Collective responsibility, not collective guilt: lessons from Jaspers and Arendt
Collective responsibility and guilt remains as live a topic as ever. This is usually in respect of historical or current wrongs committed by a polity or similar collective entity with which one is associated rather than by oneself. For example, how should present-day Americans relate to slavery, Britons to the atrocities of the British Empire, or Turks to the Armenian Genocide? In respect of present day wrongs, many of which reflect historical legacies, how should the average citizen or denizen of a state relate to, for instance, institutional racism and sexism in organisational contexts like policing or employment?
This raises issues of duty and liability, which are often, though not necessarily, discussed in terms of complicity. For example, is a US citizen who did not personally participate in either the historic wrong of Jim Crow or the present-day wrong of police brutality still liable for these wrongs and, if so, might they be said to be complicit in these wrongs?
The idea of collective guilt raises serious questions because it runs contrary to the modern understanding of guilt as something that only applies to individual subjects in respect of their own acts or omissions. This is in contrast to the older understanding of guilt as something attributable to a whole people, as seen in the plague that struck Thebes because of King Oedipus’ crime in Greek mythology.
Admittedly, the notion of collective guilt is not entirely foreign to modern thought or practice. For example, there are collective entities such as corporations that possess legal personality and can be guilty insofar as they can be found criminally liable. As for wrongdoings systematically committed in pursuance of state policy that give rise to liability under international law, the most famous example is perhaps that of Nazi Germany and the Nuremburg trials of 1945–6.
In this post-war context, prominent German writers debated whether one could hold the German people collectively responsible for the Nazis’ crimes and whether one should think of this responsibility in terms of guilt. In their public writings and private correspondence, the philosopher Karl Jaspers and the political theorist Hannah Arendt both participated in this debate. Whilst I acknowledge upfront that the context in which they wrote is not identical to the contexts in which present-day discussions of collective responsibility and guilt arise, I believe that their contributions hold valuable lessons for how to approach these major issues today.
In brief, my position is that, although there are nuances and complications that make it impossible to maintain a clearwater divide between them, as far as everyday members of the public are concerned, it is better to approach a polity’s wrongs in terms of collective responsibility rather than collective guilt. This is because an approach based on collective responsibility avoids sentimentalising and moralising political issues, which in turn makes it easier to find specifically political solutions to these issues.
The debate
In The Question of German Guilt (1947), Jaspers outlines a fourfold typology of guilt. Within this typology, a major division is whether the type of guilt relates to (a) the “external” world of law or politics or (b) the “internal” demands of one’s conscience or ethics.
First, there is criminal guilt. This is external and based on a court applying laws and finding facts in formal proceedings to determine objectively whether the accused has violated the laws in question. Here the guilty party need not acknowledge either their wrongdoing or the justice of their sentence. Second, there is political guilt. This is external and arises from a state’s misdeeds. Here jurisdiction lies with the victor and liability is expressed in terms of reparations. Citizens must accept the consequences of their state’s misdeeds, though liability is graduated according to their degree of participation in the regime.
Third, there is moral guilt. This is internal and concerns one’s ethical dispositions. Here one is responsible for one’s own actions, even if they stem from superior orders, so one remains subject to moral judgement. Unlike criminal or political guilt, for moral guilt jurisdiction lies only with one’s conscience or in communion with one’s closest associates, and the guilt leads to insight, penance, and renewal rather than external sanctions.
Fourth, there is metaphysical guilt. This is internal and based on an intrinsic solidarity with humanity in general. One experiences it as an inward responsibility for all the wrongs in the world, regardless of whether one personally inflicted or helped to inflict these wrongs. As an existentialist thinker within a religiously inflected tradition of philosophy, Jaspers describes this as a jurisdiction that lies with God. Here Jaspers is at his most evocative, especially when talking about the sense of guilt he feels as a German knowing that Germans stood by while atrocities happened before them:
“We did not go into the streets when our Jewish friends were led away; we did not scream until we too were destroyed. We preferred to stay alive, on the feeble, if logical, ground that our death could not have helped anyone. We are guilty of being alive.” (The Question of German Guilt, p. 66)
Additionally, Jaspers sees a link between sentiments of moral guilt and the actualisation of political freedom. He hoped that Germans’ subjective feelings of moral guilt would, through sympathetic identification with their community, foster a sense of co-responsibility for what their countrymen had done. He also hoped that this “purification” process would allow the Germans to renew themselves as a cosmopolitan citizenry: one that would uphold the political values of democracy and personal autonomy.
