Is guilt a natural feeling? Would we feel guilt if it wasn’t for what society/people deem as right and wrong?
Are we all guilty?
Without prior socialization I doubt we’d feel ‘guilt’ as you and I understand it. Although, should occasion arise, we would most certainly have the capacity to feel some sort of negative emotion, though we lack the vocabulary to properly define it.
Well I’m an atheist so I don’t have guilt. I’m not responsible for any of my actions. Fuck you, world!
If we feel it, it is natural.
Lets say you lived alone and failed to gather food for the next day. How would you feel the next day when you are hungry? You would feel remorse over being lazy or forgetful, right? Well that is all guilt is remorse, regret. The word guilt is used as a control word that is the only difference.
Mother’s have been guilting their kids into proper behavior for as long as human’s can remember. ROFL Some are artists at it.
What isn´t natural then?
ON THE MONEY! Lacan famously looked at the difference between America and Japan as an example of this. America’s norm is the internalization of guilt while Japans norm is the abundantly outward expression of shame. Zizek discusses this, among other related things, in Reflections of Media and Politics and Cinema. Well worth the read!
I generally think that the guilt vs. shame culture is a superficial analysis at best, and is absurdly racist at worst. Clearly people in all cultures are driven by both guilt and shame – Americans routinely break laws and moral codes when no one is looking (speeding, affairs, ect.) and Japanese routinely feel “guilt” when they do something wrong and no one is looking (the rate of theft is quite low in Japan – a friend of mine accidentally left his camera on a bench in a park in Tokyo. When he came back a full 24 hours later, it was still there, people still obey traffic laws when no one is looking, ect.).
The only difference between guilt and shame is the recognition of the other, and every culture has a mix of both recognition and forgetfulness. I’ve yet to see any analysis that goes beyond a caricature that adequately demonstrates that ratio is horribly skewed in one culture vs. another.
Cultural expression? Well, that is another thing. But saying, “I love you” in America vs. in Germany has an entirely different context despite being the same actual statement. The notion that different expressions hold similar meanings in other cultures shouldn’t surprise us either.
That’s fair. And I am glad you brought it up. This is a risk in any comparison of cultures.
I don’t think anyone would argue that it’s either/or guilt/shame.
This seems true enough that every culture does have a delicate mix of guilt/shame (if they really are significantly psychologically different) but in some cultures there appears to be a pronounced bias towards one or the other. Take Catholic internalization of Guilt as an example.
I too would like to see a more complete study done or find the work Lacan himself did on this subject. (Though I question if it would do me much good- I probably would understand 10 maybe 20 percent of its content.)
guilt is our conscience
Grape soda
The likes of Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas and Margaret Meade are hardly the epitomes of racism.
Of course, those who understand how guilt is a motiviating factor in the cultures evolving out of the Catholic West have become very adept at using such an emotion as an effective tool to try to stifle wthe will to power of western culture.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Benedict
Ruth Benedict (born Ruth Fulton, June 5, 1887–September 17, 1948) was an American anthropologist.
She was born in New York City, and attended Vassar College, graduating in 1909. She entered graduate studies at Columbia University in 1919, studying under Franz Boas, receiving her PhD and joining the faculty in 1923. Margaret Mead, with whom she may have shared a romantic relationship, and Marvin Opler were among her students and colleagues.
Franz Boas, her teacher and mentor, has been called the father of American anthropology and his teachings and point of view are clearly evident in Benedict’s work. Boas is author of many classic works including Race, Language, and Culture—perhaps the most potent anti-racist text to emerge from the academic world in his time. In it Boas attempts to prove that race, language, and culture are independent. After Boas, it was no longer possible to say that any given race was inferior, incapable of the highest culture humanity had to offer, and still be taken seriously. Ruth Benedict was affected by the passionate egalitarianism of Boas, her mentor, and continued it in her research and writing.
…
Benedict is known not only for her earlier Patterns of Culture but also for her later book The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, the study of the society and culture of Japan that she published in 1946, incorporating results of her war-time research.
This book is an instance of Anthropology at a Distance. Study of a culture through its literature, through newspaper clippings, through films and recordings, etc., was necessary when anthropologists aided the United States and its allies in World War II. Unable to visit Nazi Germany or Japan under Hirohito, anthropologists made use of the cultural materials produced studies at a distance. They were attempting to understand the cultural patterns that might be driving their aggression, and hoped to find possible weaknesses, or means of persuasion that had been missed.
