escape
"I am curious though why we work so hard to avoid guilt. I am aware its an unpleasent feeling but... the risks are too great, the costs too high to start to justify our actions to ourselves, excusing ourselves from our infinite debt to the other."(hineini)
posted by jollybeggar at
7:16 AM
3 Comments:
"I am curious though why we work so hard to avoid guilt. I am aware its an unpleasent feeling but... the risks are too great" (Hineini)
I have a rather two-sided answer on this.
(1) I rather like guilt - it makes me aware that I did something that crossed the line and offended (or hurt) another - a sort of 'wake-up' call - to make things right again. In that sense, I appreciate having guilt.
(2) I also live my life so as to avoid guilt. I do not like the feeling of doing wrong to others - so I develop values that might allow me to avoid this as much as possible. It doesn't always work and I have noticed this. But in the process, my values & actions get refined.
I was holding off on this one cause your answer societyvs kinda confused me. There seemed to be a few things going on here. Then, reading Levinas, I spotted what it was. Here is the text that helped me.
"Knowing becomes knowing of a fact only if it is at the same time critical, puts itself into question...This self-criticism can be understood as a discovery of one's weakness or a discovery of one's unworthiness - either as a consciousness of failure or a consciousness of guilt." (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 1969, 82-83)
Levinas goes on to argue that we conclude failure from our self-criticism because it doesn't limit our freedom and freedom is usually (though not for Levinas) seen as the highest good and this is where we derive politics from. Emphasizing freedom calls for a public order that is concerned with "reconciling my freedom with that of the others" (83)
He goes on to write;
"The first consciousness of my immorality is not my subordination to facts, but to the Other, to the Infinite. The idea of totality and the idea of infinity differ precisely in that the first is purely theoretical, while the second is moral."(ibid)
The theoretical here is the thoughts the self thinks, the thoughts and the reality over which the "I" is master and by which the other is dominated. This is "where the Other presents himself as interlocutor, as him over whom I cannot have power, whom I cannot kill, condition this shame, where, qua I, I am not innocent spontaneity but usurper and murderer." (84)
So the guilt I was talking about is not the effect of something we did wrong. That's the failure Levinas spoke of above and leaves me as free to place the other under my mastery by placing them in the totality, basiclly letting me define them. The guilt I was speaking of is prior to that, it's my unworthiness that call into question my freedom and leaves me in the debt of the other whom I must obey and cannot kill.
So societyvs, I appreciate your thoughts but the guilt I was trying to get at is prior to my acting, its a originary guilt, unavoidable and inescapeable.
"So societyvs, I appreciate your thoughts but the guilt I was trying to get at is prior to my acting, its a originary guilt, unavoidable and inescapeable." (Hineini)
Too deep for me? I think the idea has merit.
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