(Aristotle 7) Remorse as a Window to Human Reality
Raimond Gaita
I agree with Raimond Gaita that remorse gives us a key to what is
missing in Aristotle, to the idea that every human being is – at least to God –
an intelligible object of love, and thus of value, and thus confronts us as
someone who could suffer evil, and thus forces us to understand as evil certain
kinds of things done to them.
Martha Nussbaum – a modern,
liberal Aristotelian – in Anger and Forgiveness (2016) has no place for
remorse – the pained recognition of guilt, of having wronged a human being. At
most, it can be a spur to redress any harm one has caused – say a husband who
has betrayed his wife then tries to compensate for the damage he has inflicted
on her by being helpful in practical matters. Suffering from remorse beyond
that, for Nussbaum, can only be pathological or corrupt, a form of anger at
oneself. Anger, in turn, is either irrational as it involves either the wish
for retribution (against the self), which helps no one and does not undo the
wrong; or involves an immoral attempt to regain diminished status vis-à-vis
another by lowering or humiliating the other – in which case against presumably
another part of the self (perhaps the ‘good self’ attempting to elevate itself
by humiliating the ‘bad self’). That is all remorse can be for Nussbaum,
thinking in the spirit of Aristotle. For Aristotle a good person might feel
shame over acts directed at those lesser human beings like a beggar. But shame
is not remorse.
A big part of Nussbaum’s
previous work has been devoted to a critique of those ways of conceiving the
moral life that seek to make oneself immune from the vulnerability that comes
from loving. If you love a person or a place nothing can guarantee that you
will not lose them through guilt or misfortune, and nothing can guarantee that
one love may conflict with or be completely incompatible with another or even
with what is moral and decent – as perhaps in the case of the husband who
betrayed his wife. I have always thought that true. But because she interprets
remorse as anger against the self, she cannot see that she is doing
precisely what in other places she criticizes: making oneself invulnerable,
immune to pain. (And thus subjecting morality to ego, which is little more than
a program for pursuing what is pleasant and avoiding what is painful.)
Another person’s reality
is partly constituted by the sense in which it is terrible to wrong them.
Remorse is the painful understanding of what it means to have wronged someone;
it is a disclosure in that form of the reality of the other person; it is a receptivity
to that reality, a letting the victim of wrong appear to the loving part of the
wrong-doer (the lucid moral center of a
person that is in touch with reality). Through the pain of remorse, the victim
appears as a being that must be unconditionally respected, even in a certain
sense loved, a being that cannot be erased by the need of the one who wrongs
them to justify their actions by denying this reality – a reality, again, that
Aristotle was blind to. [This partly explains the sentimental, narcissistic cult
of victimhood as we see it in modern society.]
Of course, there are
corrupt forms of remorse – remorse can be self-display, remorse can be pathological
(self-centered) self-hatred, and much more. But these are corruptions of an
emotional response that otherwise allows the reality of the person wronged to
be disclosed to the wrong-doer. And this reality can be disclosed in no other
way when wrong has been done. Nussbaum, by ignoring what remorse in its core
really is, protects the wrong-doer from the reality of those they wrong. Trying
to help repair the wrong, if possible, is right. But it makes a difference
whether I am helping a friend recover from having been betrayed by another, or
whether I am the person who betrayed the friend: the helping actions might be
the same; the spirit in which they are taken, and the relationship between the
helper and the person being helped, will be very different.
. . .
So I say I can pity the
beggar, but cannot completely escape condescension, cannot really believe that “in
God’s eyes” we are “brothers.” Imagine he became aggressive with me when I was
feeling down and irritable. I pushed him away, he fell, and, clumsy soul that
he is, cracks his skull and goes into a coma. Of course, I did not mean to hurt
him, but I did. I feel rotten about it. I visit him daily at the hospital,
hoping he will recover. He dies and now there is nothing I can do to make it
up. (Gaita gives such an example.)
Now my relationship with
him has no condescension. In my remorse a dimension of his reality as a fellow
human being (a fellow traveler to the grave) has penetrated my ego, even an ego
transformed by Aristotelian-type community. The pain of remorse opened my eyes
to this dimension of human reality – and our common humanity – that transcends
what Aristotle (I think rightly) thought of as our nature. I don’t think
Aristotle would have been able to take such remorse seriously because his
(slave) culture lacked the conceptual resources to even dream of it (though
slaves may have dreamed of it).
We can only try to
understand what is revealed in such remorse with pictures, I think. Many of us
see fellow human beings as objects of such remorse and thus see ourselves as
the kind of creatures that can be wronged in a way that is unjust or evil. (Trump,
who the religious right loves, see immigrants as vermin polluting our blood.
There are always those who work against the reality I say (with Gaita) is
disclosed in remorse.) My picture is the common picture handed down in the New
Testament of a God as a “loving father” since a parent’s love for their
children is independent of their children’s achievements. A parent may be proud
of their child’s genuine achievements but they will not cease to love all their
children the same, in a certain sense. Or are bad parents if they do. And thus
in God’s eyes (beautiful metaphor, God’s eyes) the beggar is my brother, even
if I in this life cannot fully believe it.
I don't for this reason reject Aristotle. I do say Aristotle is blind to another dimension of our reality, our nature, one that goes beyond his conceptual space. I am not willing to say with Aristotle of the beggar: if we are sober and honest to ourselves, we must say that it were better had the beggar - standing for all kinds of categories of people - never been born. This belief if connected to divine love, and so I don't pretend to understand or know fully what I am talking about. I can only gesture toward it.
. . .
Of course, the problem remains: it is intelligible to me that I would feel remorse for killing the beggar as described, but would my remorse be of the same quality as in a case where I did something similar to a young college student, full of life and promise, loved by their family, etc.? Then it seems like grief: I would be sad over the death of the beggar but genuine grief I can only feel for those I love. Not quite the same: grief is more restricted than remorse (i.e. you can only grieve for those you know and love). But it seems the quality of our remorse does include a judgment-feeling about the value of the life of the person we wronged.
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