Essenza ed etica della vergogna: la lettura fenomenologica di Max Scheler

Shame is an emotion with a particularly problematic ethical status. In the contemporary philosophical panorama it represents an open question. The aim of this study is to show how Max Scheler's phenomenology of emotional life is a valuable tool for define, in rigorously way, the ethical problem of shame. After having clarified, in the first paragraph, the importance of shame within the revaluation of emotional life in Scheler's account, in the second paragraph its main phenomenological characteristics will be addressed, both with respect to its intentional structure and its protective function. Finally, conclusions will be drawn about the ethical role that this emotion has played and can still play.