Understanding the Conscience (Philosophy)

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amjadiqbal
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Understanding the Conscience (Philosophy)

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Conscience:

Conscience is experienced as an inner sanctuary or tribunal, rather than something external, yet it mediates a universal and objective moral law which is given rather than invented.

Conscience summons us to seek good and avoid evil by loving God and neighbor, by keeping the commandments and all universal norms of morality.

The moral law and the particular judgments of conscience bind the human person.

Basis:
Freud believed that the human psyche was inspired by powerful desires that begin at birth and need to be satisfied. These are critical to our behaviour up until the age of three and drive the id. For Freud there were two categories of desire at war within the id: ‘Eros' (the life instinct) and ‘Thanatos' (the death instinct). However, children quickly learn that the world puts restraints upon the degree to which these desires can be met. Humans therefore create the ‘ego', also known as the ‘reality principle', which takes into account the realities of society. The ego creates an awareness of self and others and is crucial to our interaction with the world. The ‘super-ego', which develops from the age of five, internalises and reflects the anger and disappointment of others. It produces feelings of guilt and creates a conscience. This guilty conscience grows into a life and power of its own and is un-reliant upon the rational thought and reflection of the individual. It is programmed into human beings by the negative reactions of other people, making it pre-rational and the inevitable outcome of conflict and aggression. In Freud's model of the conscience, the individual is not choosing to act ethically in order to promote the happiness of others. Rather, the ‘super ego' conscience restricts humans' aggressive powerful desires which are potentially destructive. Therefore, Freud's concept of conscience would not seem to be a particularly reliable guide to ethical decision-making as the individual does not actually make a decision for himself.

Piaget, an educational psychologist, modified Freud's theory, stating that conscience has both mature and immature dimensions. The mature conscience is the ego's search for integrity and is concerned with right and wrong. It acts dynamically and responsively to things of value and looks outwards into the world, developing new insights into situations. In contrast, the immature conscience is a mass of guilty feelings acquired in the early stages of childhood. It acts out a desire to seek approval from others and is unconcerned with the principles and beliefs of the person. In conducting a survey on how conscience develops, Piaget discovered that children up to the age of ten judge the rightness or wrongness of an action on the consequences it produces, whereas older children link rightness with motive and intention. Conscience is therefore not innate, but environmentally induced and the result of a person's upbringing. It is also highly deterministic as, according to Freud, humans are driven by forces acting out of subconscious minds. Such a conception of conscience could be seen as an unreliable guide. Because the immature conscience is motivated by guilt, instilled at a young age, it may inspire actions purely to gain approval. It blindly obeys, following feelings rather than reason. It is backward-looking and the amount of guilt produced is not always relative to the importance of the action. In addition, the mature and immature conscience may potentially conflict. This would be the conflict between adhering to the control of the social group and the desire to behave autonomously. Such a conflict may hamper the individual's ability to make clear ethical decisions.

Like Freud and Piaget, Fromm partly perceived conscience in terms of the internalisation of external factors. He called this the authoritarian conscience. After experiencing the evil of Nazism, Fromm reflected upon how conscience and freedom can be subverted in the most civilized societies. He used the idea of an authoritarian conscience to explain how individuals such as Eichmann can plead that he was only ‘following orders' at his trial for mass murder in 1961 It is always creditable to use examples to illustrate your point. Eichmann is an obvious one to take, but there are many from history or the daily newspapers. Be bold in assembling your own illustrations. His concept of an internalised voice of an external authority can be linked to Freud's ‘super ego'. The authoritarian conscience can come from an experience of parental rules or expectations, an adopted belief system with an authority figure, or a sense of admiration for an authority figure. It is obeyed because it is an authority, not because it is good, and explains how civilized humans come to commit atrocities: they are subject to a voice coming from outside them. Often an individual is spurred on by fear and feels bound to the faults of the authority figure. In most cases, his or her identity and sense of security is wrapped up in the authority figure, as the inner voice becomes someone else's. Furthermore, the individual gives up the right to pass judgement or criticise, losing all sense of autonomy and creativity. The key implication of an authoritarian conscience is that the individual takes on the role of authority, becoming his or her own sense of guilt and self-punishment: "He takes on the role of authority by treating himself with the same cruelty and strictness" (Fromm). Clearly, this concept of the authoritarian conscience is a highly unreliable guide to moral decision making, as the individual loses all sense of self, self-worth and originality of thought.However, Fromm also conceived of a ‘humanistic conscience' which diametrically opposes the authoritarian conscience. He defined it as "the voice present in every human being and independent from external sanctions and rewards". Developed over a lifetime of learning and reflection, this voice is our true self, found by listening to ourselves and heeding our ‘deepest needs, desires and goals'. Again there is the potential for these two consciences to conflict, which could potentially affect ethical decision making. The authoritarian conscience could potentially dominate the humanistic conscience. It would appear difficult for an individual suffering under an authority figure to head there ‘deepest needs, desires and goals'.

