(4) Metaphysical guilt: There exists a solidarity among men as human beings that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge. If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent them, I too am guilty. If I was present at the murder of others without risking my life to prevent it, I feel guilty in a way not adequately conceivable either legally, politically or morally. That I live after such a thing has happened weighs upon me as indelible guilt. As human beings, unless good fortune spares us such situations, we come to a point where we must choose: either to risk our lives unconditionally, without chance of success and therefore to no purpose—or to prefer staying alive, because success is impossible. That somewhere among men the unconditioned prevails—the capacity to live only together or not at all, if crimes are committed against the one or the other, or if physical living requirements have to be shared—therein consists the substance of their being. But that this does not extend to the solidarity of all men, nor to that of fellow-citizens or even of smaller groups, but remains confined to the closest human ties—therein lies this guilt of us all. Jurisdiction rests with God alone.
This differentiation of four concepts of guilt clarifies the meaning of the charges. Political guilt, for example, does mean the liability of all citizens for the consequences of deeds done by their state, but not the criminal and the moral guilt of every single citizen for crimes committed in the name of the state. The judge may decide about crimes and the victor about political liability, but moral guilt can truthfully be discussed only in a loving struggle between men who maintain solidarity among themselves. As for metaphysical guilt, this may perhaps be a subject of revelation in concrete situations or in the work of poets and philosophers, but hardly one for personal communication. Most deeply aware of it are those who have once achieved the unconditioned, and by that very fact have experienced their failure to manifest this unconditioned toward all men. There remains shame for something that is always present, that may be discussed in general terms, if at all, but can never be concretely revealed.
This differentiation of concepts of guilt is to preserve us from the superficiality of talk about guilt that flattens everything out on a single plane, there to assess it with all the crudeness and lack of discrimination of a bad judge. But in the end these distinct concepts are to lead us back to the one source, which cannot be flatly referred to as our guilt.
All these distinctions become erroneous, however, if we fail to keep in mind the close connection between the things distinguished. Every concept of guilt demonstrates (or manifests) realities, the consequences of which appear in the spheres of the other concepts of guilt.
If human beings were able to free themselves from metaphysical guilt, they would be angels, and all the other three concepts of guilt would become immaterial.
Moral failings cause the conditions out of which both crime and political guilt arise. The commission of countless little acts of negligence, of convenient adaptation, of cheap vindication, and the imperceptible promotion of wrong; the participation in the creation of a public atmosphere that spreads confusion and thus makes evil possible—all that has consequences that partly condition the political guilt involved in the situation and the events.
The moral issue also involves a confusion about the importance of power in human communities. The obfuscation of this fundamental fact is guilt, no less than is the false deification of power as the sole deciding factor in events. Every human being is fated to be enmeshed in the power relations he lives by. This is the inevitable guilt of all, the guilt of human existence. It is counteracted by supporting the power that achieves what is right, the rights of man. Failure to collaborate in organizing power relations, in the struggle for power for the sake of serving the right, creates basic political guilt and moral guilt at the same time. Political guilt turns into moral guilt where power serves to destroy the meaning of power—the achievement of what is right, the ethos and purity of one’s own nation. For wherever power does not limit itself, there exists violence and terror, and in the end the destruction of life and soul.
Out of the moral everyday life of most individuals, of the broad masses of people, develops the characteristic political behavior of each age, and with it the political situation. But the individual’s life in turn presupposes a political situation already arisen out of history, made real by the ethos and politics of his ancestors, and made possible by the world situation. There are two schematically opposed possibilities here:
Either the ethos of politics is the principle of a state in which all participate with their consciousness, their knowledge, their opinions, and their wills. This is the life of political liberty as a continuous flow of decay and improvement. It is made possible by the task and the opportunity provided by a responsibility shared by all.
Or else there prevails a situation in which the majority are alienated from politics. State power is not felt to be the individual’s business. He does not feel that he shares a responsibility; he looks on, is politically inactive, works and acts in blind obedience. He has an easy conscience in obeying and an easy conscience about his nonparticipation in the decisions and acts of those in power. He tolerates the political reality as an alien fact; he seeks to turn it cunningly to his personal advantage or lives with it in the blind ardor of self-sacrifice.
This is the difference between political liberty* and political dictatorship, conceived from Herodotus on as the difference between West and East (Greek liberty and Persian despotism). In most cases, it has not been up to the individual to say which will prevail. For good or ill, the individual is born into a situation; he has to take what is tradition and reality. No individual and no group can at one stroke, or even in a single generation, change the conditions by which all of us live.
CONSEQUENCES OF GUILT
The consequences of guilt affect real life, whether or not the person affected realizes it, and they affect my self-esteem if I perceive my guilt.
(a) Crime meets with punishment. It requires that the judge acknowledge the guilty man’s free determination of his will—not that the punished acknowledge the justice of his punishment.
(b) There is liability for political guilt, consequently reparation is necessary and further loss or restriction of political power and political rights (on the part of the guilty). If the guilt is part of events decided by war, the consequences for the vanquished may include destruction, deportation, extermination. Or the victor can, if he will, bring the consequences into a form of right, and thus of moderation.
(c) The outgrowth of the moral guilt is insight, which involves penance and renewal. It is an inner development, then also taking effect in the world of reality.
(d) The metaphysical guilt results in a transformation of human self-consciousness before God. Pride is broken. This self-transformation by inner activity may lead to a new source of active life, but one linked with an indelible sense of guilt in that humility which grows modest before God and submerges all its doings in an atmosphere where arrogance becomes impossible.
FORCE—RIGTH—MERCY
Force is what decides between men, unless they reach agreement. Any state order serves to control this force so as to preserve it—as law enforcement within, as war without. In quiet times this had been almost forgotten.
Where war establishes the situation of force, the right ends. We Europeans have tried even then to maintain some remnant of it in the rules of international law, which apply in war as in peace and were last expressed in the Hague and Geneva Conventions. The attempt seems to have been vain.