Guilt Without an Addressee

Heidegger, Buber, and What Is Lost Between Human Beings

We usually associate guilt with something we have done. We have broken an agreement, hurt another person, neglected a task, or failed to intervene when we should have done so. Guilt then has an event, a norm, and usually also an addressee. Someone can say: You did this to me.

Such guilt can be acknowledged. It may perhaps be atoned for, forgiven, or repaired. A debt can, in the best case, be paid.

But what kind of guilt remains when there is no longer anyone with whom we can make amends? What happens when what has been lost is not merely an action or a possibility, but a particular relationship between human beings?

In §58 of Being and Time, Martin Heidegger attempts to lead the concept of guilt back to a more original level. The moral guilt we incur through particular actions is, in his view, only one possible and derivative form of guilt. Before we can be guilty of something, there must already be a being capable of being guilty.

Guilt is therefore not primarily something a human being has. It belongs to the way human beings exist.

Heidegger calls this Schuldigsein—being-guilty.

Being Guilty Before Having Done Anything Wrong

Human beings are thrown into a world they have not chosen. We do not choose to be born, the historical period into which we are born, the body we are given, our parents, or the first conditions life gives us. Yet we must do something with the existence into which we have been thrown. We must take it over through our choices.

But every choice is also a renunciation.

When one possibility is realized, others remain unlived. No one can become everything he or she might have become. We must choose without having a complete overview, and we must act without ever being able to make the ground of our own existence fully transparent.

For Heidegger, this negativity is not a moral fault that can be corrected. It is a condition of existence itself. The human being stands on what he describes as a “null ground.” We are not our own origin, nor can we realize all the possibilities we contain.

There is therefore something irretrievable in every human life. Something is missing, not necessarily because life has gone wrong, but because a finite life can never become complete.

Heidegger’s existential guilt may thus be understood as guilt without a concrete addressee. It precedes every betrayal, every neglect, and every moral transgression. It exists before we have hurt anyone, because it arises from the very way in which we exist.

We are guilty, not first because we have done something wrong, but because we must always become one possibility by allowing other possibilities to pass away.

This is a demanding thought. It detaches guilt from the individual act and makes it a fundamental condition. At the same time, the limitation of Heidegger’s concept also becomes apparent.

For when a Thou disappears, it is not only my finitude that I mourn.

When the Thou Disappears

A Thou can disappear through death. But a human being can also disappear while both are still alive: through silence, distance, broken trust, or an address that is no longer answered.

What has then been lost is not merely one of my unrealized possibilities. The loss has a name, a face, and a history. It concerns a particular person and something that once existed between us.

Martin Buber gives us another language for this.

For Buber, the human does not exist only within the individual. It arises in the encounter. Between I and Thou there is a relational reality that cannot be reduced either to me or to the other. Buber refers to this as das Zwischen—the between.

This space between is not a physical distance. It is what arises when I do not merely regard the other as a person with particular qualities, roles, or functions, but encounter him or her as a Thou.

Such an encounter cannot be secured once and for all.

The Thou cannot be possessed. It cannot be stored like an object or guaranteed as a future. The relationship must continually be received anew, and it depends upon both people, in one way or another, keeping the space between them open.

When this space closes, it is therefore not merely an individual who loses a possibility of living more authentically. Something shared breaks down.

A conversation no longer takes place. A trust is no longer answered. A human being turns away, perhaps without fully understanding what is disappearing at the same time. What was alive between two people becomes weaker, quieter, and perhaps finally inaccessible.

Taking Buber’s reflections on the interhuman as a point of departure, guilt can therefore be understood as something that does not exist only within the individual, but points back to a relational reality that has been damaged.

Guilt acquires an address.

Guilt and Feelings of Guilt

In Buber too, it is necessary to distinguish between guilt and feelings of guilt.

A human being may feel guilty without having done anything wrong. Feelings of guilt may be shaped by shame, anxiety, upbringing, or the unreasonable demands of others. They may become so powerful that a person assumes responsibility for events he or she could never have controlled.

But the opposite is also possible. A human being may have failed another without feeling guilty.

The absence of a feeling of guilt does not erase the significance of the act.

Guilt cannot therefore be reduced to an inner emotion. It must be understood in the light of the reality that has actually been damaged. The decisive question is not only how I feel, but what has happened between me and the other.

I can fail by not answering when I am addressed. I can turn the other into a thing, a function, or a problem. I can withdraw from a responsibility that only I could have taken.

