2. Remorse Amongst the Varieties of Regret

Regret is an essentially ‘backward-looking emotion’, i.e., one that takes as its object something that is necessarily in the past, as opposed to those that take as their object the open and unknown future, e.g., fear, anxiety.Footnote ² There are many varieties of regret in human life. Some regrets are self-directed as in regretting to study for a difficult and important exam. Others are other-directed as when one forgets to fulfil a promise for a loved one. Still others seem to straddle the line as in the case of regretting wearing insufficient deodorant on a hot summer day. Some regrets are trivial like ordering the wrong meal at a restaurant and being disappointed by one's choice; other regrets are weighty as in committing a gaffe at a career-defining meeting that one recalls with horror for years afterwards. Some regrets are limited while others are, as R. Jay Wallace (Reference Jay Wallace2013, p. 51) has put it, ‘all-in’ modes of regret, cases where an agent regrets everything about a choice rather than merely some of its aspects.

Tolstoy's (Reference Tolstoy, Wilks, Briggs and McDuff2008) [1886] The Death of Ivan Ilych presents a paragon account of a special sort of regret, one that can only happen at the end of life – namely, deathbed regret.Footnote ³ Yet the story has some unique features. First, the regret is of a relatively global and amorphous nature. Ivan Ilych's complaint that ‘he had been living the wrong kind of life’ (p. 210) doesn't specify any particular action but rather a pervasive pattern of behaviour, one that is grounded, the reader quickly realizes, in a mistaken set of values. Ivan Ilych was a man driven by a concern for social prestige and propriety. What we come to discover is that the ailing man facing his imminent death calls into question the value of living a life organized around climbing the social ladder and keeping up appearances. All of this is shot through with regret. There is no particular wrong that haunts Tolstoy's protagonist. It is the adverbial shadow of ‘wrongly’ that attaches to his life rather than a specific action.

The second and, for our purposes, most important aspect of Ivan Ilych's regret is that despite leading a failed life, in the end he feels a sort of reconciliation with the world. In his final moments, Ivan Ilych has an atoning experience. Shortly before his death, he realizes that, even confined to his bed with no hopes of further projects or actions, things ‘could still be put right’ (p. 216). We are then told of a mysterious yet redemptive experience where Ivan Ilych is consumed in light and passes from this life. It seems, at least from the perspective of Ilych and, presumably, Tolstoy himself, that this final moment was an absolution of Ilych's life of wrongful living. Thus, Ilych's final moments speak to a redeemable regret.

There is another sort of regret, however, that differs both from the sort of deathbed regret described by Tolstoy as well as the more garden variety regrets of everyday life. The common name for this is ‘remorse’.Footnote ⁴ We find philosophical meditations on the significance of this emotion in both the work of Julian Barnes (Reference Barnes2012) and Raimond Gaita (Reference Gaita2000). In what follows, I will argue that their accounts of remorse resonate with each other and share certain overlapping features that are relevant to better understanding the phenomenology of meaningful living, especially the bearing of moral failing on it.Footnote ⁵

Julian Barnes's account of remorse is embedded in his novel The Sense of an Ending (Reference Barnes2012), a tale about memory's failings, love, death, and, above all, the ravages of time.Footnote ⁶ Without getting into the intricacies and nuances of this rather complex narrative, let me offer a brief sketch of the story's frame. Upon hearing that his former girlfriend Veronica and high school friend Adrian are a couple, the narrator, Tony Webster, writes a nasty letter wishing they would inflict ‘damage’ upon each other's lives and planting a seed that bears terrible fruit. Apparently forgetting or repressing his memory of the letter, the narrator re-reads it many years later after receiving a copy from Veronica. He also comes to discover that Adrian's suicide, which Tony previously had been led to believe was done out of high-minded philosophical considerations, was prompted by precisely the sort of ‘damage’ that he had wished upon the couple. We learn that Adrian had impregnated Veronica's mother and shortly thereafter committed suicide, apparently related to this devastating news. Adrian's son, whom he would never meet, is born mentally disabled and looked after by a caretaker and occasionally visited by his sister Veronica.