Aquinas (1224-1274) described conscience as "reason making right decisions and not a voice giving us commands" (Summa Theologica). He saw it as a device or faculty used for distinguishing right from wrong actions, believing that humans naturally tend towards the good and away from evil. He called this the ‘Synderesis rule': ‘do good and avoid evil'. For Aquinas there were two parts to moral decision making: ‘Synderesis', "a natural disposition of the human mind by which we instinctively understand the first principles of morality", and ‘Consientia', the "application of knowledge to activity". Whereas ‘synderesis' is an innate and unchanging basic instinct based on one moral principle, ‘consientia' is a moral skill acquired over time used to assess situations and make decisions as to the best way to act morally. ‘Conscientia' is the power of reason working out what is good and what is evil, and has links with Aristotle's concept of ‘phronesis' or ‘practical wisdom' and Fromm's humanistic conscience. Aquinas also accepted that the conscience can make mistakes and needs to be trained in the ways of morality, realising that at times people do bad things because they make a mistake in discriminating good from evil. Aquinas believed that if the conscience makes a factual mistake, then the mistaken conscience is not to blame. However, if one is simply ignorant of the rule, choosing to ignore it, then he or she is to blame and has the potential to learn from the mistake. This concept of conscience is important because it more fully acknowledges the individual's active role in moral decision making. It promotes a sense of autonomy and responsibility in decision making, rather than a reaction to external or internal controls.

Thus, while environmental factors such as upbringing and childhood experience must have an impact upon an individual's perception of what is regarded as right and wrong, in terms of ethical decision-making Aquinas' interpretation of conscience would seem to be the most reliable guide. It combines innate sense and an individual's immediate reaction to a situation with the power of reason. The fact that conscience is a moral skill acquired over time and with experience would seem to be a great asset in making ethical decisions. Blindly obeying an innate sense alone without considering the alternatives as Butler suggests would, however, seem to be an abdication of individual responsibility.


Acts Of Conscience:

1.As a voice or vicar or sanctuary of God. These authors presume a long tradition of reflection on "the first principles of the natural law": basic principles of practical reason accessible to all people of good will and right reason. Because of their "givenness" these principles provide us with bases both for self-criticism and for social criticism. Far from being a cause for the subjectivism of those who think conscience means "doing my own thing" or the relativism of those who think it means "doing what the group does," Conscience-1 is actually the beginning of an antidote to these.

2.The application of principles to given circumstances "by practical discernment of reasons and goods." This requires certain habits of mind and will, especially prudence in deliberation. In the process of deliberation the mind often faces temptations, dilemmas, confusion and apparent conflicts with the teachings of the magisterium. Conscience must therefore be both well-formed and well-informed.

3.Our best judgment of what to do or refrain from doing in the here and now (or in the past). St. Thomas mostly used the word in this sense. Conscience-3 is only worthy of respect when it can bite, that is when it can tell us to do what we might otherwise be disinclined to do, or vice versa, or give us cause for remorse. Once again, there is plenty of ground for error here. Thus while insisting that we must follow our last, best judgment of conscience as the proximate norm of action, St. Thomas wrote a great deal about how we might ensure such a judgment is reliable. He would, I think, have been bewildered by contemporary talk of the 'primacy' of conscience or of any intellective operation. Just as the value of memory is in remembering accurately, so the value of conscience, for Thomas, is in yielding the right choice. Truth always had primacy for him.


