Guilt is the result of the clash between the ideal and the real.
Thoughts?
people decieve themselves, confuse themselves between the ideal and the real - so they are too busy doing that to feel guilty, unless i guessed your one liner the wrong way of course…
guilt is aroused by doing mysterious deeds - nietzsche
I will elaborate on how and why I drew this conclusion later on.
However, I feel there is truth in this statement that I have made, and was curious as to what the gallerys reactions and interpretations would look like minus the explaination.
fair enough… but in that case, how does my contribution relate to your explaination? or should we just concentrate on nietzsche’s explaination now… and how would you relate nietzsche to your explaination
Althought this is true on many levels, it doesn’t really relate directly to my intended direction.
I am speaking of the ideal, as in someones idea about how it is ‘suposed to be’
Whereas the real is ‘how it is’
you have to bare with me if something too far out of expectation come out here, as there is a lot of guessing being involved… but that’s exactly what i meant by the two words too
shit! i was “supposed to” go to the lecture, but i “didn’t” actually go. do i feel guilty? not really. the only thing i feel is that it’d be a fuckup situ if i missed some important notes
fuck! i was “supposed to” wear a sock, but i “didn’t” actually wear it. do i feel guilty? not really. the only thing that i feel is that it’d be a nightmare if i become a daddy at 20
… so my conclusion so far: the failure of meeting the supposed scenario, would excert a fear of potential adverse consequence. the mismatch between expectation and result is not really connected to a moral judgment
i stand by nietzsche
With some of the recent thinking I’ve been doing, I think that might be spot on. As you say, we often have some ideal about how things are supposed to be; that is, we take the realization of a certain ideal to be morally valueable. In buddhist language, we are “attached” to the ideal. We emotionally believe (“feel”) that it “must” be realized, not simply for the sake of positive phenomenal consequences, but also for the sake of satisfying some mysterious moral purpose. If we cannot realize the ideal, rather than just accepting what’s bad about this to be nothing more than the consequences of not realizing it, in addition we feel guilt due to not being able to make things accord with how we feel they are supposed to be.
Perhaps this requires a broader than usual conception of “guilt”; I’m not sure.
There is a difference between recognizing, rationally, that you are ‘supposed to’ do something due to the consequences of failing to do it, and emotionally believing that the state of things is ‘supposed to’ fit a certain ideal. The former is perfectly rational, and the latter is an irrational craving for things to be a certain way.
Iss
i’m not sure what you mean. the ideal and the real in what domain? what you did? what you are?
i read once that shame is a result of a failure of being, guilt is a result of a failure of doing. maybe that’s a little too convenient, though.
i read once that guilt is the futile attempt of the soul to go back into the past and correct its mistake. or maybe that’s regret. and that not being able to go into the past (perhaps as incarnated beings?) is necessary for our evolution.
i read once that guilt is the poison that kills the plant, the plight upon the land. you don’t need guilt to tell you what you did wrong, awareness does that. although this doesn’t strictly clear up how one would define guilt.
i do believe it is the terrible awareness that you caused something totally in opposition to what you hold most important. the well-being and enrichment of others. i wonder, do we make ourselves feel bad as a ploy to emotionally program ourselves not to make the same mistake again? nah… i think it just has to do with negative self-image. when you do something, you figure, well, that must be who i am.
And to an extent it is, who you are inside manifests on the outside until you become aware and make the changes.
A
Maybe the ideal state here is our self-actualized state, our highest expression. What we are striving to be. What we know ourselves to be. Guilt must occur once we fail to act according to this, as we always do in our sttruggle to become what we are, when the consequences are particularly negative. I wonder, whether it’s because we can’t help but love our every action, call it our own. So, our positive self-image is ‘poured’ into this strand which is an action we deem less than we are, or, less than what we ‘should be’.
if i’m right, i guess i’m obligated to provide a solution. thinks the solution is that we create or recreate ourselves in every moment. if one does something he thinks is less than what he is, should be, or wants to be, he should recreate himself as one who wouldn’t make that mistake if the situation arose again. one can even call upon a like situation to arise with thought.
the funny thing is the opposite might happen too. the outside does something and the inside reasons that’s what it is and then repeats the behavior. maybe that’s how we even maintain and develop an identity.
inhahe,
Actually the outside does nothing. Your environment is a product of who you are and who we are collectively. The environment can control you only if you allow it to, then you are being controlled by an external. Yet, who you are truly can be manifested in the environment. Hence people’s enviroments are different.
Am I making any sense?
A
true
but what i meant was that you can do something which is more of a decision through ambiguity or uncertainty or other people’s thoughts - or fear - and then unconsciously decide that that’s who you are, thus being the reverse of who you are determining what you do. i think this might happen sometimes, i wonder if happens all the time, with all of your actions. even the ones that come from within you - making your actions pivotal to your path in identity.
it may be no coincidence that Conversations with God says, if you want to change the way you think, do the action you would do if you thought differently, then then talk about what you did.
inhahe,
In NA there is a saying. Fake it till you make it. This is fundamental to anyone wishing to make any changes. But what will we change about ourselves and according to what truths?