Embedded in this narrative of youthful rage and its unfolding destruction, Barnes offers us an account of remorse as a powerful backward-looking reflection characterized, above all, by the ineffaceable character of the harm. Remorse, as Barnes (Reference Barnes2012, p. 99) characterizes it, is ‘[a] feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval [than guilt or shame]. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made’. Remorse signifies what Barnes calls ‘accumulation’, an amassing of wreckage that cannot be undone.Footnote ⁷

The grounds for the narrator's remorse are themselves problematic and require some unpacking. Tony Webster writes an awful, fuming letter cursing ‘damage’ upon two lovers, but he hardly causes the resulting existential ruin. The links between his own action, whatever his ill intentions had been, and the ensuing damage – the subsequent affair between Adrian and Veronica's mother, the pregnancy, and the suicide – are tenuous at best. On a causal level, the most one can say with respect to Tony's own involvement is that he suggested Adrian speak to Veronica's mother. Whatever his intentions were in suggesting the meeting, the reader can only speculate. Nevertheless, the causal linkage is broken. Other actors made crucial choices in that chain of events culminating in Adrian's suicide. The central narrative arc of the story is shot through with others’ agency and whatever moral responsibility one might ascribe to Tony must be seen in light of this.

In spite of the formidable difficulties in pinning the blame on Tony's letter, when he rereads his letter in light of the revelations about his friend's situation, the uncanniness of his words seizes him with remorse. As he puts it:

Remorse, as Barnes portrays it, doesn't necessarily track causal responsibility. Even in cases where the links connecting an agent to an outcome are tenuous or, upon reflection, broken, remorse can be present given ill intention and ill-fated circumstances. The result of such ill will combined with accidental success in foretelling the future is enough to stir a sinking, negative feeling in the pit of one's stomach – remorse. Despite the complexity of circumstances occasioning the emotion, one feature remains prominent: the harm is irreparable. Tony cannot apologize to his deceased friend. Nothing can undo or fix the nastiness of his past.

A resonant account of remorse can be found in the philosophical work of Raimond Gaita (Reference Gaita2000, pp. 29ff). He tells the story of man called N who on his hurried way home encounters an old beggar who grabs him. In the subsequent struggle to free himself from the panhandler's grip, he pushes the man away. Quite accidentally, the force of the shove causes the beggar to fall off the pavement in the way of an onrushing truck that strikes him dead. Gaita (Reference Gaita2000, p. 31) describes N's subsequent feelings as remorse: ‘[p]ained bewilderment is the most natural expression of remorse. “What have I done? How could I have done it?” These questions express a shocked realization of the meaning of what one has done, a shocked realization that anything could have that meaning’. On Gaita's view, remorse sets in when one's backward-looking understanding of one's acts reveals them to be otherwise than one's state of mind at the time of committing the deed.

How might N feel following the ill-fated encounter with the beggar on the street corner? Gaita speculates:

What's important here, as Gaita notes, is not that N would necessarily respond this way but that it is an intelligible mode of response, that it makes sense to us that N may feel ‘haunted’ or ‘blighted’ by the chance encounter. Indeed, if N felt nothing at all about the event, shrugged his shoulders, and went on his way after, presumably, handling things with the police investigation, we'd find him callously inhumane.

Remorse as it is described by both Gaita and Barnes share a common point of emphasis: the persistence of something negative. For the novelist, it is the ‘accumulation’ of the past in the present; for the philosopher, it is the mark of being ‘haunted’ or ‘blighted’ by the past. Remorse signifies something dark from the past that lingers. However, the scenarios discussed by the two writers diverge in a remarkable way. The story of N describes a situation of casual agency without intention to harm. The beggar's life is brought to an untimely end by the actions of N, and yet there is no intent to maim or destroy – only the desire to push past the beggar and get on with tasks of the day. The resulting destruction is an accidental by-product of a myopic rush. By contrast, Tony's letter expresses causally impotent ill will. It rages with palpable enmity yet remains causally ineffectual, even if uncannily prescient. The resulting combination fuels remorse too. Both are victims of what Bernard Williams (Reference Williams1981, ch. 2) called ‘moral luck’, albeit in inverted ways.Footnote ⁹

