The Burden We Did Not Choose

The Burden We Did Not Choose

On Guilt, Shame, and Responsibility in Søren Kierkegaard

Some things in life we choose for ourselves. Others are chosen for us.

We are born into a family, a history, and a world already under way. Before we can speak, others have spoken about us. Before we can choose, the choices of others have already affected our lives. Love and care can be passed on. So can fear, silence, sorrow, and shame.

But can guilt also be inherited?

The question runs like an uneasiness through Søren Kierkegaard’s life and authorship. He experienced himself as born into a family over which an unknown guilt rested, burdening both his father and the children. At the same time, he knew that no one can be guilty of what they have never chosen. Between these two insights lies a tension that concerns not only Kierkegaard. It concerns us all:

When does a burden imposed upon us become a responsibility we ourselves must assume?

The Great Earthquake

In a journal entry from 1838, Kierkegaard recounts what he called “the great earthquake.” It was not the earth that moved. It was his understanding of the family.

Suddenly, he saw his father’s advanced age, the family’s unusual gifts, and the suffering of his siblings in a new light. What he might once have regarded as a blessing now appeared as a curse. He writes:

“A guilt must have rested upon the entire family; the punishment of God must have been upon it.”

We do not know with certainty what Kierkegaard believed this guilt consisted of. His father’s cursing of God as a young shepherd and his relationship with Ane Sørensdatter before their marriage have been proposed as explanations. But the journal entry gives no unambiguous answer. We should therefore be cautious about treating “the great earthquake” as the solution to a biographical mystery. Perhaps the uncertainty itself is what matters most.

The guilt is not attached to a visible deed. It appears as a mood, a suspicion, and a key to interpretation. The family is read through the signs of guilt.

The guilt seems to precede Kierkegaard’s own choices. It is already present in the house, in his father’s melancholy, in the family’s relationship with God, and in Kierkegaard’s religious upbringing. He did not bring it about. Yet he feels that he must bear it.

This resembles the tragic guilt familiar from Greek tragedy. A human being is struck by a history that began before he entered the world. He is innocent of its origin, but he cannot place himself beyond its consequences.

Some histories are inherited without ever being told.

The Child Cannot Be to Blame

Kierkegaard describes how the gravity of his childhood left a lasting pressure upon his consciousness. As he later wrote, he was brought up by a melancholy old man as though he himself were already old. The child learned about suffering, crucifixion, sin, and judgment before he had been allowed to live as a child.

He writes that such pressure from childhood cannot be overcome by an act of will. It may be borne in humility, but it cannot simply be removed. He then adds a decisive sentence:

“It is undeniably one of the most difficult tasks, because it is so difficult to bring it under the category of guilt.”

Here Kierkegaard stops at a boundary. Suffering cannot simply be understood as guilt.

The child did not choose his upbringing. He did not choose his father’s melancholy, the family’s silence, or the religious ideas placed upon him. The child may be shaped by all of this, but he cannot be made guilty of it.

This distinction is crucial. Otherwise, guilt risks becoming limitless. Everything painful is interpreted as deserved. The sufferer is made responsible for his own suffering. Guilt is transferred from the person who acted to the person who was harmed.

At times, Kierkegaard comes dangerously close to such an understanding. He interprets his life through sin, punishment, and penance. But he also holds fast to the recognition that something was done to him before he was able to respond.

What is inflicted upon us is not the same as that for which we are guilty.

Guilt and Shame

Seen through the lens of more recent theories of shame, what overwhelms Kierkegaard in “the great earthquake” may resemble shame as much as guilt. Guilt is commonly associated with what I have done, whereas shame strikes at what I experience myself to be. In Kierkegaard, the boundary is less distinct. The family’s guilt appears as guilt but is experienced as shame: not only an action, but the entire family, stands beneath a condemning gaze – the gaze of Kierkegaard himself, of the family, and ultimately of God.

Guilt says: Something wrong has been done. Shame whispers: There is something wrong with us.

