Rée

In this chapter, Paul Rée’s views on guilt, responsibility, free will, and punishment are considered. Three subsidiary aims of the discussion are to show that, first, Rée’s works are worth paying attention to in their own right and not merely as a foil for Nietzsche’s ideas; second, that Nietzsche’s criticisms of Rée’s views fall short of the mark; and third, that in contrast to the views of some interpreters, Rée’s thought does undergo development in the course of his career. The discussion presents a radically different approach to guilt from the one encountered in the chapters on Kant, Schelling, and Schopenhauer. This approach spurns all metaphysical speculation and attempts to consider guilt as a natural phenomenon, that is, a phenomenon that does not require for its explanation an appeal to some noumenal or intelligible realm where agents perform timeless deeds but is to be explained as a thoroughly this-worldly psychological phenomenon.