Blame and Dread

The capacity for the practice of blaming roots itself deep in the core of the human condition. “Core” here should be understood as, in some sense, metaphorical: the human condition is not a space with inner and outer localities, such that some would be core and others peripheral. Nonetheless, what makes blaming possible is not, I will argue, additive and secondary but rather primary and constitutive of human existence.

This initial claim might be criticized on the grounds of a seeming paradox: one might infer from the language of “blame root[ing] itself” that, as it were, blame is to blame for blame’s existence. An initial criticism would be that this formulation blames blame, when maybe it is rather we who are the source of blame. The response to this criticism, though, is that the statement regards the capacity for blame, not blame itself. Lacking this capacity, we would be unable to blame blame.

Suppose the capacity for blaming is so deeply rooted as to be inextricable. In that case, one might conclude that the human condition is no more and no less than the capacity to blame, simpliciter. The invalidity of this conclusion can be deduced analytically. Either nothing and no one is to blame for anything, or someone or something is to blame for at least something. If the former were true, two possibilities arise. One is it would be impossible for anyone or anything to be to blame for anything. If this were the case, it might initially appear that there is no possibility of experiencing blame or blaming. Taking for granted human experiences of blame, we might reasonably reject the possibility altogether. A retort, though, would be that all such experiences could have issued blame incorrectly; in this case, human experiences of blaming would be rooted in the capacity for blaming coupled with the illusion of blameworthiness. Yet here we find paradox again, for it might seem to follow that, given this reality, we are blameworthy for ever having blamed anyone or anything; were that so, our premise of blameworthiness as an illusion would be negated.

Thus, it seems to follow both that the impossibility of blaming and the impossibility of being blameworthy are off the table for the human condition. Yet the structure of each of these implies why the human condition could not only be the capacity to blame. The issue is that, in its essence, blame is only possible on the basis of a relation, or perhaps better yet, relations between sets of relations. Blameworthiness would only be possible where an agent could have done otherwise. It thus rests on the relation between possibility and actuality in the context of action: there is what could have been done and what was done. Doing implies a relation between choice and the world: in having done something, I produce a world different than the world that preceded the doing. This ensemble of relations makes blameworthiness possible. Valuative attitudes toward that ensemble of relations, in turn, make blaming possible (and may do so independently of blameworthiness as such). At the very least, then, besides being those with the capacity to blame, we are also those who act such that blame could be relevant to those actions.

The upshot, then, is that no one is to blame for the capacity to blame. Yet each instantiation of blaming can itself be blamed. Indeed, each instantiation of blaming might also prove blameworthy.

My interest here is existential rather than moral. I do not raise these issues to draw normative conclusions about who should blame whom (or what), nor about who stands as blameworthy. Indeed, given these initial existential observations, we find ourselves on terrain where Frantz Fanon’s reflections in philosophy of science are relevant. Fanon noted that methods have a way of devouring themselves, opting to leave them for the mathematicians and the botanists. While Fanon’s insight can be explored through various prisms, among them is the seeming implication that methods are at their best in governing the unidirectional mode of address between observer and observed. Where the project of producing conclusions both general and valid implies that aspects of the observer must be observed, methods function better as sources of questions than as answers. Any method for developing a general normative account of blaming and blameworthiness faces precisely this problem: in some sense, any answer would figure to either be circular or invalid.

Fanon’s insight was related to a criticism of psychology. One framework in psychology would hold that the possibility for mental illness roots itself in the constitution of human groups, such that individuals in turn suffer from maladies composed of traits inherited from ancestors; mental illness would thus be phylogenetic. As Fanon put it, Sigmund Freud reacted against this constitutionalist tendency by emphasizing the individual factor: Freud offered an ontogenetic model for which the dynamics of the human mind can result from what the individual experiences within a given lifetime. As Fanon sought to demonstrate, though, both phylogenetic and ontogenetic models failed to account for the aberrations of affect experienced by typical Black people in an antiblack racist world. These aberrations of affect, he concluded, were ultimately sociogenetic: they were experienced not because of atypical individual experiences or atypical biological inheritances, but because of typical individual experiences of a pathogenic social world. Yet we also note that Fanon’s point was not to make psychology into a field that would devise strict methods for treating the sociogenetic such that the phylogenetic and ontogenetic would be rendered irrelevant. In other words, for the conclusion that such aberrations of affect were strictly sociogenetic to hold water, Fanon’s approach to psychology would from the start need to be multidimensional and hence irreducible to any narrow methodological commitments.

