Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Part 4. Guilt and the Fear of Punishment - 3. The Real Guilt Feeling - An Experience of Real Guilt - Guilt as an Absolute Phenomenon
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
Below is the raw OCR text
from the above scanned image.
Do you see an error? Proofread the page now!
Här nedan syns maskintolkade texten från faksimilbilden ovan.
Ser du något fel? Korrekturläs sidan nu!
This page has never been proofread. / Denna sida har aldrig korrekturlästs.
THE REAL GUILT FEELING
be described as spiritual-mental and the latter as
physicalbiological.
The experience Hans Triib underwent has completely
revolutionised this conception. It was not a mere step backwards on the
road he was travelling, but, as he puts it, ‘an endless total fall’.
The road itself was torn down. No longer was it for him a
question of picking himself up after a fall and going on again.
He was suddenly thrown into a new state of existence, in which
his former attitudes and relationships were discerned as part of
an earlier phase of personal experience that belonged to the past
and could never return. None of the earlier causes could any
longer explain what was happening to him. None of the old,
familiar modes of thinking could help him or bring him relief.
He lived in a whirlwind of disappointment and revolt against
earlier feelings; wandering, as it seemed, through endless depths
of evil. He had ‘fallen into guilt’.
But out of this tragedy of guilt consciousness Hans Triib arose
to awareness of a new power of self-knowledge. A new quality of
selfhood came when he was able to say: ‘Here I stand guilty,
and I take upon myself responsibility for my guilt.’
Whathe then experienced was a wholly new view of his own ego
and of man. He knew with finality that he no longer existed as a
psychological object. Hitherto his awareness of guilt had been
part of the material of reflection, to be observed and related to
the rest of his psychological knowledge. Now it had become true
self-knowledge. ‘ Here in my guilt that cannot be explained away,
and in this moment of confession and admission I know clearly
that an “I myself” exists, and I stand on firm ground,’ he said.
In the moment when a person experiences an ethical demand
as the power of life speaking to him out of the unknown, in the
moment when he confesses himself a sinner, he becomes aware
of himself as a real being. He appears for the first time as
‘subject’ on the conscious level of his own life. He perceives that
the depths as well as the heights of his own being are himself;
and that self he accepts in its totality.
Guilt as an Absolute Phenomenon
When the experience of Hans Triib is closely scrutinised
several important points emerge. He speaks of two worlds: one
151
<< prev. page << föreg. sida << >> nästa sida >> next page >>