With respect to the idea of immoral action understood as a causally effective ill will, both of the remorse-inducing scenarios described by Barnes and Gaita are outliers. And yet the remorse experienced in these variants, lacking either causal efficacy or malice, is intelligible nonetheless. Taken together, the descriptions of Barnes and Gaita of remorse reveal to us a wide range of situations where we may feel the bite: when we bring about unintentional damage, when we seethe with venom yet remain toothless, or when we enact enmity and bring about destruction. Neither a good will nor casual impotence is enough to immunize us from the possibility of experiencing haunting remorse.

Moreover, it would be a mistake to assume that remorse is occasioned only by actions or intentions. One can also be haunted by omissions as is well illustrated in Albert Camus's The Fall (Reference Camus and Buss2013) [1956] by the character Jean-Baptiste Clamence, who heard a young woman fall into a river but for reasons somewhere between fear and apathy failed to do anything to help her, even to report the apparent suicide, and was subsequently haunted by mysterious laughter that drove him to demonic despair.

Remorse, then, differs from both garden variety regret as well as Ivan Ilych's deathbed regret. The former, ordinary sort of regret picks out those things that are not of an existentially weighty character. The failure to wear deodorant on a hot day or even poor performance on an annual review may be the sort of things that an agent regrets, but in the grand scheme of things, they may not be very significant. Tolstoy's regret, by contrast, concerns something existentially weighty – namely, that his entire existence had been misspent following a wrong set of values. Yet Tolstoy's regret was ultimately the sort of thing that he thought could be redeemed in something like a deathbed conversion. By contrast, remorse as we find it described in Barnes and Gaita concerns those sorts of misdeeds that are neither trivial nor can we do anything to undo them. From these authors, we can distil a conception of remorse as occasioned by (1) significant and (2) irreparable damage.

3. Remorse and Anti-Meaning

The above analysis has been focused on the emotion of remorse, which may lead one to form the opinion that it is the negative feeling that blights our lives. Yet this poses certain problems. Is it the feeling that takes away from the meaningfulness of a life? Or does the feeling point to something that takes it away? More concretely, if Tony hadn't been reminded of his devastating letter, he'd go on living in peace. Would this make his life more meaningful? If N could only forget about his encounter with the beggar and continue his life unbothered, would this restore the meaningfulness of his life to its previous levels? Before proceeding further, we need to get clear on the relationship between remorse and anti-meaning.

The significance of remorse for theories of meaning in life depends on how we conceive of anti-meaning. As Stephen M. Campbell and Sven Nyholm (Reference Campbell and Nyholm2015, p. 696ff) have argued, we can think of theories of anti-meaning as parallel to various theories of meaningfulness. Thus, for starters, if we think of meaning as a sort of subjective property, e.g., desire (Taylor, Reference Taylor1970, pp. 256–68) or care/love (Frankfurt, Reference Frankfurt2004), then we might conceive of anti-meaning as a sort of subjective attitude that diminishes the meaningfulness of a life (Campbell and Nyholm, Reference Campbell and Nyholm2015, pp. 698–99). On such a subjectivist interpretation of anti-meaning, the presence of the emotion of remorse itself is the source of anti-meaning. In virtue of feeling remorse, it would make an agent's life less meaningful. If the pangs of contrition were absent, the anti-matter would be gone too.

There are strong reasons, however, not to prefer the subjectivist theory of meaning, reasons that also cast suspicion on the subjectivist interpretation of anti-meaning. Most notably, the problem is that if merely adopting a positive attitude toward something is enough for meaningfulness, then it is an ‘overly permissive’ theory, as Cheshire Calhoun (Reference Calhoun2015, pp. 16, 29) has put it.Footnote ¹⁰ All sorts of stupid, bizarre, and downright disturbing activities could qualify as filling a life with meaning, e.g., taking care of one's goldfish or eating faeces.Footnote ¹¹ Moreover, the subjectivist theory has another problem. As Aaron Smuts (Reference Smuts2013, p. 554) has argued, merely feeling that one's life is meaningless, doesn't make it so. People can wrongly feel that their lives are meaningless.Footnote ¹² If these objections are correct, then we can feel our lives to be both more and less meaningful than they actually are, and this provides grounds for rejecting the subjectivist theory.

