Guilt and Goodness

Here's an interesting idea: Martin Heidegger seperated the idea of guilt/conscience from morality. He said that each of us live in inauthentic way in relation to the world. We just do whatever one does and don't live authentically. What happens is this leads us to not make real decisions about our lives. Life involves possibilities and we (hopefully) choose a certain way to live. In so doing, however, we choose NOT to do certain things. This can lead to a certain amount of guilt. Our decisions affect people negatively and when we don't make decisions authentically we feel bad doing so.

When people feel this anxiety and guilt about life they try to escape this. They try to escape this by using certain "moral" actions to assuage their feelings of guilt. "If I'm nicer to people I'll feel better". "If I pay my tithing I'll feel better". While these things may be true, Heidegger thinks that it doesn't address the real problem...if we never take a stand on who we are we'll never escape the tendency to hide from the anxiety. We cannot get away from guilt, it is a part of our being. But, if we face up to theat fact and live realizing that we have to make decisions we can at least live authentically and have a rich existence.

At any rate, it's interesting to think that perhaps what we think is escaping from guilt is actually perpetuating the problem and "solving" it in entirely the wrong way.