Despite this, Jaspers adamantly refuses to conceptualise such felt culpability in terms of collective guilt, finding it dangerous to treat an entire, abstracted “people” as if it exists objectively and concretely:
“People and state do not coincide, nor do language, common fate and culture…The categorical judgment of a people is always unjust. It presupposes a false substantialization and results in the debasement of the human being as an individual.” (The Question of German Guilt, p. 35–36).
As Jaspers notes, acting as if only collective groups exist rather than human beings, then categorically condemning those groups, is what the Nazis did. For this reason, the liability of a people or a group within a people could only be a limited instance of political liability, even if Jaspers misleadingly calls this liability “political guilt”.
Arendt comes at the issue of over-generalising guilt from the opposite angle. For her, the problem of collective guilt is that it makes it more difficult to condemn those who actually committed the wrongs in question. As she puts it in a passage worth quoting at length:
“…the cry ‘We are all guilty’ that at first hearing sounded so very noble and tempting has actually only served to exculpate to a considerable degree those who actually were guilty. Where all are guilty, nobody is. Guilt, unlike responsibility, always singles out; it is strictly personal. It refers to an act, not to intentions or potentialities. It is only in a metaphorical sense that we can say we feel guilty for the sins of our fathers or our people or mankind, in short, for deeds we have not done, although the course of events may well make us pay for them. And since sentiments of guilt, mens rea or bad conscience, the awareness of wrong doing, play such an important role in our legal and moral judgement, it may be wise to refrain from such metaphorical statements which, when taken literally, can only lead into a phony sentimentality in which all real issues are obscured.” (Collective Responsibility, p. 43)
This connects with Arendt’s broader ideas about the nature of freedom and politics. To Arendt, freedom is about creating new beginnings through one’s actions, but every new action takes place within a preexisting web of relationships, where it starts a new process that will affect others. Freedom in political life involves constituting and affirming an intersubjective reality by transcending one’s own subjectivity: we form the polity by discussing the ends of our life in common.
Our actions are therefore enmeshed with collective, political responsibility. Through our entanglement in a web of relationships, we are responsible when we bring new beginnings into the world through our own actions, but also when the community acts in our name and when we suffer the consequences of our community’s actions. We can only escape such political responsibility by leaving the community (e.g. by ceasing to be a citizen):
“This vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but among our fellowmen, and that the faculty of action, which, after all, is the political faculty par excellence, can be actualized only in one of the many and manifold forms of human community.” (Collective Responsibility, p. 50)
We passively belong to certain collective entities (e.g. the national group into which one is born) and, through action, we make that “natural” fellowship public, turn it into an active and political fellowship, and thereby change the meaning of this “given” belonging in a way that transforms our identities. This is what makes it politically significant that there were, for example, Germans who saved Jews from the Nazis or Jews who fought back against the Nazis.
The problem with guilt is that, since it is a sentiment, it is self-regarding and as such leads not to worldly activities like persuasion, but to a decrease in the distance required for difference and disagreement to manifest in the public sphere. Guilt is too easily “enjoyed for its own sake” and can rapidly “lead into a glorification of its cause” (Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 251). Instead of illuminating the polity’s common affairs, guilt limits one’s capacity to respond politically. This is why, although both Arendt and Jaspers believed that citizens have a responsibility to reckon with their state’s wrongs, unlike Jaspers, Arendt thought that feelings of vicarious guilt make it harder to actualise political freedom, not easier.
