Remorse

Remorse occupies a contested but productive space in the depth-psychology corpus, positioned at the intersection of guilt, conscience, ethical transformation, and psychological suffering. The tradition does not speak with one voice. Freud situates the sense of guilt within the super-ego’s punitive economy, where masochistic self-reproach can become a permanent feature of the ego’s subjective life rather than a spur to change. The Stoic tradition, as Graver documents, is internally divided: Posidonius dismisses genuine remorse as phenomenologically rare, while Chrysippus, Seneca, and Epictetus actively employ it as an instrument of ethical therapy, making it a hinge between moral failure and transformation. Hillman, characteristically, retrieves remorse from the moralistic frame and reconstitutes it under the sign of Necessity: remorse is felt to be necessary, yet it does not indict what could have been done otherwise—it belongs to the tragic rather than the penitential register. The Christian ascetic literature (Philokalia, Climacus, Hausherr) treats remorse as intimately bound to compunction and tears, a purifying affect that propels the soul toward repentance. Barrett raises the epistemological problem: remorse perceived in others is never detected but constructed, making its legal and juridical uses deeply unreliable. James’s healthy-minded type regards both remorse and repentance as potential ‘sickly and relaxing impulses.’ The term thus marks a fault-line between psychology as therapy, ethics as transformation, and jurisprudence as social construction.

In the library 13 passages

it is remorse that is the preeminent reactive response toward integral objects. The question, then, is whether in the ordinary person, assuming all the epistemic limitations ordinary people have, remorse and the related forms of desire and fear may not sometimes be entirely appropriate.

Graver argues that for non-sages remorse occupies a structurally central position among affective responses to one’s own moral failures, and asks whether such remorse can be epistemically appropriate despite the ordinary person’s cognitive limitations.

Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, 2007thesis

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Seneca, Epictetus, and certain Stoics known to Plutarch go even further: they actually seek to make use of their pupils’ remorse and shame as promising developments in a course of ethical therapy.

Graver identifies a strand of Stoic practice that rehabilitates remorse from a mere pathos into a therapeutically exploitable affect in moral education.

Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, 2007thesis

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I may know that what had to be, had to be, yet nonetheless I feel remorse. Necessity says the remorse, too, is necessary as a feeling and belongs to your yoke, but it does not refer to what you actually might or should have done otherwise.

Hillman reframes remorse as a feeling belonging to Necessity rather than moral culpability, dissociating it from repentance and locating it within a tragic rather than penitential psychology.

Hillman, James, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, 1996thesis

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We can never know whether Tsarnaev experienced remorse for his terrible actions… those perceptions of remorse, like all perceptions of emotion, are not detected but constructed.

Barrett uses the forensic context to argue that remorse is not a transparent inner state read off from behavior but a social and neural construction, undermining its reliability as a juridical datum.

Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017thesis

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Even repentance and remorse, affections which come in the character of ministers of good, may be but sickly and relaxing impulses. The best repentance is to up and act for righteousness, and forget that you ever had relations with sin.

James presents the healthy-minded religious temperament’s suspicion of remorse as a potentially enervating rather than transformative affect, privileging forward action over retrospective suffering.

James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience Amazon, 1902supporting

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When you fall from a higher state, do not become panic-stricken, but through remorse, grief, rigorous self-reproach, and, above all, through copious tears shed in a contrite spirit, correct yourself and return quickly to your former condition.

The Philokalia prescribes remorse as a corrective and restorative practice within the Christian ascetic ladder, coupling it with tears and self-reproach as instruments of spiritual recovery.

Palmer, G. E. H. and Sherrard, Philip and Ware, Kallistos (trs.), The Philokalia, Volume 1, 1979supporting

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there are … occasions when… it may be impossible for anyone, including the person herself, to tell whether she is prompted by feelings of guilt or by remorse.

Cairns identifies a conceptual difficulty in the guilt/remorse distinction, arguing that phenomenologically the two can be indistinguishable and that the popular fusion of them resists tidy philosophical separation.

Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993supporting

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Even if Orestes did the best thing possible in the circumstances, what he has done, and done intentionally, with his eyes open, is so bad that he cannot go on living his life as if he had not done it.

Nussbaum argues that agent-regret and a guilt-like suffering are ethically appropriate even when an act was the best available option, grounding a tragic conception of remorse independent of moral failure in the strict sense.

Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy, 1986supporting

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The sense of guilt, the severity of the super-ego, is therefore the same thing as the rigour of conscience; it is the perception the ego has that it is watched in this way, the ego’s appreciation of the tension between its strivings and the standards of the super-ego.

Freud locates the phenomenology of guilt and its remorse-adjacent states within the structural economy of the super-ego, framing them as the ego’s masochistic response to an internalized critical institution.

Freud, Sigmund, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930supporting

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Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner we travel always with the albatross of guilt, pettiness and complicity about our neck… Many of us live in a guilt-ghetto, and we don’t like our internal neighbors very much.

Hollis employs the Jungian register to describe chronic guilt as a psychic condition requiring self-forgiveness rather than continued self-punishment, implying that remorse without transformation becomes a pathological dwelling.

Hollis, James, Creating a Life: Finding Your Individual Path, 2001supporting

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a show of remorse can mean absolutely nothing. Take the case of Dominic Cinelli, a violent criminal with a thirty-year history of armed robberies, assaults, and prison escapes.

Barrett illustrates the constructed and potentially performative nature of displayed remorse, arguing that its expression carries no necessary correspondence to inner state or future conduct.

Barrett, Lisa Feldman, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017aside

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Orestes’ awareness that he has done wrong leads to unwillingness to face the reproaches of Tyndareus. His conscience, however, emerges unambiguously as such in the famous line 396, in which he explains his affliction in terms of ‘awareness, the fact that I am conscious of having done terrible things’.

Cairns traces the earliest Greek articulation of conscience as painful self-awareness, showing the proto-remorse complex in Euripides’ Orestes as the dawn of a distinctly internalized moral psychology.

Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature, 1993aside

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