Being Guilty: Freedom, Responsibility, and Conscience in German Philosophy from Kant to Heidegger

What can guilt, the painful sting of the bad conscience, tell us about who we are as human beings? How can it be explained or justified? Being Guilty seeks to answer these questions through an examination of the views of Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Paul Rée, Nietzsche, and Heidegger on guilt, freedom, responsibility, and conscience. The concept of guilt has not received sufficient attention from scholars working in the history of German philosophy. What's more, even individual thinkers whose conceptions of guilt have been researched have not been studied fully within their historical contexts. Guy Elgat redresses both these scholarly lacunae to show how these philosophers' arguments can be more deeply grasped once read in their historical context, a history that should be read as proceeding dialectically. Thus, in Kant, Schelling, and Schopenhauer, we find variations on the idea that guilt for specific actions we perform is justified because the human agent is guilty in his very being--a guilt for which he is responsible. In contrast, in Rée and Nietzsche, these ideas are rejected and guilt is seen as rarely justified but rather explainable through human psychology. Finally, in Heidegger, we find a near synthesis of the views of the previous philosophers, as he argues we are guilty in our very being yet are not responsible for this guilt. In the process of unfolding the trajectory of these evolving conceptions of guilt, the philosophers' views on these and many other issues are explored in depth, and through them Elgat articulates an entirely new approach to guilt.

Table of Contents:
Introduction Chapter One: Kant: The Timeless Deed that Makes Guilt Possible Chapter Two: Schelling: Evil, Freedom, and Guilt Chapter Three: Schopenhauer: The Varieties of Guilt Chapter Four: Rée: The Naturalization of Guilt Chapter Five: Nietzsche: The Genealogy of Guilt Chapter Six: Heidegger: Being-guilty as a Condition of Possibility of Guilt Conclusion

About the Author :
Guy Elgat is Lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He has published numerous articles on the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche in various journals and is the author of Nietzsche's Psychology of Ressentiment: Revenge and Justice in "On the Genealogy of Morals" (Routledge, 2017).

Review :
Being Guilty is provocative and original, both as intellectual history and as philosophical argument. Elgat has very interesting things to say on a variety of subjects pertaining to guilt, especially in Nietzsche and Heidegger. The book is certain to stimulate vigorous discussion and debate. This is a wide-ranging and highly informative study of guilt, the feeling of guilt, and conscience, including their relations to freedom and responsibility, through the lens of the German philosophical tradition. The study examines three major approaches—metaphysical (Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer), naturalistic (Rée, Nietzsche), and phenomenological (Heidegger). Elgat's interpretations are always careful and scholarly, his arguments perceptive and lucid. The readings of Nietzsche and Heidegger in particular are of illuminating originality. Elgat's own critical appraisal of the philosophers studied, as well as his independent reflections, show well-informed and balanced judgement throughout. This book deserves to become a key text on this topic. Guilt, as Guy Elgat first introduces us to it, is a feeling: "the unpleasant feeling for having done wrong in some sense" (1â2). But this, it quickly becomes clear, is merely guilt as surface phenomenon, and the question that animates Elgat's book is, as its subtitle suggests, whether this surface phenomenon can be grounded on any deeper metaphysical foundations. Is this painful feeling really justified? Are we (ever, always?) actually guilty...And perhaps such an existence, "guilty" in Elgat's sense though it may be, might be a choiceworthy one. Being Guilty...succeeds in presenting us with a systematic, insightful and valuable account of various ways in which the possibility of moral guilt and the assertion or denial of its justifiability can be explained.