This may explain why Kierkegaard does not merely ask what his father might have done. He experiences the shadow of the deed as having fallen across the family’s very existence. The children are not merely the descendants of someone who may have been guilty; they become part of a family perceived as singled out, condemned, and set apart.

Perhaps this is where the shame of the great earthquake returns, disguised as guilt.

Such shame requires no public disclosure. It can live in silence, in what remains unsaid, and in the child’s sense that something threatening lies behind the family’s visible life. In this way, shame can pass from one generation to the next without ever being put into words. The child does not necessarily inherit knowledge of a particular event. The child inherits a way of looking at the family – and, eventually, at himself.

It therefore becomes all the more important to distinguish between the guilty act, the shame that spreads around it, and the people who must live with its consequences. Without this distinction, the person who never acted may come to bear the heaviest judgment.

Responsibility Without Guilt

Yet the burden does not disappear merely because we establish that it is not our fault.

An adult who carries the traces of a difficult childhood may rightly say: I did not choose this. This should not have happened. Responsibility belongs to those who acted, or to those who failed to act.

But the consequences nevertheless remain in the life of the person who was harmed. They may appear in the body, in the ability to trust others, in fear, in silence, and in the way the world is interpreted. The past is not over simply because guilt has been placed where it belongs.

Here arises one of life’s most unjust tasks: a human being may have to take responsibility for the consequences of something for which he bears no guilt.

This does not mean that guilt is transferred back to the person who suffered. Nor does it mean that someone can freely choose to leave behind what happened. Kierkegaard knew better than most that the will has its limits. He believed that a person could accomplish almost anything, but not abolish the melancholy he carried within him.

Responsibility, therefore, is not the same as complete control.

Responsibility may begin far more modestly. It may begin with an acknowledgement: This exists in my life. It has helped to shape me. I did not choose it, but I must try to find a way of living with it.

Guilt concerns the origin of an action. Responsibility also concerns the road ahead.

Repentance Without a Specific Deed

In The Point of View for My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard describes himself as “a penitent.” He writes that his life could best be used in doing penance.

But for what is he doing penance?

He names no particular crime. His repentance seems to encompass his whole life. It is not only a response to something he has done, but to something he experiences himself as having become. He has lived in concealment. He has disguised himself. He has been more a spectator of life than a participant. He has been spirit, yet believes that he was scarcely allowed to be a child, a young man, or an ordinary human being.

Guilt has thereby moved from the deed to existence itself.

This is both the strength and the danger of Kierkegaard’s understanding of guilt. Its strength lies in its seriousness. No one can reduce responsibility to an account of isolated actions. Our omissions, our self-deceptions, and the way we relate to others also belong to our lives.

The danger is that a person may make his entire existence guilty. Then there is no longer any distinction between what I have done, what others have done to me, and what I simply could not prevent.

Repentance can open a human being. But it can also become a lifelong sentence.

Original Sin and the Single Individual

The tension is sharpened by Kierkegaard’s Christian understanding of original sin. A human being never begins at a point outside history. We are born into the human race, into the reality of sin, and into a world in which freedom has already been marked by what came before.

At the same time, Kierkegaard insists more strongly than almost anyone else upon “the single individual.” No one can believe, choose, repent, or answer on behalf of another. The individual stands personally before God.

The thinker who insists most strongly upon the individual’s solitary responsibility is also the one who feels most heavily bound by what he was born into.

This tension is never fully resolved. But it prevents us from understanding freedom as though human beings created themselves from nothing. We never choose from an empty place. We choose with the body, family, time, and life experience we have been given. Freedom is always freedom within a particular situation.

In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard examines the connection between anxiety, freedom, and sin. Anxiety reveals that the human being stands before possibilities. We can choose. For that very reason, we can also become guilty.

But anxiety is not itself guilt. Possibility is not action. What is inherited is not the personal choice.

Without freedom, there is no personal guilt. Only where a possibility of responding exists can there be responsibility. And only where there is genuine freedom to act otherwise can we speak of personal guilt.

