Conscience A Renovation Philosophy Page
		I experience conscience as a suspicion that I have failed, am failing, or am about to fail, some standard of right behaviour. From the testimony of other human persons, I conclude that ∙ the content of my conscience is peculiar to me (I have my own concerns, and my own definition of right and wrong), but ∙ the fact and general form of conscience is common, and limited, to persons throughout history and all around the world.           It has traditionally been assumed that conscience is some sort of moral faculty or sense that somehow reveals the moral properties of an event or state of affairs - rather in the way that our physical senses reveal the physical properties of events and states of affairs. In consequence of this belief, conscience is often thought to give intuitively authoritative judgments regarding the moral quality of our actions. Historically, almost every human culture seems to have recognized the existence of a conscience in this sense, and in many belief systems conscience is regarded as the voice of divine morality and therefore a completely reliable guide of conduct. This picture might be plausible if ∙ moral properties were analogous with physical properties and ∙ everybody's consciences were in at least rough agreement. As neither of these conditions hold, the picture is not plausible.           Significant differences in the content and intensity of conscience, from person to person, place to place, and time to time, has led to a widespread assumption, in modern secular societies, that the 'voice' of conscience is just that of our familial, social, religious, or political, conditioning. Certainly the 'voice' of conscience commonly has a pragmatic element that has to do with a fear of consequences if we are caught doing what we shouldn't, or not doing what we should, according to a communal ethic. Just as often, however, and perhaps more significantly, persons will attribute acting against their conditioning to conscience; think of 'conscientious' objection to slavery, war, or unfair discrimination, as historical examples. To not join in, or actively oppose, a popular, entrenched, or familial way of life is hardly a product of social conditioning.1 It appears to me that popular assumptions about conscience are obscuring what might be called the 'guts' of the basic phenomenon. If we put aside our theories, and simply describe its basic structure as it occurs in common human experience, we can note that, whatever the content, conscience is always experienced as a 'voice' that tells us something that has an 'ought' to it (we ought to do this or ought not to have done that). Conscience is, in other words, a kind of discourse. The elements of this, and all, discourse are that ∙ it is addressed by someone to someone, ∙ it has a subject [that which is talked about] and, if true, ∙ it discloses the character of the subject. If we focus on the basic and common structure of conscience, it becomes clear that ∙ the someone conscience addresses is an individual self (my conscience addresses me, your conscience addresses you, and so on), ∙ the subject is the way of life of that self, and ∙ it tells us something about that subject (usually that a performance is or is not compatible with a value that is relevant to the subject's way of life). Because conscience so often tells us something ethical that is inconvenient, it is usually assumed that the 'someone' who addresses the individual with the 'voice' of conscience is ∙ transcendent (e.g., God, a universal Moral Law, or 'super ego'), or ∙ internalised parental and/or communal conditioning. These assumptions not only fail to adequately account for the evidence of experience but also beg the question by appealing to theories which seriously prejudice any understanding that they allow. If I try to put aside all prejudicial theory, and just describe conscience as I actually experience it, it seems clear that the 'voice' of conscience is me addressing myself. This apparent insight bothers me because it lends itself to a kind thingish bifurcation of myself. I have completely rejected all the popular nonsense about persons having a 'higher' [parental] self and a 'carnal' or appetitive ['lower'] self. Nevertheless, the voice of my conscience is mine and, when it speaks, it is nearly always telling me something that I don't want to hear. So what is going on here? I do not claim to have the answer to this question, but I do have an hypothesis which ∙ seems to account for all the facts and ∙ relies on evidence which you should be able to verify for yourself from your own experience. My starting place, for any explanation of human behaviour, is that being a person is a way of engaging with the world; something I am doing rather than something I am. This explains why conscience is relevant to how the individual, being addressed by conscience, is living the life of a person in the world; conscience doesn't address my 'soul' but the behaviour by which I am creating and maintaining my self as a moral/psychological character. This much seems uncontroversial. What is controversial is the ethical element of conscience. Conscience is overwhelmingly associated with guilt. So what are we all supposedly guilty of? For that matter, where does the powerful human notion of guilt come from in the first