Abstract

The title, "The Nature of Shyness ," reveals the dissertation's subject and method. The primary purpose of the dissertation was to achieve an insightful grasp of the essence of shyness, a phenomenological attempt to map out the structure of shyness, to say what it is by essence, and to understand it. In light of the phenomenological method, which in this case follows Dietrich von Hildebrand, Max Scheler, and others in which Munich Phenomenological school, our approach has been to "look" to shyness in its self-givenness, especially trying to discover necessary, constitutive elements--those elements which must exist, or else there could be no such essence. ;"Shyness" can refer to many things. We, however, use the term to designate a negative personal reality which is distinct from positive phenomena, no matter how similar in some outward manifestations, such as the "shyness" of humility, of modesty, of innocence, of young love, of wonder of awe, and of tender regard for one's own or another's personal center. ;If one were to summarize the shyness we have investigated, then something like the following definition would result. Shyness is a negative personal experience marked by inhibition and incapacitation, a sense of failure, inferiority feelings, a temporary loss of esteem, sometimes accompanied by embarrassment. The shy person is one who is involved in a dynamic of "adequacy." This is, he is compelled to "perform" according to criteria to which he must measure up when in the presence of other people . The criteria of adequacy are idealistic, borne out of the shy person's sense of what it is like not to be socially incapacitated and inhibited. A capsule definition of shyness is that "shyness" is the experience of inhibition and tension arising out of the need to perform in a socially ideal manner, the failure of which is broadly perceived as personally denigrative." ;A secondary purpose of the paper was to seek curative attitudes which possessed meaning structures opposed to those of shyness. The self-donating, the humble, the value oriented, and the authentic man who lives without disguise or guardedness are men who possess such attitudes. Learning and adopting these essentially curative attitudes, the shy person may diminish or lose his shyness