To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Wednesday, July 15, 2020
 
Why do we experience the feeling of 'guilt' or what triggers the sensation, if you will, of guilt? I observe that I have this feeling of guilt when I engage in reading when I ought to be writing, in other words, procrastinating. The reading I do may be related to my writing work so it's not as if I am completely shirking my work but there's still this sense of guilt. I have been wondering if it relates to the fact that reading gives me pleasure and I am engaging in what gives me pleasure instead of doing what can be termed my duty, that is, my work.

This makes ponder: how is pleasure related to guilt? If you think about pretty much anything that gives you pleasure, say food or entertainment, there seems to be a scope for guilt embedded into the experience; it could be having certain types of food or too much of it or watching too much television or watching nonsensical stuff in terms of these two examples. The items themselves be it food or entertainment, are not inherently bad and are associated with pleasure rather than anything bad, but they have the possibility of turning into what’s ‘bad for you’ and in that context, ‘guilt’.

I find it interesting to think that because anything that gives us pleasure can also more often than not lead to a sense of guilt, could it be that we start feeling a sense of guilt when we are merely experiencing pleasure, even when we haven’t done anything to be guilty of? I mean, sometimes when I am reading and taking pleasure in it, I have absolutely no reason to feel guilty because it’s legitimate time off from work or it could be that I have to read that piece before I work, but guilt steals upon my consciousness almost unconsciously. I recognise it to be an irrational feeling but I can’t deny its presence. Also, if I eat a piece of cake and it’s not as if I am overindulging in it… I feel guilt mixed with the pleasure of it. What I am getting at is that pleasure is becoming almost a signal of sorts for guilt whether there is cause for guilt or not…and in that sense signalling to me or making me think about the rightness of my actions!

It could be said that the guilt is meant to keep our desires in control, in that, not to overeat or overdo or simply exercise circumspection/moderation where pleasure is involved, because if we didn’t have this sort of guilt response there would be nothing to stop us from overindulging in pleasure or harming ourselves in the process. In this sense, it could even be called an emotional moral compass of sorts—as opposed to a cognitive one?—though one could argue that it’s not really possible to analytically separate the emotional and the cognitive if we were to look at how they meet in the concept called “conscience”?

It seems to me that any moral compass especially one with an emotional basis has to be calibrated to a cultural setting and cannot be universal so to speak. And even within a culture it’s not as if everyone is equipped to or trained to calibrate their compass in the same way. If that were the case we would have model cultures with only upright citizens...which obviously isn’t the case.

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 7:28 pm 0 comments
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