place? Why, for instance, do so many of our primal myths, from widely separated cultures, equate the origin of personhood with guilt? The answer to these questions cannot be morally or politically specific because (a) we have not all committed the same crimes,2 (b) the fact and character of a supposedly universal Moral Law is incompatible with what we know (as contrasted with what various folk believe) about being a human person in the world, and, (c) the ethics, with which individuals interpret the voice of conscience, vary so significantly. There needs to be something universal to persons, and just about being a person, that explains why guilt plays such a significant role in the evolution of humans as persons. Regardless of local ethics, the human concept of guilt, in all cultures, has to do with failing to meet a responsibility. This responsibility may be defined by a religion or ethic but, again, the universality of responsibility, as an important concept in human cultures, suggests that religions and ethics are a response to a primal sense of guilt rather than the source of it.           It is entirely possible that the importance of responsibility emerged from the importance of cooperation in early human survival (letting your mates or kin down, when their survival is at stake, is likely to have been the ultimate sin in those days - as it still is for teams of people dealing with crisis situations). There are, however, two even more primordial responsibilities, just about being a person, which we do not, and cannot, adequately discharge. These, primitive, individual, and poignant, responsibilities are for our actuality and our potentiality.3 Actuality: In their everyday lives humans tend to take it for granted that their way of life, and therefore their character as selves, has some sort of thingish (physical or metaphysical) foundation. In fact, however, and if you think about it carefully, the only 'ground' of your way of life is that fact that it is yours and you are living it. You, and you alone, have to be and are responsible for living the actuality with which you are landed even though you didn't choose it and don't have control over the circumstances into which you find yourself thrown.           Being a human person is somewhat like having accidentally overheard a conversation which, just because we have overheard it, commits us irrevocably to a project of fabulously high stakes which is easier to lose than win. Being 'thrown' into this project (being a person in the world) is a non-negotiable event which binds us to an almost god-like power that we did not earn and a god-like responsibility for which we did not ask. You simply awoke to find yourself already thrown into being what you are in a particular set of circumstances. This existence, and most of those circumstances, are the result of past actions by other persons. These circumstances, which are not of your making, include your biological and psychological makeup as well as a cultural-historical context in which others determine your possibilities. So you have to be yourself, and live your life, by taking responsibility for a whole load of facts which are ∙ not of your making and ∙ founded on a past over which you have no control whatsoever. Potentiality: Added to the fact that your facticity - the set of facts for which you are landed with responsibility - is not of your making or choice, is that fact that you have to be-towards realising some of your possibilities, at the expense of others, without having any thingish foundation of values on which to stand. What you are thrown into the world 'as' is ∙ an actual human individual in actual circumstances and ∙ a potential lover, hater, truth- or lie-teller, builder, destroyer, bigot, hero, coward, and so on and on. You are responsible for both of these. Which aspects of your potentiality you choose to realise, and which you choose to neglect, is not decided for you by any genetic, religious, psychological, or fated, fact, but by the values that you choose to live by; you do not, for example, behave honestly or dishonestly because of your DNA or upbringing but because of the value that honesty or dishonesty has for who you will be after you've been honest or dishonest. In the project of being a person, you  have to, and do, choose to live by some values - but you can never know that your choices are right.4           Your possibilities are not some kind of incomplete or lower-class actualities; a possibility is literally no-thing. So being thrown into responsibility for your potentiality means being responsible for a whole bunch of no-things - some of which will become some-things as a result of your inputs to the world. Indeed, as a potential builder, teacher, killer, etc., who realises a potentiality for various ways of life just by being a possible builder, etc., you 'stand on' what is not of your making or choice (your actualities), and are being-towards what doesn't exist (your possibilities). Added to this, in actualising any one possibility you thereby waive all sorts of other possibilities - the time spent at a job, for example, cannot be spent in other ways at the same time. So another responsibility arises, just from being a person, in the form of all the potentiality and possibilities that are not realised because you have chosen, or are choosing, an alternative. Perhaps more to the point, and as a result of this, there are all the possible selves that you could have been but are not because you are choosing to be the self you are. Your actuality and your potentiality are two responsibilities which you simply cannot discharge adequately. Responsibility without adequate discharge is a 'being guilty' [failing a standard] which is common to all persons - human or divine.           