I don't mean feelings of guilt about any particular sin or sins, though I am not without those too. I mean what I think of as "free-floating guilt," guilt that bears no particular relationship to anything I have done.
Googling that phrase, "free-floating guilt," led me to The Existential Philosopher's Museum on the website of James Park, who calls the phenomenon "existential guilt." Park is an existential philosopher and author who advocates Unitarian Universalism as a religious stance.
I'm about to start investigating Park's sprawling website, but I have to admit I'm not really crazy about delving into existentialism and enlarging on what little I know about Unitarian Universalism, both of which I think of as somehow "godless." Yet I'm intrigued by Park's "Five Differences between Moral Conscience and Existential Guilt" which appear in a table about two-thirds of the way down this page.
Park says that moral conscience is remorse for particular misdeeds and omissions, while existential guilt is characteristically free-floating and non-specific. Well, I do have some specific misdeeds and omissions that I feel (some degree of) remorse for, but mostly what I feel is free-floating and non-specific guilt. So, check.
Park says that pangs of moral conscience are caused by the discrepancy between our actual behavior and our standards. In that sense, they are rationally justified. Existential guilt is uncaused and not psychologically intelligible. Check.
Moral guilt is temporary and passes with time. Existential guilt is permanent and renewed at every moment. Check.
Pangs of conscience are temporary and pass with time, says Park. I'm still feeling guilt over minor misdeeds from decades ago — even though I've "confessed" them in the prescribed manner of my faith. When Park says existential guilt "flows thru-out our selves [and is] pervasive [and] possesses our entire being," I know whereof he speaks. So, again, check.
If we suffer the strictures of moral conscience, we can, Park says, "relieve the tension by changing our behavior or standards." But existential guilt cannot be overcome in this way: "psychological techniques are useless." Yup. Check, again. I've been trying to engineer my own "reduction of tension" ever since the late 1980s, at the time when my parents died and I in mid-adulthood "got religion." (It hasn't worked.)
Specifically, the sacrament of penance in the Catholic Church — known popularly as "going to confession" — doesn't serve to reduce my tension. I expect that may be because it is not expected to have any effect on existential guilt.
Park asks, "Have you ever been a perfectionist, driven by a deep sense of guilt that does not go away no matter how good you become?" Yes, I've been there. "Do you sometimes feel more guilty than you ought to feel?" Definitely. "Does your sense of guilt keep coming back attached to new 'reasons'?" Yes ... that, and I seem to manage to recycle old reasons that one would think had lost their sting.
Why? Why do I have this weird, senseless guilt? Why does nothing I do (or eschew doing) relieve the tension? Park says:
Human beings have been feeling guilty since before the dawn of civilization. The decline of organized religion in the West has corresponded with less interest in guilt. But at least for some people, it is still relevant to look into the deeper dimensions of the experience of guilt.
OK, then maybe the hidden agenda of this whole In Search of Solidarity blog has been, for me, an attempt to change the terms of religion so I could have my cake and eat it too: be religious, but get rid of the guilt.
In other words, I'd like religion to become, not nonexistent as atheists would prefer, but much less in the guilt-provoking vein ... simply because I myself have a boatload of existential guilt weighing me down at all times and I don't need to take on any additional guilt from the teachings of my church.
In view of the above, I believe I have been putting myself in an ever-tighter moral straitjacket over the course of the past several years. It is as if I have been trying to "cure" my existential guilt by ratcheting up punctiliousness. In making this attempt, all I have succeeded in doing is getting less natural and spontaneous — becoming less "refreshing," to repeat a word one of my friends used of me several decades ago.
I am no longer refreshing, and I rarely feel refreshed.
In recent posts to this blog (the Confessions series) I have admitted to being a closet prig and prude, while confessing to feeling "inauthentic" about it all. Inauthenticity is one of the characteristics Park speaks of as the lot of the existentially guilt-ridden, as a quick scan of his site reveals.
In other recent posts in my Does Nature Need Correcting? series, I have sidled up to a Taoist perspective in which there is no ground whatsoever for guilt. Guilt has no part in a philosophical system in which the whole object is to cultivate spontaneity and naturalness ... as if the only thing we can do wrong is not be spontaneous and natural.
I think the hidden agenda of my Taoism interest is my (formerly unconscious, now conscious) hope to cure my existential guilt.
One of the upshots of discovering that I suffer from existential guilt is that it renders suspect everything I have ever said in this blog, as well as in my other blogs, about religion, morality, and related matters.
It is as if I have held myself out to be an insightful art critic and then discovered to my supreme embarrassment that I have been color blind all these years. Or a music critic who can't, and never could, hear musical overtones.
Without quite realizing it, I have been carrying around a massive load of existential guilt for a very long time now. Because it makes no sense on the face of it to even believe a person can have such free-floating, unmotivated guilt, I haven't been able to put a name to it. Lacking the ability to name it, I simply assumed it wasn't there.
But it was, and is. I has been a bit like a dark star around which a visible star revolves. The position in the sky of the visible star is apt to wobble, as its brightness waxes and wanes. Translate that analogy into the realm of religion and morality, and you can see that my supposedly rock-steady pronouncements need to be taken, now, with a whole shaker of salt.
For my hidden (from myself) agenda has always been to say and make myself believe things that can help me shoulder my heavy load of existential guilt. So when I have dissed "conservative" religious outlooks which, as their theological starting point, emphasize how sinful we are in God's eyes — Christian fundamentalists/evangelicals, mainline churches as the Lutherans, and also my own church mates the "conservative" Catholics — I obviously can't be trusted to be objective.
There may be a valid case to be made that theologies of sin and guilt are simply incorrect and un-biblical, such as the argument set forth recently in a book by Garry Wills (see What Paul Meant). But I am clearly not the best judge: I want Wills to be right so very badly, simply because it might help cure my existential guilt. Ergo, I can't be trusted to pass evenhanded judgment on Wills' ideas.
In fact, I now realize my capacity for making moral judgments is generally out of whack, for the exact same reason. I simply don't have the ability to make consistent moral choices. I find myself trying to exorcise the tiniest lingering blemishes in my own personal behavior while excusing in the behavior of other people what many Christians call grievous sin — as if waving off someone else's major transgressions will somehow lessen my own existential guilt.
So I'm all over the map on sin and Christian morality. I'm a closet prig and a prude, while at the same time I'm tolerant of gays' and lesbians' right to act naturally and spontaneously according to their inmost natures.
I'll continue to explore the ramifications of my existential guilt in future posts ...
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