A
Inhahhe,
I think that’s correct. We tend to believe, at an emotional level, that there is a Self that transcends our experience, which flourishes with our successes (that is, realizations of how we feel we’re supposed to be) and is damaged by our failures. Rather than taking life to just be about enjoying the many interesting things that can be experienced in life, we’re attached to a “this is how my life is supposed to be†because we feel that realizing it constitutes the Self flourishing. But, there is no such Self; there is only experience. Thus, failure to realize a certain ideal should entail no more than the consequences of such failure; that is, there is no reason that, on top of the negative consequences themselves, we should also feel guilt over the negative consequences.
Perhaps I should give a brief illustration, incase my abstract language above does not signify anything concrete to the reader. Imagine an NBA basketball player who is accustomed to getting plenty of playing time, but then suddenly gets into a ‘funk’ and can’t seem to do the skillful things that had previously just come naturally. The coach benches him, and he gets very frustrated over this because he feels that he’s being deprived of the playing time that he’s entitled to have. What’s bad (in his perspective) about losing playing time is not simply the fact that he can’t any longer enjoy the experience of playing (and must instead enjoy the experience of watching his team play like a fan with a front-row seat), but also the fact that losing playing time prevents him from realizing his ideal about how his life must be in order for “him†to be successful.
Perhaps it is not necessary at all that we suppose that there is a transcendent Self. Certainly, this is a deeply ingrained feeling, but those who have spent years and years meditating have claimed that this feeling can be uprooted altogether. I can say that I’ve at least felt I’ve felt less attached to things at times.
Iss
the primary concern under any circumstance is consequence. morality is independent of consequence, as it’s not rational whereas consequence is. if morality depends on consequence then it becomes rational - it becomes super-morality, which is no longer the same. guilt is morality proper, so it is impossible under any circumstance in this context
Hello, let me now further clarify what I meant by the statement
Guilt is the result of the clash between the ideal and the real.
Let’s start with an example of a situation in which the average person would feel guilt. Let’s say someone steals food, because they are hungry. The person is wracked with guilt, because his his ideals tell him that stealing is ‘wrong’. Reality told him he was starving, driving him to commit the act. Hence the clash.
If the ideal is eliminated in this situation (that it is wrong to steal) the guilt is also eliminated.
If the real is eliminated, (being unbearably hungry), so also is the guilt.
Let’s look at a second, less noble example. Say a man rapes a woman, simply because he is aroused and is a general dirt bag. But he still, deep down, idealy believes rape is ‘wrong’, and lives wracked by guilt.
Again, eliminate either the ideal or the real from this scenario, and so also removed is the guilt.
Every example I can think of plays out the same way. This leads me to conclude that:
To live free of guilt one must eliminate either the ideal or the real.
Thoughts?
Uniqor,
I don’t understand why you say that morality proper is impossible in this context. Note that even a view that we have a ‘duty’ to be happy is a moral view, since rather than taking happiness as good for its own sake, it posits that we ought to be happy for the sake of some other, “higher†purpose. Often the ideals to which we become attached are indeed conducive to positive phenomenal consequences (that is, enjoyable experience), but that does not mean that we don’t also feel that these ideals are valuable for reasons beyond enjoyable experience.
Iss
i’m not sure where this is going iss. dr santatical’s delayed explaination makes the situation messy. without the same context, the arguement can’t be continued. think i’ll just try to clarify my points
on accomplishing a deed, possible consequence is on top of the doer’s head. rationality is employed for the evaluation. whatever the conclusion might be, the doer won’t assert any moral judgment based on it. for morality is beyond any actual consequence - otherwise how could anyone apply morality to any case beforehand without actually being invloved? in the case of christian dogmas, the bible cares not about the details, it tells one what principles should be followed regardless of conditions. so, morality is to be applied to events, not to be deduced from them
however, if the doer starts to complex the situation by relating morality to the consequence rationally (as rationally as he could), his fundmentally irrational moral principles no longer hold - conflicts and paradoxes would occur in front of him. it then becomes and intellectual mess, as it so often happens with ethics. even the most refined moral codes can’t be free from this destinated trouble - otherwise why would christdom be divided into three branches
as far as guilt is concerned, the doer would find it easy to come up with all sorts of excuses to spare him the guilt. this moral flexibility is because as stated above, that morality does not work well. the rational and irrational mixture is doomed to fail. one must understand guilt from its irrational original basis, which is the realm of morality proper. on that issue, i still stand by nietzsche: guilt hides in the mysterious.
Guilt is an emotional response that we (most of us) are taught as children by our parents. The “ideal” is what our parents and other role models expect of us. The “real” is what we do that doesn’t live up to those expectations (how this is more real than the ideal, I do not know, but this isn’t my model). Those who don’t feel guilt we call pathological. They simply don’t recognize an ideal to live up to. We can overcome guilt when we overcome ideals. But these ideals are taught, and not objectively true in any way. They may seem that way because we learn them at such an early stage of cognitive development.
This is a psychological matter only. We are not taught to have emotions per se, but we are taught which are appropriate at a given time.