If this is right then persons would universally experience guilt on the grounds of an unavoidable failure of responsibility - for our own actuality and our own potentiality - that has nothing to do with any kind of moral, political, or religious, ethic. We tend to 'spin' our being guilty into a political, religious, or ethical, failing only because we are not living the authentic lives of persons - we hide from the real responsibility of being a person in everyday living, belonging to a group, and/or various beliefs about gods, star signs, personality types, race, gender, and so on. The fact, however, is that being guilty is more primordial than any religious, political, or moral, ideologies founded on it; humans do not experience guilt because they have ethics but have ethics because they feel guilty. It is almost certainly this primordial being guilty that conscience reveals and which we obscure by 'translating' what conscience reveals according to our various religious, ethical, and scientific, myths.5           This being the case, the call of conscience will not be a call to any ethic or none but to an authentic being guilty. Put simply, you can live normally, hiding from your responsibilities for choosing a self behind race or gender or social class or whatever, or as an authentic person. You can live authentically only if you choose which of your possibilities you are going to actualise in an understanding of what you are and what you are doing - you turn away from being governed by circumstances and towards being governed by yourself. This is a matter of projecting your actual potentiality onto your actual circumstances - whatever you and they may be. There is, in this, not an escape from being guilty but a kind of freedom to own the reality of being guilty and become worthy of it. Here we get to what I suspect is the crux of conscience. A person is not a thing, values are not things; being a person is a project, and values are a measure of ∙ what is and is not relevant to that project and ∙ in what way. This insight, which I owe to Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, needs to be the starting point of any reliable understanding of the character of human personhood. Starting from this point of view, I note that, in the normal course of events, we are not actively engaged with accepting our responsibility and guilt for what we are (our actuality) and who we are being-towards (our potentiality), but simply go about our everyday lives out of habit, convenience, and/or in some community-prescribed manner. By doing this, we hide the performal reality of being a person in a kind of counterfeit thingness ("I'm a woman, or Maori or Sagittarian, or ambitious, I was abused as a child, I am poor, etc, and that dictates that I must act as I do"). Before we can recover from this unreality, we have first to 'find' our hidden reality as persons. This is a matter of finding our lost responsibility and our lost guilt. The reality of being a person is not, however, lost simply as a fact but because we fear the weight of personhood and prefer being religious, or political, or scientific, or whatever. Because being a person is an activity, we can find this hidden reality not in any kind of thingish characteristics (having a language, being self-conscious, and such like) but in the life-long activity of being a person in the world (i.e., the reality of our personhood is found in what we are doing rather than in what we are). If the reality of being a person was totally occult (a 'secret') then we wouldn't know that and/or have any clue as to what to do about it. Having a conscience is the evidence that ∙ we are not totally lost and, ∙ the reality of being a person is not secreted away in some occult esoterica but simply ignored because we don't like it.6           Of course, what could be called 'social' conscience speaks to us of specifics; we feel guilty about a particular performance, we worry about what other persons will think of us and/or what a certain performance says about us. These events are, I believe, just symptoms of the basic, or 'existential,' conscience that is their source. It is basic conscience - the conscience which explains social conscience - that I am talking about here. Regardless of specifics, all conscience is the suspicion that we are failing some standard and/or the discharge of some obligation. The one standard that we are all failing is not a moral or political one but that of living the authentic life; that is, a way of life in which we accept the actuality, potentiality, responsibility, and guilt, of being a person. It is very much this possible way of life from which we are hiding in everydayness, politics, belonging, religion, art, learning, drug use, and so on. In the midst of that everyday unreality, basic conscience ∙ witnesses to the fact that we are not living authentically as person, ∙ witnesses to the possibility of