Similarly, a subjectivist interpretation of remorse generates some strange implications. It would mean that an exceptionally cold-hearted individual who feels no compunction for his ruinous actions suffers no loss in meaning. And an overly sentimental person who feels unwarranted remorse would still suffer a loss of meaningfulness in virtue of the misguided feelings.Footnote ¹³ We thus have reason to question a subjectivist interpretation of anti-meaning generally and a subjectivist interpretation of remorse more specifically.

By contrast, if we take an objective view of anti-meaning, then it is, say, one's failings rather than one's feelings of failure that matter with respect to meaning (Campbell and Nyholm, Reference Campbell and Nyholm2015, pp. 697–98). This view fits nicely with a conception of emotions as a mode of ‘awareness’ of the significance of things (Taylor, Reference Taylor1985, pp. 47ff). So understood, it isn't the feelings of remorse that take away from the meaningfulness of one's life but the deeds themselves, which occasion feelings of remorse, that matter with respect to anti-meaning.Footnote ¹⁴ Our experience of remorse draws our attention to anti-meaning rather than constituting it.Footnote ¹⁵ This fits with a plausible reading of Barnes's protagonist Tony Webster, who only feels remorse years after he wrote his friends a devastatingly cruel letter. The failures of his memory, itself a theme of Barnes's novel, sheltered him from the toxicity of his past self, but the failures of memory do not erase what he did. Feeling remorse is not the reason one's life is meaning-deficient, but rather the feelings reveal one's negative exertion on the world.

There is still a third relevant possible construal of anti-meaning considered by Campbell and Nyholm – one that parallels the hybrid view of meaning. On this view, anti-meaning is both subjective and objective. This creates the further possibility, as they note, that such suppression of the subjective element (the felt remorse) may itself be even more damning as we think that insensitive and callous people are more depraved than those that feel appropriate contrition. In other words, anti-matter is not constituted by an agent's subjectivity but still the absence of the appropriate subjective response to the wrongdoing makes it even worse (Campbell and Nyholm, Reference Campbell and Nyholm2015, pp. 700–703).

This hybrid model strikes me as a useful way of thinking about remorse. There are various ways in which the feeling of remorse can be attenuated, blocked, or repressed, and all of these, it seems to me, are relevant to the meaningfulness of a life. For example, an agent may be unware of what he or she brings about. This would have been the case with Tony Webster if he had never discovered the true fate of Adrian and Veronica. We might similarly imagine a scenario where N pushes the beggar to the side without even noticing the ensuing death. Call this obliviousness. But even with an awareness of one's deeds, an agent may still fail to appreciate the significance of what one has done. Perhaps an agent underrates or downplays the true impact of her actions. Call this insensitivity. Still, even if an agent appropriately appreciates the significance of what has happened, he or she may fail to appreciate the irreplaceability of what has been lost. Call this an attitude of cheapness, the thought or attitude that what has been done can be fixed or made up for in some way, the failure to recognize the true value of things. These failures to feel remorse when it is warranted may also detract from the meaningfulness of one's life as one fails to be attentive, sensitive, or properly appreciative of the world transcending the self.Footnote ¹⁶

While I myself favour the hybrid view, it is not crucial to my argument going forward. I only need to maintain the implausibility of the subjectivist account and the relevance of the objective sense of anti-meaning. Thus understood, it is not the feelings of remorse that detract from meaning in life, but rather remorse when appropriately felt signals an underlying source of anti-meaning. It is a felt awareness of the negation of meaning in life.

