Introduction

The study of embarrassment may seem a small and insignificant enterprise, and yet it raises some important psychological, moral, and philosophical issues. It turns, in part, on the nature of the human self and its relation to the fact of embodiment. Embarrassment often is a very bodily emotion. This is not only through the emphasis on the body's presence on occasions of embarrassment but also through the way that my personal presence is mediated to others by my visible, audible, tangible, tastable, and smellable body. In our culture, smell and taste are not usually signs of the tangible presence of bodies. For us, it is the fact that I can be looked at, that the lumpish presence of my body can never be denied when I am in company, that means that I can hardly achieve presence without vulnerability. Hence the importance of masks, burkhas, cloaks, and so on in the achievement of presence without the chance of embarrassment. Where would a Mozart opera be without them?

But embarrassment is also an emotion characteristic of situations in which personal conduct becomes an object of a public consideration and judgement of which the actor is either aware or believes himself or her-self to be aware. I hope to be able to show through the study of embarrassment how conduct and personal appearance are linked through the grounding of rules and conventions of propriety in conceptions of personal honour. This should provide a general account of the emotions of self-attention that will transcend the enormous variety of kinds of conducts and bodily exposures that are locally taken to be discrediting.