living authentically, ∙ 'calls' us to do so, and ∙ haunts us with the sense of responsibility and guilt from which we are fleeing in our normal inauthenticity. This matters because, if my analysis of the human condition is correct, an authentic way of life must be possible despite our having lost sight of authenticity by hiding from our responsibility as persons in human normality. We must, somehow, be able to pull our own selves out of our own unreality. But how are we to do this if we have successfully hidden our reality in normality?7 The answer to this is that our conscience attests to the possibility of being authentic by 'whispering' to us that our normal inauthenticity isn't the be-all and end-all of existence. I think that the evidence of this can be found in non-specific conscience; that is, the occasional feeling that those of who want to live valuable lives get that we are not being all that we could be.           What I am talking about here is more than just occasional and specific feelings of guilt or anxiety related to distinct acts of commission or omission. It is more a kind of unease from which such feelings emerge as symptoms which both indicate, and cover up, an underlying condition. Perhaps the best illustration of this would be that of an addict. My own observations and experiences verify the thesis that addicts are caught up in by their addiction in a way similar to that in which we are all caught up in the traumatic trivia of our everyday lives. But, somewhere in all addicts, there is an awareness that the addicted way of life and the character is realises are failing some standard that is much more primordial, and personal, than communal ethics and laws. I have witnessed this awareness time and time again in all kinds of addicts. This awareness is real enough that it has to be suppressed - the addict has to work at keeping the 'voice of conscience' quiet. Because this suppression requires constant effort, the awareness is never entirely stilled; in between the all-consuming search for the next escape, and the escape itself, something gets through. In this 'something' lies the addict's only hope of recovery - she has to know that an alternative way of life is possible and have some sort of reason for choosing it. Analogously, there lurks within all of us a suspicion that normality (conformity, non-conformity, everydayness, jockeying for advantage, acting out of habit, tradition, or convenience) is inauthentic (unreal) in some way. We normally suppress this suspicion, often with considerable success, using the same kind of lies, dishonesty, busyness, and self-deception, that any addict does. But the suspicion never quite goes away; it's a kind of 'haunting' that occasionally breaks through all the bullshit and busyness of everyday life. This 'haunting', which is our only hope for recovering from our inauthenticity, is the 'voice' of basic conscience - a voice which counts as a kind of discourse because it discloses something by 'calling' to us. This call doesn't have any proposition content in itself (any content is a product of a particular ethic), but it does have a 'direction' in that it, in effect, calls us away from everyday unreality and towards our own potential for living authentically. If this is right then the 'guts' of conscience, which is obscured by details and/or theory, is the lurking awareness you retain, in the 'cracks' in your everyday inauthenticity, that there is some important possibility for being a person that you are neglecting for reasons that you would rather not examine too closely. Your reasons for not examining this possibility too closely almost certainly include the fact that doing so would confront you with the anxiety, responsibility, and failure of responsibility (i.e., guilt), that being a real person entails. This awareness 'calls' to you not as the propositional voice of ordinary social conscience (which may not trouble you at all) but as a kind of subversive nagging which invites you to pay attention to the way that you are going about being a person in the 'light' of your own potentiality. To speak of conscience as nagging', 'inviting' or 'calling' you implies the existence of a caller - the 'someone' who is addressing you in discourse. The call of conscience originates within you, but the caller is obviously not who you are being-towards as a normal human self; after all, conscience irritatingly 'calls' against the expectations and wishes of your everyday self (the 'voice' of conscience 'speaks' to us individually but most often tells us what we don't want to hear). This is where the folk-psychology of conscience as the voice of God or social conditioning comes from; people don't like the call of conscience and so disown it as coming from a source outside of them. The lived experience of having a conscience, however, indicates that the 'caller' in conscience is yourself as the potentiality for being real from which you are hiding in everydayness and belonging. This caller cannot be some sort of 'higher self' or 'super ego' because such fancies don't exist. Nor can it be the 'real you' because the real you is always being defined, in an ongoing manner, by whatever choices you are making. I believe it to be, rather, the not-quite-suppressed awareness of what is involved in being a person which scares you. Persons who fear