Analysis:

Conscience as emotive response. On this view, conscience is nothing more than an emotive response conditioned over time by genetic factors, environment and other socializing factors, in addition to psychological forces deep at work in our own psyche. So conceived, conscience—particularly when manifested as guilt—is to be overcome or ignored or otherwise harmoniously integrated into our own everyday life in a way that it does not become an obstacle to our “life style choices,” “values,” “self-projects,” and so on.

Conscience as built in moral guidance system. Here, conscience is understood to be a kind of natural faculty or power. Some depict it as the very voice of God who, through conscience, can guide our actions directly. If not so depicted, it is presented as at least responding to the external dictates of moral authority in the manner of an internalized moral GPS: “do this,” “avoid that,” “too much more and you will cross the line,” and so on.

Conscience as moral sense. A third misconception, presents conscience as a kind of intuition which simply cannot be accounted for or explained in terms of human reasoning. Sometimes called the “moral sense,” conscience, from this viewpoint, must be developed much like developing the ability to judge a good wine, pick a winning race horse, assess a person’s character, or keep a group of school children well behaved and attentive.

Brief Impact on Particles of Man:

Metrodorus, a disciple of Epicurus said: "The happiness we receive from ourselves is greater than that which we obtain from our surroundings." It has given the dual poles of man's existence: the world, or what are external events, and man's nature, all things human eventually boil down to the reality: "That the principal element in a man's well-being -- indeed, in the whole tenor of his existence -- is what he is made of, his inner constitution."

Where, then, should ethics begin than by paying respect to man's inner life?
Schopenhauer's thought, much like the brilliance found in the thought of other Stoics, addresses common sense in ways that many today have forgotten or systematically ignore. Schopenhauer views the subjective life as being in our control. The objective life, on the other hand, is our having-to-do, as Ortega y Gasset refers to our dealings with the world. The objective life, or what is the world-at-large Schopenhauer tells us, is essentially in the hands of fate.

The greatest deficiency and ultimate tragedy of so much of twentieth-century thought is the blind insistence that man's nature is determined by historical and environmental forces. This asinine assertion is particularly troubling, especially after so many profound immaterialist philosophers throughout human history have uncovered the principle essences that govern our inner nature. Consider what Schopenhauer has to say about the force of personality and consciousness.

Further, the constitution of our consciousness is the ever present and lasting element in all we do or suffer; our individuality is persistently at work, more or less, at every moment of our life: all other influences are temporal, incidental, fleeting, and subject to every kind of chance and change. This is why Aristotle says: It is not wealth but character that lasts. And just for the same reason we can more easily bear a misfortune which comes to us entirely from without, than one which we have drawn upon ourselves; for fortune may always change, but not character. Therefore, subjective blessings -- a noble nature, a capable head, a joyful temperament, bright spirits, a well-constituted, perfectly sound physique, in a word, mens sana in corpore sano, are the first and most important elements in happiness; so that we should be more intent on promoting and preserving such qualities than on the possession of external wealth and external honour.

Thus, it is not difficult to see that consciousness meets with resistance in everything that it intends. For this reason, I will suggest that a genuine and sincere ethics is in fact a mechanism for assuaging or resolving contradictions in human existence. Ethics works to resolve contradictions in objective reality simply because these are unavoidable. For this reason, never should a genuine ethics entertain the dubious notion that it can impart any resolution to problems of human action and behavior. Ironically, given most people's incapacity to rule over themselves, it becomes necessary to construct laws that protect the greater good. This is the overwhelming role of positive law.

It is not until we begin to understand the role of conscience in individual human beings that we can comprehend how this aims to resolve contradictions. Perhaps the greatest claim that one can make about ethics is that it serves as a regulator of personal choice-making. Conscience is just this kind of mechanism, for it is a system of checks and balances that levels the field, as it were, in addressing concerns that pertain to personal behavior.

Our secularly liberated conception of happiness is contrary to Schopenhauer's. We are children of that great discovery of the latter half of the twentieth century: existential liberation from ourselves. This self-professed liberation has razed all of our moral convictions and diminished the effectiveness and integrity of our most cherished institutions. In its place, the vociferous proponents of radical liberation have built nothing but a self-consuming and paralyzing skepticism. Yet somehow, we now live under the illusion that we can still be moral agents. Unfortunately, today we actually exist more like beings that have been gutted; whose entrails no longer inform who we are inwardly. The greatest of these illusions, which border on the pathological, is the belief that we can be self-less, soul-less, center-less, committed altruists and at the same time strive to be ethical in our conduct. How soulless, merely biological beings, subjects subjugated to the demands of the state can still retain a vestige of responsibility, moral duty and freedom of choice, this does not seem relevant to the ethical equation today.

