I. MORAL CONSCIENCE vs. EXISTENTIAL GUILT

1. General Description.
2. Cause.
3. Duration.
4. Scope.
5. Cure.

III. HOW DO WE DISCOVER EXISTENTIAL GUILT?

1. Exaggerated Guilt.
2. Misassigned Guilt.
3. Recurrent Guilt.
4. On/Off Guilt.
5. Uncaused Guilt.

V. WAYS OF RESPONDING TO EXISTENTIAL GUILT

VI. RELEASE FROM EXISTENTIAL GUILT

     Are you a perfectionist, driven by a deep sense of guilt you cannot overcome
no matter how good you become or how much you are able to achieve?
Have you striven mightily against a sense of worthlessness?
Do you sometimes feel more guilty than you ought to feel?
Does your sense of guiltiness keep coming back attached to some new ‘reason’?

     Hidden away in the inner recesses of our human frailty
lurks a controlling problem or trouble that eludes our attempts to name it.
“Meaninglessness”, “depression”, “guilt”, “anxiety”, “loneliness”
—descriptive labels that stick to our tongues when we try to spit them off.
Our Existential Predicament is a problem of our human spirits
rather than an understandable conflict within our psyches.
If we have moved beyond moralism, can we still call our problem “guilt”?
Might there be a level of guilt that is deeper than misbehavior?

     Our task in this chapter will be to isolate and describe “non-moral guilt”
(an expression that may seem self-contradictory at first),
to explore how it interacts with our everyday experience of conscience,
and to shine a light in the direction of freedom from this “existential guilt”.

     The word “guilt” resonates both in our conscience and in our inner depths.
And often it resonates so strongly in our conscience
that we cannot feel the sympathetic chord vibrating deep within us.
We need conceptual instruments with tuning fine enough to separate
the two similar resonating frequencies—moral failure and primordial guilt.

     If we can separate our psychological from our spiritual guilt,
existential guilt will emerge from behind the screen of conscience.
We will see that “primordial guilt”, “existential guilt”, “original guilt”
—whatever we may call it—is utterly non-moral.
Uncovering our underlying existential guilt will imply nothing
about our natural human vice, immorality, or evil tendencies.
Nor will it correspond with some versions of ‘original sin’
—a view that proclaims a basic moral corruption in human nature,
a fallenness that manifests itself in actual ‘immoral’ behavior.
“Existential guilt” is not an expression for our innate badness,
but it points to our inward ‘caughtness’ or ‘imprisonment’.

     Thus we must first pump the black goo of guilt from our deep well
and then refine this mixed, remorse-like human experience
to separate the truly moral phenomenon of conscience
from its deeper non-moral twin—existential guilt.

Chapter 8    EXISTENTIAL GUILT: DEEPER THAN MORAL CONSCIENCE   by JAMES PARK    165

I. MORAL CONSCIENCE vs. EXISTENTIAL GUILT

     Reaching down into our guilty depths,
we dredge up a dark, gooey liquid, something like crude oil.
We are assured by both common sense and orthodox psychology
that this unpleasant substance is homogeneous—all of one kind:
All our guilty feelings result from violations of our moral standards.
If we find an ‘over-guilt’, a guilt that does not dissipate with time,
or a free-floating guilt that pervades every corner of our being,
our case is labeled pathological or neurotic, requiring professional care.

     But what if the guilty goo is not all of one kind?
Perhaps the dark liquid is really a mixture of two substances,
one of which (moral conscience) predominates most of the time
—giving us the interpretative model for the whole mass—
and the other of which (existential guilt) only occasionally makes itself felt
—usually by distorting and exaggerating our normal feelings of conscience.

     This hypothesis about the guilty goo agrees with our common-sense notion
that most of our guilty feelings are properly understood as moral conscience
—pangs of remorse caused by violations of our own moral standards.
But some of our guilty feelings may be independent of moral mistakes.
We may also be suffering a primordial, existential guilt.

     This possibility—that we experience two distinguishable kinds of guilt—
requires a thoro rearrangement of thought, a careful, extended discussion.
So let us examine five defining criteria for the experience of moral conscience
and then note that each is precisely reversed in describing existential guilt.

         1. General Description.

     Moral conscience is the internal tension between
who-I-am  &  who-I-think-I-ought-to-be,
the sense of remorse and regret we feel when we do something wrong
—in our sex-lives, one financial dealings, our relationships with relatives.
Conscience feels the discrepancy between our behavior and standards.

     Existential guilt is a non-specific, free-floating sense of guiltiness
that does not arise from misbehavior or personal failures.
It is an all-embracing, non-intellectual inward sense of wrongness.
Our whole being is fundamentally guilty, disjointed, “messed up”.
Existential guilt is an internal problem of our spirits,
quite beyond our normal powers of understanding and self-cure.

     First contrast: Moral conscience is
a specific, internal psychological tension
between our standards and behavior.
Existential guilt is a non-specific, free-floating sense of total wrongness.

166      OUR EXISTENTIAL PREDICAMENT: LONELINESS, DEPRESSION, ANXIETY, & DEATH