Love

Why is guilt so often associated with love and relations? Should we banish guilt from our relations or is guilt a form of "ethical anxiety" towards an other, and thus desireable?

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Guilt, like pride, shame, and embarrassment, is an emotion of self-assessment; all these emotions, too, are social emotions, in that they involve reference to (real or imagined) relations to other people and our place in the social order. Given that guilt involves--one might even go so far as to say that it is at least in part constituted by--relations between the guilty party and some other party or parties, it is natural that it might arise in the context of love, understood as a loving relationship. Insofar as love is indeed a relationship--this, I think is a controversial claim: you might consider other entries on this site on love for other perspectives on love--then it would be natural that guilt, shame, and other social emotions would arise in the context of that relationship. What's distinctive of guilt, however, is a feeling of responsibility for an action that one regrets, an action, moreover, that violates authority or breaks rules--including, in this context, the rules constitutive of a loving relationship. Although it may be natural to feel guilt in the context of a relationship--including the relationships with other people that might be taken to be constitutive of morality--there is, however, a deep question whether guilt is justified. Indeed, Nietzsche sought to banish guilt as a manifestation of 'bad conscience'; in his rich and wonderful book, Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams gives a genealogy of guilt and its relation to shame. One suggestion that can be derived from Williams's book--a suggestion, moreover, which I take very much to be in the spirit of Nietzsche--is that guilt should perhaps be reconceived in terms of shame: rather than feeling guilty for what one has done, and seeing it as requiring reparation, in order to, as it were, make the social fabric whole again, perhaps the party in question should conceive of the action as reflecting who s/he is, and therefore calling instead for reparation. Regardless, however, of whether such a reconceptualisation can and should be undertaken--considerably more argument is needed in order to settle the matter, of course--it is unlikely, as a matter of natural fact, that social emotions should be extirpated, at least as long as there continue to be social relations.

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