I will now argue what is usually described as excessive pride might be better described as either empty or exclusive pride. I will start my argument with empty pride. If someone is proud about something then intuitively it should be something which he believes to be good, which he desires and something or some quality he believes he possesses. If his pride is simply focussed on himself, rather than some of the attributes he possesses or values he holds, then it seems to me his pride is of a deficient form. Helm argues someone’s pride in his values helps to form his identity; it follows that if someone’s pride bypasses his values and simply focuses on himself it doesn’t really focus on anything at all and as a result is an empty and hence deficient form of pride.

I now want to turn to what I mean by exclusive pride. Coriolanus had real achievements to be proud of and so his pride was not simply empty pride. Nonetheless Coriolanus was damaged by his pride. An excellent discussion of Coriolanus and his pride is given by Gabriele Taylor (4). Taylor argues Coriolanus’ pride was an arrogant pride and that it was this arrogance that damaged him. I do not disagree with Taylor that Coriolanus’ arrogance damaged him but would suggest that his arrogance was due to the exclusivity of his pride. Helm argues if someone genuinely loves himself that he must feel both pride and shame. I would define exclusive pride as the pride someone feels who doesn’t or is incapable of feeling any shame. If we accept that someone must of necessity love himself and that Helm is correct, when he argues that to truly love oneself someone must be capable of feeling both pride and shame, then someone who feels exclusive pride is damaged as a person. Taylor suggests Coriolanus is damaged as a person because he lives in a world apart seeing himself as sole arbitrator of right and wrong. Coriolanus has limited perspective meaning he does not have the ability to change his focus. This inability to broaden his perspective is caused by his exclusive pride which excludes shame. I would suggest that the same argument can be applied to exclusive shame but I will not repeat the argument here.

Let us accept that the ability to feel both pride and shame is necessary for us if we are to love ourselves in a way that doesn’t damage us as individuals. In practice of course most people do feel both pride and shame. Nonetheless it appears to me that the balance between them has shifted and shame plays a less important part in most people’s psyche. Perhaps this shift was needed in the past. For instance in the past some Gay people were ashamed of their homosexuality and this unjustified shame led them to lead inauthentic lives. However it also seems to me this shift has gone too far so that it damages both individuals and society. For instance the fact that this shift has occurred at the same time as drunken behaviour in major UK cities has increased might well be significant.

1.      Frankfurt, 1999, Necessity, Volition, and Love, Cambridge University Press. Page 129.

2.       Necessity, Volition, and Love, page 90

3.      Bennett Helm, 2010, Love, Friendship & the Self, Oxford.

4.      Helm, page 109.

5.      Gabriele Taylor, 2006, Deadly Vices, Oxford, chapter 5.

6.      Taylor, page 79.