When Guilt Encounters Social Work

Here Kierkegaard’s question also becomes a question for social work.

People who have experienced neglect, violence, or sexual abuse may carry guilt that does not belong to them. A child may think that he somehow caused the violation, that he should have stopped it, or that his later silence made him complicit. Shame may go deeper still: not merely “I did something wrong,” but “there is something wrong with me.”

An important task for the helper is to place guilt where it belongs. The person who was violated is not to blame for the violation. Sometimes this must be said clearly, and it may need to be repeated many times.

But social work cannot end there.

To tell someone, “This was not your fault,” is necessary, but not always sufficient. The words must be followed by a space in which that person can gradually recover the possibility of responding: through choices of their own, a future of their own, and new relationships. Responsibility without release from guilt can crush a person. Release from guilt without restored agency can leave a person as a spectator of their own life.

This is a difficult balance. The helper must not make the person who suffered responsible for what happened. Yet neither should the helper encounter the other as someone without the capacity to act. Care may then unintentionally render that person even more powerless.

Kierkegaard’s writings compel us to hold both insights at once, even though he did not always manage to distinguish them clearly in his own life: the human being is shaped by what was never chosen, yet cannot become a self without responding, in some way, to the life that is his or hers.

This response must not be demanded from outside. It cannot be forced as the objective of treatment or the command of morality. It must emerge as the person’s own possibility of becoming a participant in life once again.

The Burden Becomes a Task

Kierkegaard could not abolish his melancholy. Nor could he recover the childhood he had not been allowed to have. But he could try to give his experience a form.

Near the end of his account of himself, he writes quite simply:

“Thus I became an author.”

The sentence is brief, but it contains a movement. What was first experienced as a curse does not disappear. Nor is it declared good. But it is transformed into a task.

Kierkegaard used his experience of hidden suffering to write about despair, anxiety, guilt, faith, and becoming oneself. He wrote indirectly, under pseudonyms and through different voices. Perhaps this was also a way of approaching what could not be said directly.

His authorship did not abolish his suffering. But it gave him a way to respond to it.

Here lies the difference between explaining suffering and giving it meaning. An explanation looks backward and asks why this happened. Meaning is not necessarily found in what happened. It may arise in the way a person responds to what happened.

Evil does not become good because something good later grows from it. The harm of childhood is not justified by the greatness of the authorship. But neither is the human being completely determined by what has been done to him.

The burden can become a task without ceasing to be a burden.

Taking Possession of One’s Life

For Kierkegaard, becoming oneself does not mean discovering a hidden and untouched core. The self exists in relationship. It is a relationship to oneself, to others, to one’s history, and to God.

Becoming oneself therefore also means taking possession of the life one has actually been given.

But to take possession is not to approve. It is not to say that everything that happened was necessary or good. Nor is it to assume the guilt of others.

It is to say: This is my history, even though not everything in it is my action.

I cannot choose its beginning. I cannot rewrite what has already happened. But perhaps I can influence how the story continues, how it is understood, and what is passed on to others.

One of the most important things we can do for another person is therefore to help distinguish between guilt and responsibility. Guilt must be placed with the person who violated, failed, or neglected to protect. But the person who was harmed may nevertheless need help to recover responsibility for their own life.

Not because the harm was self-inflicted.

Not because that person should have been stronger.

But because no one else can fully live this life on their behalf.

Perhaps it is precisely here that Kierkegaard’s concept of guilt becomes practical philosophy. The human being is more than what has happened to them, but no one can become a self without relating to what has happened.

We are not guilty of everything we carry.

Can guilt be inherited? Personal guilt cannot be inherited, because no one can be guilty on behalf of another. But the history of guilt can pass from one generation to the next. So can shame, silence, and the consequences of what others have done.

The burden is no lighter for that reason. But when guilt is placed where it belongs, the burden may perhaps be transformed into something to which a human being can respond.

Some of what we carry is nevertheless placed in our hands.