Benedict’s war work included a major study, largely completed in 1944, aimed at understanding Japanese culture; for the Allies were in combat with Japanese armed forces in the Pacific Theatre of the Second World War.
Americans found themselves unable to comprehend matters in Japanese culture. For instance, Americans considered it quite natural for American prisoner of wars to want their families to know they were alive, and to keep quiet when asked for information about troop movements, etc., while Japanese POWs, apparently, gave information freely and did not try to contact their families. Why was that? Why, too, did Asian peoples neither treat the Japanese as their liberators from Western colonialism, nor accept their own supposedly obviously just place in a hierarchy that had Japanese at the top?
Benedict played a major role in grasping the place of the Emperor of Japan in Japanese popular culture, and formulating the recommendation to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that permitting continuation of the Emperor’s reign had to be part of the eventual surrender offer.
While one critic has written that The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is “long since… discredited since Benedict had no direct experience in Japan” and described it as “considered shallow and overtly racist”, the Japanese ambassador to Pakistan stated this in a public address:
In 1946, Ruth Benedict, a well-known American cultural anthropologist, published a book on Japan entitled “The Chrysanthemum and The Swordâ€, which has been a must reading for many students of Japanese studies.
Guilt=conscience=moral compass?
Wrong.
Guilt informs our conscience…
conscience=moral compass perhaps…
guilt = a social construct that associates itself with regrettable thoughts/feelings/deed(s) etc.
We use our conscience to determine what is moral but it doesn’t equal guilt. It sounds like you’ve been morally repressed by associating guilt with conscience in that you equate the two as being one and call it a negative experience when it can be conversely positive, in an overcoming of the present situation through good conscience that one ends up feeling good about their conscience.
I don’t know the wiki article said it was racist- so if someone saw fit to mention it then there may be some grain of truth. You have peeked my intrest. Thanks for the post! Very informative. HOWEVER- you could have just given us the link instead of copying from the Wiki.
Nor is ecstasy but I feel that.
I happen to agree with the Japanese Ambassador on this one. I mean, really, what sort of conclusions would I draw from American culture if my only window into it was newspaper clippings, TV shows, and books? A superficial and grossly misinformed one, that is what. Now, if one actually has a solid understanding of the culture, then using those tools for analysis can be meaningful. But without understanding the cultural significance of absolutely anything and everything said, there is no way such an analysis can mean anything.
Koizumi was a very devout shinto. I mean, he was always going to the Yasukuni Shrine to pray. Good for him.
is that the drug or the emotIon? Ecstasy the emotion is more like a combonation of emotions rather than just one. And Emotions are natural. How can they not be?
i meant the drug, meaning that something “unnatural” can be felt by the emotions. i don´t know what saying “if we feel it, it is natural” means, i.e. how can we feel something that isn´t natural?
Ahhhh, Ok well all emotions are natural but, that which triggers emotions does not have to be natural. Triggers are generally outside influences to our state of being. The exception might be memories or thoughts, these are natural to our bodies and not an outside trigger. Well some could argue the opposite.
The drug is a trigger. You are not feeling the drug but, the emotions triggered by the drug. We don’t feel a baby laughing but, we do feel the joy the baby laughter triggers within us.
Is that clearer?
Hmm, think of a piano. The key pushes a hammer to strike a wire to make a noise. Is it the key making the noise? Or the hammer or the string? Or is it the vibrations from the string?
Certainly, and I agree with what you say. In relation to the above “Is guilt natural?” then, the answer can only be yes? So internal triggers (by definition) are natural? As for external triggers, I´m never sure how one can class some as natural and some as unnatural, or whether the latter should be welcomed and the latter avoided. People tend to think that something being unnatural means the particular feeling it evokes/induces is bad. But if guilt is only learned from parents, and thus we aren´t really naturally guilty, wouldn´t that mean we are really bad (because it must come unnaturally)?!
Sorry I only just saw this bit. I´d limit it to the last sentence, because it´s the tightest description needed to explain sound. Talk about the key and you could talk about the pianist, and so on. But what does this all mean?