The Composition of Remorse

An intersubjectivist theory of remorse and conscience, the agenbite of inwit, from Adam Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments, II.ii:

The violator of the more sacred laws of justice can never reflect on the on the sentiments which mankind must entertain with regard to him, without feeling all the agonies of shame, and horror, and consternation. When his passion is gratified, and he begins coolly to reflect on his past conduct, he can enter into none of the motives which influenced it. They appear now as detestable to him as they did always to other people. By sympathizing with the hatred and abhorrence which other men must entertain for him, he becomes in some measure the object of his own hatred and abhorrence. The situation of the person, who suffered by his injustice, now calls upon his pity. He is grieved at the thought of it; regrets the unhappy effects of his own conduct, and feels at the same time that they have rendered him the proper object of the resentment and indignation of mankind, and of what is the natural consequence of resentment, vengeance and punishment. The thought of this perpetually haunts him, and fills him with terror and amazement. He dares no longer look society in the face, but imagines himself as it were rejected, and thrown out from the affections of all mankind. He cannot hope fore the consolation of sympathy in this his greatest and most dreadful distress. The remembrance of his crimes has shut out all fellow-feeling with him from the hearts of his fellow-creatures. The sentiments which they entertain with regard to him, are the very thing which he is most afraid of. Every thing seems hostile, and he would be glad to fly to som inhospitable desert, where he might never more behold the face of a human creature, nor read in the countenance of mankind the condemnation of his crimes. But solitude is still more dreadful than society. His own thoughts can present him with nothing but what is black, unfortunate, and disastrous, the melancholy forebodings of incomprehensible misery and ruin. The horror of solitude drives him back into society, and he comes again into the presence of mankind, astonished to appear before them, loaded with shame and distracted with fear, in order to supplicate some little protection from the countenance of those very judges, who he knows have all unanimously condemned him. Such is the nature of that sentiment, which is properly called remorse; of all the sentiments which can enter the human breast the most dreadful. It is made up of shame from the sense of the impropriety of past conduct; of grief for the effects of it; of pity for those who suffer by it; and of the dread and terror of punishment from the consciousness of the justly-provoked resentment of all rational creatures. (102-3)

There is here a theory of the interiorized other—the super-ego if you will, dividing the soul against itself. It is in fact the division of the soul, the distance between the ideals betrayed and the reality observed (through the eyes of others) that provides as a matter of fact the experience of remorse as self-confrontation or self-cannibalism, as one's eating one's own heart (Do you like it, my friend? —asked Stephen Crane— It is bitter—bitter. But I like because it is bitter, And because it is my heart). This is also, in part, the conflict within described by A. C. Bradley in Shakespearean Tragedy, the inner division in the tragic agonist which mirrors the external conflict between the opposing forces of good and evil.

Smith's analysis provides a grammar of situations, and a chemistry of emotions, with remorse described as being made of a combination of simpler sentiments. It is also a chronology of the self, containing in a synchronic display the engraved sequence of before the act, During the Act, and After the Act, and replaying it as a the self's own historical (ontogenetic) structure. There is a hint of this temporal perspective in Aristotle's classification of tragic plots, too. But Smith is much more conscious of the importance of retrospection in the structuring of the remorseful self. Retrospection is built into the structure of this self—as the temporal shape of the intersubjective theatre of self-confrontation.

El espectador real