4. Anti-Meaning and Significant, Irreparable Damage

The phenomenon of remorse, as described above, reveals a peculiar sort of anti-meaning that poses problems for what I'm calling the ledger theory of meaning, the view that the overall meaningfulness of a life is determined by weighing the pro-meaning and negative-meaning values against each other. This special variety of anti-meaning that occasions remorse has two defining characteristics – namely, it is (1) significant and (2) involves irreparable damage. Such pangs of conscience, I have argued, reveal that one has done (or failed to do) something that is both weighty and whose harms cannot be fixed or remedied.

Much of the discussion involving anti-matter or anti-meaning has a moral tenor, indeed, Landau's (Reference Landau2011) discussion takes place explicitly within the context of arguing that gross immorality is incompatible with leading a meaningful life. This is true also for the specific sort of anti-meaning that occasions remorse – namely, significant, irreparable damage. The reason why moral cases seem to fit this pattern is that gross acts of immorality often involve significant and weighty damage that cannot be undone or redeemed. This is true, for example, of murder or manslaughter. As in the case of N discussed above, to take a human life is to do something existentially weighty and that cannot be repaired.Footnote ¹⁷ A family might be compensated financially, but this is a symbolic gesture that in no way counts as moral restoration. Nothing can return the deceased to life. The damage inflicted is essentially irreparable to the victim.Footnote ¹⁸

Of course, not all acts of immorality fall in this category. Some misdeeds are wrong yet existentially insignificant. Think here of petty, unjustifiable lies – say, pointless deception that amounts to nothing of consequence. These deeds may be fully in the wrong and may, in some sense, detract from the meaningfulness of an agent's life, but these do not fall in the category that concerns us here. Misdeeds may also be existentially weighty yet something that might be fixed or restored. Think here of making financial restitution for a great material loss. Such financial compensation may make amends for a loss of property. These acts too fall outside the domain of the sort of anti-matter related to remorse for these wrongful deeds can be made up – there are actions that can be taken that would undo their damage. What concerns me are those acts that are both significant and irreparable. Some of these are clearly moral in nature, yet not all acts of immorality would be such.

Immorality, however, doesn't have an exclusive chokehold on anti-meaning. On Metz's (Reference Metz2013, p. 64) articulation of ‘anti-matter’, for instance, he explicitly notes that some non-moral deeds would take away from the meaningfulness of an agent's life, e.g., his example of the wanton destruction of the Sphinx. A similarly broad range applies to the particular species of anti-meaning that occasions remorse. We might imagine that someone who destroyed, even unwittingly, a rare artefact such as the Mona Lisa or Rosetta Stone may be plagued with remorse for the irreparable damage done to something of cultural significance. Even if an artefact could be reproduced, it wouldn't be the same as the destroyed original for it would lack what Walter Benjamin (Reference Benjamin, Arendt and Zohn2019 [1935], § 2, p. 171) famously called its ‘aura’. The significant, irreplaceable loss of non-moral goods may conceivably prompt remorse. The hapless destroyer of such a cultural treasure may suffer from remorse, yet it is hardly clear a moral crime was committed.

We thus have reason to see how remorse (understood as responding to significant, irreparable damage) can be occasioned by moral, aesthetic, as well as cultural losses. We can see how such remorse-inducing losses may fall within, to borrow Metz's (Reference Metz2013, ch. 12) taxonomy, the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. The destruction of a life, a rare artwork, or a cultural relic would all count among things whose loss cannot be replaced and thus fall within our account of remorse.

What about natural scientific knowledge? Within this sub-domain of the True, we do not encounter the same sort of irreparable loss. Consider the case of a scientist's clumsy assistant. Suppose the ill-witted helper manages to accidentally lose a manuscript or deletes the file containing a rare scientific breakthrough. What is different about this case compared to a similarly inept cultural historian's assistant is that the loss of this scientific discovery may in principle be recovered, even if it takes a lot of hard work, whereas the destruction of, say, an original, untranslated manuscript of one of Aristophanes’ hitherto lost comedies would be irreplaceable. Of course, if the loss of such scientific knowledge has something of moral value riding on it, e.g., developing a vaccine for a highly infectious and deadly disease, then it may occasion remorse as the loss of even a few months’ time may translate into thousands of human lives. But here we have entered moral rather than strictly scientific territory.