Schopenhauer's thought may not be making a splash on those who formerly might have been considered intelligent people, but the truths which he alludes to will not easily go away. When conscience, whether that which is understood as divine in origin or rational, and thus rationally revealed no longer play a decisive role in our conception of ethics, then clearly we can say with certainty that we are a demoralized people.

Conscience is a natural system of checks and balances whereby the rational component in our lives speaks to us about what is right and wrong. But rational, in this respect means intuitive more than self-conscious. Conscience is equivalent to personal identity, that portion of our selves that rules over us, but which is less obvious to others. We cannot readily disconnect our ethical behavior from conscience any more so than we can from personal identity. How some academic teachers of philosophy have made their claim to fame -- or their make-work careers -- arguing that the subject-I does not exist in itself, is tantamount to someone who claims not to speak a given language by communicating in it.

One of the notable problems with most ethical theories today is that they rationalize or over-intellectualize moral principles. This seems to be a paradox of sorts, something akin to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. When we observe people engaged in everyday activities, we quickly notice that for most the moral decision making process is exercised spontaneously. It is only when we engage in ethical "debates" that questions become unnecessarily muddled.

We have entered into an insidiously hollow and insipid age when reason is no longer held to be the final court of appeals in settling rational matters. Debating has become a pointless and fruitless activity given that the foundation of morality has been vanquished. In essence, debating today has become a rhetorical tool used for relativists to control problems of the day through obfuscation. This is why debating, as so many in academia are wont to value, is very much a root cause of propelling our nihilism forward to the next level of insipidness. This was not the case in previous epochs. Not long ago people actually presented evidence supplied by history, data, facts, and used demonstrable proofs to demonstrate the validity of arguments. There seems little use in debating in societies that do not retain respect for truth. Consider that we run out of a burning building, flee from the path of a wild animal, and duck from airborne objects without recourse to "theories" of action. Ironically, debating the virtue and merits of truth, moral goodness or the nature of the good life is rarely something that those who sincerely practice such things feel compelled to do.

Conscience is an intuitive mechanism that resists the pigeon-holding that is so prevalent in the minds of those who have made ethics their make-work. We live in an age when debate is employed not to establish the value and goodness of a given idea or belief, but rather, to debunk these. Debate has been turned into a tool for the negation of truth. As examples of this, we can cite how communism, socialism and Marxism in the twentieth-century made debate a staple of their mechanism of confusion, moral duplicity and terror. Debating the virtues of moral goodness is something that those who have an ax to sharpen are always interested in promoting. This is a central characteristic of dialectical materialism.

This is interesting in its own right in relation to Schopenhauer's philosophical system when we realize the value that he places on wisdom. What will become of man now that truth and wisdom have been completely charred as guides for human existence? It seems that much of our over-intellectualized, empty chatter today, whether in philosophy, morality, social-political questions or theology boil down to mere posturing. Looking about us to today, we quickly arrive at the conclusion that genuine thought -- sincere reflection that aims to guide individual's in appropriating their role in collective life -- is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Because the center has in fact been vanquished from human life, we no longer seek to settle questions with permanent answers. The heart and soul of the dominant paradigm today is a radical, ideological skepticism that is taking us to an unprecedented zombie-state where totalitarianism awaits us as the logical outcome of our hedonistic nihilism. Unfortunately, as Yeats' poem asserts, those who should know better -- those moralists who preach ethics as a secular religion -- have had their souls poisoned by very unbecoming, un-ethical wishes and desires.

Lescek Kolakowski said "Man Does Not Live by Reason Alone"

What is surprising in the present moment are those beautiful and deeply moving words spoken in Prague and Warsaw, words which pertain to the old repertoire of honesty or the dignity of the person. I wonder at this phenomenon because underneath there is an abyss. After all, those ideas have their foundation in religion. And I am not over-optimistic about the survival of religion in a scientific-technological civilization. How long can such notions stay afloat if the bottom is taken out?


Stay Blessed.
All the people rushing by,
Looking for the meanings of this life!
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