Walter Benjamin, circa 1928 (Academy of Arts Berlin, Walter Benjamin Archive, public domain)

How may we think about fulfilment, professional or otherwise? Or, what can we hope to be free for? In his difficult secular essay Benjamin offers clues when he contrasts fate and character, not as abstract theological or psychological concepts but as raw, full-bodied experiences. Aligning fate with guilt and character with innocence, he pulls them apart from each other. However, although mutually contrary, they are not found poles apart but viscerally intertwined. He draws, therefore, on tragic drama and comedy to illustrate the complexity of their entanglement.

There is no good fate. Assumed to have been set in advance, fate is invariably associated with misfortune. One may have good luck but, Benjamin remarks, since good luck is often an invitation to hubris (i.e. pride and arrogance) which brings misfortune, it is another source of bad luck. Both fate and hubris figure prominently in classical Athenian tragedy, where indeterminacy, ambiguity and guilt are assumed to be the default human condition. In this world, phylogenetically evolved guilt makes bad luck feel like punishment. As psychiatrists we may think here of the disproportionate feelings of remorse and guilt that torment the severely depressed patient as a result of overwhelming trauma or bad luck.

Benjamin associates ‘character’ with innocence because he defines both as intentionless. According to him, like guilt, innocence is natural. One may discern a character's natural innocence by its ‘simplicity, rigor, consistency, freedom and radiance’. It does not depend on failure or success but shows itself in them, sometimes more, sometimes less. Benjamin locates its most vivid portrayal in comedy where the main characters, for example Alceste in Molière's Misanthrope, are not divided internally by reflection or self-doubt but simply act themselves. The portrayal of character in comedy is exemplary because here it ‘develops like a sun, in the brilliance of its single trait, which allows no other to remain visible in its proximity’.

Of course, this does not guarantee moral conduct. Quite the opposite! Molière's protagonists can be scoundrels, misers and so forth. For Benjamin a fulfilling experience (‘bliss’) is this being oneself as one in the world, the quality of being genuine, not the fulfilment of a contract. As clinicians, we might think of the patient frequently dependent on borderline psychological defence mechanisms whose inhibitions are overwhelmed by genuine feeling and are not uncommonly associated with omnipotence, denigration or idealisation. Could such ‘in character’ behaviour be ‘innocent guilt’?

The best example of innocent guilt may be found in tragedy: Oedipus, although wide awake, lives as if in a dream. Although guilty of killing his father and sleeping with his mother, he is at the same time innocent because he is not fully aware of the significance of his deeds until later. Since they were not the result of choice but performed on the impulse of his character in the fate of his circumstances, he cannot be considered guilty in the full sense of the word. It is the human law that tars him indelibly with the stigma of guilt because in our culture we are held responsible for our actions, even when not acting fully voluntarily and knowingly.

Following philosopher Max Scheler, we could say Oedipus is guiltlessly guilty. Despite his best intentions, he meets the fate befitting his unavoidable guilt. However, in meeting his fate, he simultaneously transcends it by becoming aware of the intricacies of the human condition, our natural sense of guilt, that is.

So how are we to think about fulfilment? More than success, a lot depends on fate and character. In other words, on how we ride our guilt and innocence. Benjamin remarks elsewhere ‘The fairy in whose presence we are granted a wish is there for each of us. But few of us know how to remember the wish we have made; and so, few of us recognise its fulfilment later in our lives’. If so, what is left of our freedom? Well, at the very least, the chance to wake up from our dream to the consciousness of our fate and character. And thus to conscience as well as action.