Finally, we can also encounter remorse in the territory of prudential value, especially related to the sphere of love and friendship.Footnote ¹⁹ The loss of a close friend or romantic partner, for instance, can occasion not simply feelings of grief but also feelings of remorse, especially if one finds oneself to blame, at least in part, for the dissolution of the relationship.Footnote ²⁰ Think of the love songs laden with bitter regret about the sad course a relationship took: mistakes made, things overlooked, persons neglected, mistaken priorities. The realization that one has lost someone in one's life who is irreplaceable may occasion precisely the thought highlighted by Gaita: ‘what have I done?’ In such cases, no matter what other sorts of meaning one may achieve in life, one may feel a haunting loss that complicates things. New relationships may imbue a life with meaning, but this would neither undo the damage done to one's other relationships nor expunge the accompanying remorse.

Thus, while the cases of moral failing stand out as perhaps the most emotionally charged grounds for remorse, they are far from exhaustive. In spheres of cultural, aesthetic, and prudential value, we can also encounter significant and irreparable damage, the sort of thing that occasions remorse's bite.

5. Rethinking the Ledger Theory of Meaning

The foregoing analysis of remorse has been motivated by a dissatisfaction with a prominent way of thinking about meaning in life that I have dubbed the ledger theory, which rests on the intuition that the overall meaningfulness of a life refers to a tabulation and reckoning of those meaning-positive and meaning-negative activities. Once the books are balanced, so to speak, if the remainder is positive, one's life is meaningful, at least to some extent, and if the remainder is negative, then one's life is the opposite of meaningful or what Landau (Reference Landau2011, p. 317) calls ‘unworthy’ as opposed to merely the ‘not worthy’ lives of those who waste their time. I want to argue that a closer analysis of remorse shows a pitfall in this way of thinking about meaning – we cannot think of it as an account book for the negative and positive do not balance each other out as in a ledger. The reason is that the peculiar type of anti-meaning that occasions remorse does not and cannot behave like a debt that could be cancelled out. We thus have good reason to rethink the metaphors by which we conceptualize meaning in life.

As we have seen, both Gaita and Barnes observe that remorse involves the haunting or accumulative character of certain misdeeds. We have described this as occasioned by the significant, irreplaceable character of the damage suffered. The wrong has happened and cannot be erased. It is there, and it piles up over time. The anti-meaning inheres in the harm done rather than the mere feelings of remorse, although, we have agreed with Campbell and Nyholm that the absence of such feelings may make a person worse off with respect to meaning.

Why think that remorse poses a problem for the ledger theory of meaning in life? This can be better appreciated if we unpack a crucial underlying assumption held by ledger theorists. This view understands the meaningfulness of a life as a product or function of its positive and negative elements. To arrive at the overall meaning (or lack thereof) achieved in a life one combines the positive values and subtracts the negative ones. In virtue of conceiving of meaningfulness as a function, the ledger theory rests on what I'll call the Balancing Principle – namely, the idea that a unit of meaning can offset the value of a comparable unit of anti-meaning and vice versa. Thus, following the balancing principle, a pro-meaning deed can offset the negative value of an equivalent anti-meaning misdeed. The good can neutralize the bad and restore a moral agent to something like a zero point of meaning. From here, further meaning-conducive acts can put an agent into positive territory.

The balancing principle may provide a plausible interpretation for some varieties of anti-meaning. Many of the misdeeds of life are the sort of things that can be rectified or redeemed. We can make amends or provide compensation for the harm caused. A drunken sports fan whose team just won a championship may, as part of a crazed mob celebration, damage property surrounding the stadium including, say, lighting fire to a parked car. In a sober moment, the contrite fan may make recompense for the destruction. Assuming no one was harmed by this hooliganism, the fan may swear off drinking, take to watching matches at home, spend time volunteering in the community, and financially compensate those whose property was damaged. While regretting the acts of criminality, the fan would not be haunted in the way that N was. Certain appropriate pro-social activities may effectively work to balance the former misdemeanours and fully and completely assuage our momentary hooligan's conscience.