The existential question we might ask, then, is how we might distinguish between those affective dimensions of blame and blaming that are healthy and those that are unhealthy. Definitions of health are myriad, so I shall stipulate one. Health is that which is multidimensionally conducive to the continuation of existence. In this sense, we might note two immediate dimensions relevant to the assessment of health in the context of human existence.

I have already argued that human existence includes the possibility of acting. In acting, one possibility is to make choices directed toward extending one’s life beyond what its duration might otherwise be. One dimension of health, then, would be what facilitates or stands in the way of such choices. An individual might wish to live a long life but nonetheless be limited by a congenital condition that limits the reach of their choices today. Indeed, there is also the issue of the individual who today resolves to extend life but who, in the past, has made choices that wittingly or unwittingly inhibited the reach of choices made today. Let us, following existential phenomenologists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, call this dimension factical. The factical dimension of health limits or extends the reach of human choices that aim to extend life.

On the other hand, there is still the matter of what one chooses now. One whose choices now are less conducive to the continuation of existence than other possible choices is thus acting unhealthily, or at least not acting so as to maximize health. What we might call the transcendental dimension of health refers to one’s choosing to extend existence. Our dimensions thus are distinguished on the basis of how they stand, relationally, from the vantage of the moment of choosing. Factical health combines the chosen and the unchosen, but transcendental health concerns choosing in the context of a situation shaped by both the chosen and the unchosen.

Following Fanon suggests some initial considerations. Suppose we are concerned with unhealthy practices of blaming, taking these to be “aberrations of affect.” (Though perhaps only “aberrant” by virtue of departing from health, rather than being anomalies in the sense of violating observational expectations). The factical dimensions of unhealthy blaming would seem to involve the phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and sociogenetic, though in different permutations depending on the cases in question.

As a matter of existential phylogeny, the capacity for blaming roots itself deeply in the core of the human condition. The human condition includes the capacity to act upon the world and the capacity for valuative consciousness of both acts and world. As valuative consciousness requires the capacity for negation, then any act—or any aspect of the world that inhibits acts—can stand to such consciousness as the negation of possibilities of value. Valuative consciousness of that negation takes the form of blaming. As human beings do not initially choose to bear the capacity for action or for valuative consciousness, they face the possibility of blaming without having chosen to face such possibility. Existentially, it is a phylogenetic inheritance, independent of whatever conclusions we might draw about its status as being biologically phylogenetic.

Ontogenetically, each individual existent thus confronts the possibility of experiencing practices of blaming in concrete ways that shape the factical health of the individual. The point can be made by distinguishing rational and aesthetic dimensions of experience, though to distinguish these is not to assert the possibility that one could choose between a purely aesthetic or purely rational experience. Any given experience must be lived by the one who lives it. In the living of it, there is the possibility of relating it to other experiences using criteria external to any of these experiences as such. If one could live an experience in such a way as to reduce its meaning to only that which stands vis-à-vis these criteria, then the experience is reduced to its rational dimensions.

The notion of a purely rational experience strains credulity: in experiencing something, it would at the least generally be more common to experience aspects of it that transcend such critical apprehension. (Indeed, no criteria could be furnished without the prior experience of formulating or learning such criteria.) However, in relating to an experience experienced, there can be the effort to make the experienced figure into a rational assessment—even to the point of neglecting, forgetting, or disavowing the experience’s aesthetic dimensions. In other words, we might surmise that the aesthetic dimension is a condition of possibility for experience, but the capacity to relate to experiences introduces the possibility not only of doing so rationally but of attempting to do so through rationality alone, whether or not such attempts could succeed.

Ontogeny thus involves the interrelation of rational and aesthetic dimensions of experience as they accrete and sediment in facticity. At the heart of this interrelation lies another possibility: the irrational presented as the rational. Imagine a child being told they are to blame for the family’s economic condition. On initial exposure, the claim may seem absurd. But imagine it is repeated daily, or if only stated once, stated in a context and tone that prompt the child to take it seriously despite its seeming absurdity. The effort to experience this claim rationally calls for squaring it with other experiences and/or criteria. The child learns a meaning of blame that is derived, we might say, from taking-for-granted a dubious premise. One possibility for future experiences is that they denude this false premise. Another possibility is that future experiences cultivate the habit of seeing reinforcements of this premise in each subsequent experience. This involves, in short, cultivating habits about how one shall relate aesthetically to rational categories.

This reference to the categorial speaks to the untenability of a model of the ontogenetic standing in isolation. As Fanon observed, to speak a language is to carry the weight of an entire civilization. The individual’s factical health will, in principle, be facilitated or inhibited by how conducive to continued existence are the basic terms employed in and propagated by a social world. The typifications and objectivations of a social world can function dynamically so as to make it easier or harder to make healthy choices about what and how to blame, or how to articulate principles of blameworthiness.

