Being Guilty

What can guilt, the painful sting of the bad conscience, tell us about who we are as human beings? This book seeks to answer this question through an examination of the views of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Wilhelm von Schelling, Arthur Schopenhauer, Paul Rée, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger on guilt, freedom, responsibility, and conscience. The concept of guilt has not received sufficient attention from scholars of the history of German philosophy. The book addresses this lacuna and shows how the philosophers’ arguments can be more deeply grasped once read in their historical context. A main claim of the book is that this history could be read as proceeding dialectically. Thus, in Kant, Schelling, and Schopenhauer, there are variations on the idea that guilt is justified because the human agent is a free cause of his or her own being—a causa sui—and thus responsible for his or her “ontological guilt.” In contrast, in Rée and Nietzsche, these ideas are rejected, and the conclusion is reached that guilt is not justified but is explainable psychologically. Finally, in Heidegger, we find a synthesis of sorts, where the idea of causa sui is rejected, but ontological guilt is retained and guilt is seen as possible, because for Heidegger, a condition of possibility of guilt is that we are ontologically guilty yet not causa sui. In the process of unfolding this trajectory, the various philosophers’ views on these and many other issues are examined in detail.