However, as the discussion of remorse above illustrates, not all sorts of misdeeds can be treated according to this balancing logic. The key phenomenological feature of remorse that stands at odds with the ledger theory of meaning is precisely the sense of significant, irreparable damage. If the above argument is correct, there is at least one type of anti-meaning that accumulates and cannot be merely balanced in a computation of life's meaningfulness. Nothing can neutralize the wrongdoing. It simply sits there and remains. To think about meaningfulness in terms of the ledger gets the phenomenology wrong, and this signals a deeper flaw in thinking about meaning in terms of a balance of pluses and minuses.

The defender of the ledger theory might respond that Tony Webster or N may be inspired by his past wrong-doing to devote himself to the public good. Suppose that Tony upon discovering nasty contents of his letter decided to volunteer at an orphanage. Or suppose that after the death of the beggar, N is moved to found a philanthropic organization to fight homelessness and help the poor. Such a conversion may further complicate our feelings towards these characters as they change for the better amidst the wreckage of their pasts. However, my point is not that our assessment of them wouldn't change if they were inspired by their remorse to do good, but rather that we should not read the good as washing the way the bad, the way a sudden influx of cash can wipe out a debt. No neutralization happens. There is no point, X, where the achievement of good deeds wipes away the transgressions that occasion remorse, as if they never happened. Our evaluation of their lives (as well as their own evaluations of their lives) will remain complicated, despite the good that grows from the bad. I'm suggesting that we take these complicated feelings seriously when developing our account of meaning in life, and these mixed feelings speak against the ledger conception. Indeed, they are a clue to the existential phenomenon of meaning in life and suggest it doesn't follow the balancing principle and therefore doesn't operate like a ledger.Footnote ²¹

In a recent book on God's relationship to meaning, Thaddeus Metz (Reference Metz2019, pp. 28, 44) has raised the question of whether discussions of meaning might be enriched if we go beyond simply talking about meaning in terms of quantity but also include notions like ‘deep’, ‘shallow’, or ‘permanent’ meaning. This approach suggests that there are other dimensions of meaning besides quantity that matter. This resonates with what I have been arguing about the phenomenon of remorse. Closer attention to the phenomenology of moral ‘accumulation’ or ‘haunting’ points us toward asking whether we might also think about meaning in alternative metaphors. This gives us a linguistic way of registering how misdeeds may mark a life without falling into merely the quantitative talk of the ledger model. Doing justice to the complexity of the heart requires expanding our vocabulary associated with meaning-talk in qualitative directions.Footnote ²²

How then should we think about meaning, if not as a ledger? Instead of images of ‘balancing’ or ‘weighing’, we may follow the lead of Gaita and Barnes use of language such as ‘haunting’, ‘blighting’, or ‘accumulation’. We need metaphors of persistence that capture how remorse reveals a species of anti-meaning that lingers and how it leaves a sense of complication. Alternatively, we might adopt the metaphor of ‘staining’. Rather than a ledger where the good and bad can be equalized, life's past operates more like a painter's canvas that retains colour; the marks of the past, both good and bad, accumulate. Just as pride or a sense of satisfaction may be a reminder of past good deeds, remorse is a reminder of past misdeeds.Footnote ²³ Both can exist side-by-side in the complicated maelstrom of human feelings. Certain sorts of anti-meaning are better captured by the metaphor of staining rather than of a negative balance. Try as we may to wipe away the wrong, the blemish remains.

In theorizing about meaning in life, certain abstract models are tempting. What I have called the ledger theory has the allure of cleaning up our thinking about what makes life meaningful and what takes away from it. It simplifies our lives allowing us to arrive at an overall judgment of life's meaningfulness. Yet I'm suggesting that we may do well to avoid foisting this abstraction upon our lived experience of meaning. Closer attention to the phenomenology of remorse speaks against this way of thinking about meaning. Remorse serves as a clue and reminder that life doesn't balance like the books. Our deeds and misdeeds are not, as it were, simple gains and losses. I'm suggesting there is a danger in applying a false model that doesn't account for this aspect of our lives.