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negative act itself and responsibility for that act. A good example of
this is anti -war veterans' need to rediscoyer the Vietnamese as human
beings in order to rediscover their own humanity. The rediscovery
of that identification is very crucial to their sense of their transforma–
tion.
In this sense, guilt becomes the anxiety of responsibility. And of
course, guilt as perceived subjectively is a form of anxiety. There's no
such experience as guilt
per se.
It's an experience of anxiety with some
element of self-condemnation or self-dissatisfaction which we call guilt.
And if guilt is the anxiety of responsibility, using guilt in this very
broad definition means that we require guilt for survival purposes. As
we distance ourselves from the experience of guilt through technology,
large bureaucratic structures, and various kinds of avoidance, we in a
sense lessen our chances for survival in a time I see as an age of numb–
ing.
Let me come back, in concluding, to the issue of collective guilt.
Hannah Arendt has said that, both beca use of the German people's
sense that they were performing professional tasks and because of the
unprecedented scale of the atrocity, one can't apply the term guilt to
the German experience, for that would be an external labelling of
culpability.
If
this is true, then we're desperately in need of a redefini–
tion of the concept of guilt and of its relation to one's actions and their
consequences. Jaspers on the other hand took up the question of Ger–
man guilt from within the German experience, and he made an inter–
esting point. He said moral guilt exists for a ll those who give room
to conscience and repentence. Moral gui lt, in other words, was some–
thing to be earned and sought after. Jaspers urged the Germans to
identify with all German behavior and therefore to share the responsi–
bility for that behavior as part of universal guilt or the universal po–
tential for doing the sort of thing that the Germans did. One shared
the guilt of Germans and the guilt of all.
Here we have a model for a rather delicately stated version of
collective guilt which I think is relevant to us now in America. What
I'm really calling for, in both a psychological and a moral or political
sphere - and in this sense, they come together - is for us to rescue
our guilt, or at least our animating relationship to it; to become more
sensitive in response to our weaponry and our destructive technology;
and finally, in relationship to the Vietnam war, to be able to examine
both our leaders and ourselves from this standpoint to recover the idea
of guilt as the anxiety of responsibility.
LESLIE FARBER: I'm going t:>, rather stubbornly, present my own
view about guilt, and really not respond to what Dr. Lifton has said
at this time. Later on, I should like to. My remarks on the subject of
collective guilt, if there is such a thing, will begin with guilt itself. And
after that, I will try to address myself to whatever the phenomenon
of collective guilt might be.
What I have to say is largely taken from an essay, published post–
humously, by Martin Buber, entitled "Guilt and Guilt Feelings." Buber
followed the psychoanalytic mO\'ement really from its inception and
was conversant with most psychoanalytic theory. Toward the end of