This guilt points back to something concrete: a human being I did not see, a word I did not answer, a trust I allowed to wither.

But the addressee is not always available.

The other may have withdrawn, ended the relationship, or died. Sometimes recognition comes only when there is no longer anyone from whom forgiveness can be asked.

Then guilt cannot be settled like an account.

Yet it is not without direction.

Two Centres of Gravity

Heidegger and Buber both move beneath ordinary moral psychology. Neither is content merely to ask how guilt feels. They ask what kind of human reality makes guilt possible.

But they place the centre of gravity differently.

For Heidegger, existence is always mine. No one can die my death, choose my possibilities, or take over my being. He refers to this structure as Jemeinigkeit—the fact that existence is, in each case, my own.

A human being may live together with others, but cannot escape having to take over his or her own life. Guilt therefore belongs to the individual’s relation to thrownness, finitude, and death.

With Buber, the centre of gravity shifts.

What matters is not only that existence is always mine, but that the human being comes into being and is called to responsibility in the encounter with a Thou. I am not first a completed self that subsequently enters into a relationship. I become an I in the encounter with the other.

Guilt therefore also takes on another direction.

Heidegger examines guilt from the perspective of the individual’s unavoidable incompleteness. Buber makes it possible to examine guilt from the perspective of the fragility of relationship and the responsibility that arises between human beings.

Heidegger shows us that no one can live without allowing possibilities to be lost. Buber shows us that not every loss is merely an expression of human finitude.

Some things are lost because a human being did not answer while an answer was still possible.

The Irreparable Between Us

The difference becomes particularly clear when a relationship breaks down.

Heidegger can help us understand that life can never be lived over again. The life we chose casts its shadow over the lives we did not choose. We cannot return to the beginning and choose again with the insight we possess today.

But Heidegger’s analysis says less about who stood on the other side of the choice.

Buber reminds us that the irreparable does not consist only in the fact that a possibility was lost to me. Another human being may have been left standing alone. An appeal may have remained unanswered. A shared space may have collapsed because I did not enter it, or because I left it while the other was still waiting.

This does not mean that every broken relationship has one guilty party.

A space between can be abandoned by both. It can break down through misunderstanding, fear, power, silence, or an inability to see what is in the process of being lost.

But the mutual character of the relationship does not necessarily release the individual from responsibility.

It is possible that both bore responsibility without the responsibility being equal. It is also possible that one tried to keep the space open while the other closed it.

Relational guilt cannot be distributed mathematically.

It must be met through acknowledgment.

Bearing What Cannot Be Repaired

What does it mean to relate truthfully to a guilt that cannot be abolished?

For Heidegger, authenticity does not mean becoming free of guilt, but taking it over. The human being must acknowledge that he or she can never become the ground of his or her own existence, and that every life will be marked by choice, limitation, and loss.

From a Buberian perspective too, guilt may be something that cannot be removed. But it can be acknowledged as guilt toward someone or something.

When concrete restoration is possible, acknowledgment must seek expression in action. An apology that changes nothing can easily become a way of comforting oneself. Taking responsibility may require listening, enduring the other person’s response, and refraining from demanding forgiveness.

Forgiveness can never be the guilty person’s right.

Sometimes, however, the other is no longer there. Responsibility can then be expressed only indirectly: through another way of living, through greater attentiveness in new encounters, or through a decision not to repeat the betrayal.

The lost space between us does not return.

Yet it can still affect how we enter the spaces between us that remain. Guilt may then become more than self-punishment. It may become a painful form of knowledge.

Not a knowledge that abolishes what happened, but one that changes how we answer the next time another human being addresses us.

Between Finitude and the Other

Heidegger and Buber give us two different approaches to the ground of guilt.

Heidegger leads us toward the finite existence of the individual. He reminds us that no one can take over our life, and that we can never realize all the possibilities we contain.

Buber leads us toward the other. He reminds us that a human being can lose not only the self through inauthentic choices, but also what could exist only between two people.

For Heidegger, guilt is fundamental because existence is finite.

For Buber, guilt becomes serious because relationship is fragile.

Perhaps we need both perspectives. Heidegger protects us from the belief that every loss could have been avoided if only we had chosen more wisely. Buber protects us from reducing concrete betrayals to abstract expressions of human finitude.

Not everything we lose is our fault. Some things belong to finitude and could never have been preserved.

But some things are lost because we did not answer while an answer was still possible.