This suggests why any method of blaming will tend toward self-devourment. For whatever is blameworthy, it will be difficult to rationally defend that only one factor is to blame. For any assessment finding two factors at fault, it will be difficult to exclude a third factor, and so on for any n factors. It’s not long before we confront another possibility: that transcendental health is impossible without the capacity for blaming, but that each act of blaming is paradoxically an inhibition on transcendental health.

The attentive reader has, by now, perhaps lost interest on the following grounds: I have titled this essay “Blame and Dread” but have yet to mention dread. On this front, I am surely to blame. Indeed, I have been dreading this moment.

Dread is surely an affective phenomenon. Yet as I see the matter, whereas blame is rooted in the aesthetic through its relation to the possibility of the rational, dread is rooted in the realization of the rational through its relation back to the inescapability of the aesthetic. In other words, as I shall characterize it, dread is an aesthetic relation to future experiences. In dread, I feel the weight of what shall happen. Yet such feeling is rooted in a rational apprehension of those experiences. I already see how they relate both to other experiences and to categories for rendering such experiences mutually intelligible. I dread Tuesday because it shall be the worst day of my life. I dread 2026 because it shall bring even greater misery. I dread because I already know what the future brings. Ironically, this can be the case despite the future having never been experienced. Dread presupposes what we might regard in Kantian terms as categories of pure reason.

It seems to follow that an inability to dread would be unhealthy. My dread prepares me to apprehend future events through a ready-made rational framework. They are fulfillments of a misery foretold. And if it is the aesthetic dimensions of misery that most inhibit transcendental health, then my labor to define experiences in advance so that only their rational meanings stand out is an effort to decouple misery from ill-health. I am my dread today so that tomorrow my factical health may facilitate my transcendental health.

Yet an unqualified embrace of dread faces two problems. For one, the facilitation of transcendental health is not the achievement of transcendental health. Dread today conditions the context of choosing tomorrow, but my dreading today can never substitute for the experience of having to choose tomorrow. For two, there is no guarantee that dreading will improve factical health. Dread anchors me to a rational apprehension of the future, but anchors may do as much to inhibit voyage and discovery as to prevent maritime calamity.

Fanon had observed that each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission and fulfill or betray it. He also had prayed to be always someone who questions. Anyone who teaches is aware that it is routine for students to dread being asked questions. With Fanon, we might pray that we remain immune to the tendency to dread those questions that shall soon face us. What it is healthy to dread, then, is that process through which prior answers are eliminated through agonizing experience. Witnessing the elimination of such answers—an elimination that, all too often, experientially goes hand in hand with the loss of irreplaceable human lives—is an experience that we might today rightfully know awaits us tomorrow. Health may simply demand that we make this misery meaningful in advance, such that a rational insight—that this misery nonetheless shall provoke the questions necessary to guide fulfillment of an as-yet opaque mission—can be with us through the experience and not just subsequently. Our transcendental health may call, ultimately, for the ability to mourn what is lost while theorizing what can be built, rather than being overcome by the aesthetic grip of grief.

In principle, we are not blameworthy in the abstract for dreading the future, no matter how much we might be to blame for the roles we have played in the past that produced the future we now dread. What would be blameworthy, though, would be those practices of blaming that inhibit the asking of questions necessary to fulfilling a mission not-yet transparent. Such blaming threatens to produce sociogenetic aberrations of affect, a social world so enmeshed in routinized experiences of being-to-blame-for-others that the conditions for rational distinctions between healthy and unhealthy practices of blaming are occluded. In such a world, a commitment to health would require tethering ourselves to dread so tightly that, in effect, existence’s continuation would become one-dimensional. A dreadful world such as that could extend the quality of livedness, but it could not vivify existence; it would be sapped of vivacity and, in the terms of Rastafari, livity.

The capacity to blame roots itself at the core of human existence, and we root the rational basis for dread at the core of our lived experience of those present times that foretell miserable futures. Dreading can thus be a healthy alternative to blaming, though no amount of blaming can forestall the existential conditions prompting dread. We thus rightly dread a world governed by nauseating practices of blaming. Nonetheless, assuming a commitment to health, it would seem to follow that we are to blame where we opt for practices of blaming in hopes that they will relieve us of our dread.

Thomas Meagher

Thomas Meagheris Assistant Professor of Philosophy atSam Houston State University. He specializes in Africana philosophy, philosophy of race, phenomenology, political theory, existentialism, and philosophy of science. Meagher earned his PhD at the University of Connecticut in 2018 and has previously been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Visiting Scholar Fellow at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.