The Madness of Guilt: Against Contemporary Approaches to Shame and Guilt

In The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), Eric Dodds systematically explores some of the most impressive manifestations of the irrational in Greek thought and myth. This chapter draws on structural features of his account to offer a conception of guilt as a primary emotion that can influence a cultural framework as a whole. It seeks to provide a structural account of both irrational guilt-mechanisms and their genetic development, which can speculatively be traced either to a historic-religious evolution (as Dodds does) or, more prosaically, to psychogenetic roots. Building on the main insights of Dodds’s masterpiece regarding this specific emotional pattern, the chapter situates them in a twenty-first century global context, in an attempt to explain what can be not only irrational but maddening about guilt and guilt-mechanisms. To this end, the chapter presents a model of the constitution of the guilt-mechanism in the emotionally susceptible mind – as laid out by Dodds himself – and then compares that model with the genetic account defended by Bernard Williams in Shame and Necessity (1993). This comparison of the two models reveals the shortcomings of both and confirms Dodds’s structural insight concerning guilt and guilt-mechanisms: the idea that guilt as a cultural phenomenon may either overwhelm the subject and lead to self-destruction or rescue her from a moral abyss.