heights, for example, and disavow that fear because avowing it may affect their status in the eyes of others, frequently admit their fear by staying away from high places. In the same way, we admit our fear of our own responsibility and being guilty by turning away from the reality of our own personhood. This being the case, conscience is the awareness that remains that, in living your everyday life, you are turning away from the reality of being a person. The 'voice' of conscience seems 'other' than ourselves only because everyday belonging has alienated us from our own potential for authentic existence. The notion that the call of conscience is the voice of a power outside of ourselves, or the call of a universal law, is also a device for fending off conscience by making the voice of something other than ourselves. This mythology covers conscience over with a kind of counterfeit. The real conscience, hidden by the counterfeit, is the call of ourselves to be free of our own self-oppression and, as such, is a universal call of our own potentiality as individuals and in our individual circumstances. Just by having a conscience at all, human persons admit that we ∙ are not living the lives of authentic persons, ∙ could be, but ∙ fear the intuition that living an authentic life would confront us with responsibility, guilt [failures of responsibility], and anxiety. REFERENCE:  Heidegger, Martin. (1927)  Sein und Zeit (translated as Being and Time by Macquarrie and Robinson. Harper Row, New York, 1962). Division 2, Book 2. NOTES: 1. Some conscientious objection is undoubtedly just a conflict between, say, familial and social attitudes (as, for example, when children of pacifist families refuse to participate in a popular war), but the examples that I have in mind are those in which individuals take a conscientious stand against both their family and wider society. 2. This is why religious, mythic, and psychiatry, explanations of guilt look for something that our mythic ancestors did (as occurs in the notion of Original Sin) or a supposedly universal feature of childhood (such as the supposed Oedipal Complex of Freudian psychiatry). 3. It is probable that the earliest humans to develop personhood, in pre-history, were far more acutely aware of being persons that we are (for all of the historical period, up to and including today, humans seem to have taken their personhood so much for granted as to lose sight of it altogether. ). In such circumstances I would expect an awareness of the responsibilities of personhood to emerge alongside, or prior to, responsibilities to kin, gods, or an ethic, rather than the other way around. That would certainly explain the sense of guilt, associated with individual personhood, that haunts the primal myths of Tane Mahuta (Maori), Prometheus (Greek), or Adam and Eve (Hebraic). 4. Whenever you perform, you always do so for a reason that has to do with the value which you attach to being a certain kind of self. So say, for example, that you are presented with a possibility for being fair or unfair. Whichever way you choose, there will be a reason for your choice. This reason will ultimately depend on the value that you attach to being the kind of self who is fair, unfair, or tries to avoid the choice. Thus: ......➔ You act for a reason ➔ your actions realise a moral and psychological character (a self) ➔ you realise this self, rather than another possible self, because you consider it to be more valuable than the alternatives, ➔ what is or is not valuable to you depends entirely on the self that you are creating ➔ the self you are creating gives you your reasons for acting as you do ➔...... This is a circle without a foundation [ground] - the schema above could start with any of the arrows. Your self is not its ground because your self is being created by its choices; the choices are not the ground because they are chosen as valuable to the self they are creating; your genetics or circumstances are not the ground because neither of them realise possibilities for a reason that calculates them to be valuable. There is nowhere that you can break into this circle with a fact that will settle who you should be. The circle is driven by values, and your way of life is without a foundation precisely because there is nowhere in the circle to ground the values which drive it. 5. There is no religious, scientific, ethical, or psychological, answer to this guilt. Our essential being-guilty cannot be avoided by any form of life or death. We simply cannot realise all of our valued possibilities, or go back and recreate our existence and circumstances from the ground up. And, although we can come to believe that a past choice was wrong, we can never know for certain that the way of life that we are now choosing is right. 6. Indeed, all our ridiculous exploration of the supposed 'occult' is no more than evidence of just how desperately we don't want to face the truth. 7. The problem here is not unlike that of self-deception. If you know that you have been deceived then the deception fails. So, to be truly self-deceived, you must not know that you are deceiving yourself. But how could you possibly find out that you are self-deceived if being self-deceived means not know that you are?
		Steven Foulds. Page last modified on 28 November 2011      Return to the Renovation Home Page