Perturbations of the mind

Strictly speaking, from the classic Stoic perspective, feeling guilt, or other closely related emotions such as shame, embarrassment, regret, and remorse, would be something bad. When it comes to emotional states, Stoic philosophy is clear and categorical. The majority of the emotions they discuss, those they will call pathń or perturbations, are bad. They are divided into four main categories, depending on whether they involve judgments about something being good or bad, present or not: pleasure, pain, desire, and fear.  

Three good emotional states

Stoics also identify good emotional states (eupatheiai), which are rationally felt. There are three main categories: rational desire (boulńsis), often translated as “wish”; rational fear (eulabeia), frequently rendered as “caution”; and rational pleasure (kharis), typically termed “joy”.  The ancient Stoics didn’t think there was any eupathic correlate to the main category of pain. Lupń, pain or distress, is always something bad from the Stoic perspective. These points are probably familiar to anyone who has learned about the Stoic theory of emotions, but since many readers don’t know that theory, it is worth spelling them out.

The meaning of ‘good and ‘bad’

It's also useful to clarify what these terms “good” and “bad” mean when applied to emotions, especially since many people in our contemporary culture get told, and then parrot, a perspective any virtue ethics would view as deeply mistaken: “Emotions aren’t good or bad. It’s how we express them that can be good or bad.”  The Stoics would disagree with that dogmatic declaration, and regard any person making it as deeply mistaken.  From their perspective, emotional states and responses are in fact good or bad, and in multiple ways.  Good emotional states are something good in themselves. They are good for a person to feel. And feeling them contributes to making a person him- or herself good. It works the same way for bad emotional states. 

Guilt-related emotional states

The classic Stoic authors don’t talk specifically about the spectrum of emotional states that we call by the name “guilt” in the present day. They do share a common psychological vocabulary of the ancient world that includes some of those “closely related” emotional states mentioned earlier, in particular shame (aidos), regret (metameleia), and repentance (metanoia). If we were going to place them into the Stoic fourfold classification, they would all fall under the category of pain. All of them would share a common set of objects and judgments about them, namely one’s past actions, and the view that one’s actions were bad. Whether through guilt, shame, or regret, one feels bad because one judges that one has done something bad, and there is arguably a connected judgment that one is oneself bad, at least in being responsible for that action.

Feeling remorse can be good

One objection naturally arising in response to the Stoic view that guilt would always be a bad emotion would be this. Feeling bad about one’s own past actions, and by extension about one’s own messed-up motivations, priorities, and habits on the one hand, and one’s mistaken judgments, assumptions, and assents, on the other hand, can actually prove to be something good. Wouldn’t this be the case if it leads a person to recognize how messed up they are and to resolve to change themselves for the better? Feeling emotions like guilt or shame could certainly play a part in a person’s story of moral reformation. Perhaps it’s even a necessary experience for those who have gone down wrong paths and damaged themselves, if they are going to engage in self-improvement.

Using bad feelings to steer us away from that failing

Here is where we need to make a distinction. It is certainly possible, indeed often the case, that something generally bad ends up producing or playing a part in something that happens to be good in a particular case. That doesn’t mean that what’s bad ceases being bad. In some sense it is better for a person to feel guilty over moral lapses than to not feel guilty, let alone to feel that they did the right thing, since it reflects a right judgment that they did wrong (assuming they actually did something wrong). But it would be better not to feel guilt because one doesn’t do things that are bad or wrong. Of course, for us non-sages, we are going to fail sometimes, feel bad about that, and then hopefully use that bad feeling to steer us away from that failing. 

I’ll close with something several of my inmate students said to me, when I was teaching philosophy classes at Indiana State Prison. It was a maximum security prison, so nearly everyone incarcerated there had been convicted of serious crimes and had long sentences to serve. “This is a terrible place,” they would say, “but this is what I needed. I was a bad man, and I’m still not a good one, but I’m making progress. And being put in here is what I needed for that to happen.” Perhaps we ought to look at the guilt, or shame, or regret we feel in an analogous manner.

Greg Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a member of the Modern Stoicism Team, an APPAcertified philosophical counselor, and teaches at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

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