Admittedly, there are nuances and tensions in Arendt’s perspective. Despite her misgivings about sentimentalising politics, she does not believe that politics is a place of emotionless rationality. An inability to be moved would be just as detrimental to politics as sentimentality. Nor does Arendt completely separate ethics from politics. This is especially true when she considers the structural context of judgement, responsibility, and guilt. To Arendt, there was a problem not only in the moral psychology of the Nazis and their supporters, but also in the entire system of government, which had created a major disjuncture between the morality by which the person is judged and the moral beliefs upon which the person acted. In her view, just punishment becomes impossible if the judged do not share at least some of the normative precepts by which they are judged, even if it remains possible to sanction them.
Arendt is closely associated with the cog theory of totalitarianism; that is, the idea that people under totalitarian systems are dehumanised into “cogs in the machine” of the bureaucracy. Nevertheless, this thesis not really the main point of her controversial account of and commentary on the 1961–2 trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the main organisers of the Holocaust. Indeed, she rejected Eichmann’s characterisation of himself as a mere cog and thought it a virtue of a criminal court that it can transform a “cog” back into a human being. Rather, her main point is to broach the more general issues of (a) how, under the right circumstances, perfectly ordinary people can commit mass murder and (b) how to deal with legal and ethical problems of justice where a polity or a large section of a polity systematically accepts wrongful acts.
Responsibility versus guilt
Using Jaspers and especially Arendt as points of departure, I believe that, where a polity or similar collective entity to which one belongs has committed wrongs, but one did not directly contribute to the wrong in question, one should understand the situation as collective responsibility rather than collective guilt. Whilst I agree that the interconnections between political responsibility and moral guilt make it impossible to divide them completely, there is a world of difference between, on the one hand, accepting nuance and complexity in how we think of “the political” and “the moral”, and, on the other hand, collapsing politics into morality.
If Arendt points to how a moralistic politics inhibits the distinctly political task of acknowledging and constituting a world in common that must be open to plurality and contingency, then — following Raymond Geuss — I would point to the other side of the problem: politics is, among other things, a skill or craft for achieving objectives that deals with changing and often contradictory beliefs and desires within historically specific contexts. As such, whilst politics requires people to have and act upon their own values and conceptions of the good (however inchoate or inconsistent these may be), and dedicating oneself to political activity calls for certain passionate commitments and generates particular ethical demands, one cannot simply treat politics as applied ethics. This is especially true considering how, as Geuss observes, “[t]wo thousand (and more) years of moral preaching have not seemed to provide much evidence that this is an effective way to improve human behaviour” (Philosophy and Real Politics, p. 101).
Stretching the notion of “complicity” for a historical or current wrong, even when that wrong is systemic in nature, reifies abstract group-identity categories and prevents the kind of differentiation required to hold to account those specific individual or institutional actors who in fact committed the wrong in question. At its most egregious, the attitude that “we are all guilty” and therefore must repent comes across as simply a secularised version of original sin.
In contrast, approaching such wrongs in terms of collective responsibility places the emphasis where it needs to be placed: we inhabit a shared world, and through action we have constituted and can again constitute a polity, so for the sake of our life in common we should act to address these wrongs. This lays the ground for us to formulate and persuade others to a political response.
Returning to the example of present-day systemic racism, what measures do we think would “level up” disparities in housing, education quality, healthcare access, employment, political representation, and so forth? [1] What decriminalisation initiatives, reductions in police powers, etc. do we think would combat police brutality against BAME and working class people? Likewise, provided they are honestly committed to historically rigorous investigation and not to trading one oversimplified, audience-pleasing narrative for another, truth and reconciliation commissions can help a polity face up to and understand the wrongs of the past. This enables the polity to properly reckon the present-day effects of those wrongs and to build a better future for the entire population.
In short, we have much to gain from fostering a political sense of collective responsibility, but not a sentimental, moralistic, and ultimately self-indulgent sense of collective guilt.
***
[1] One can very plausibly argue that, insofar as such measures focus on the material conditions of existence, they contradict Arendt’s somewhat peculiar insistence on separating “the social” from “the political”. Due to insufficient space, I shall have to pursue this issue elsewhere. For now, I shall simply say that, contrary to the usual reading of On Revolution (1963), I do not believe that Arendt thought the French Revolution mistaken for addressing “the social question”. On the contrary, a major concern in her work is the modern revolutionary tradition’s recurring failure to solve “the social question”.
