THE REVOLT IN MORALS

There is a certain irony in the revolt of the masses¹ against being a mass. It makes sense for an individual to revolt against his submersion as an undistinguishable atom in the global homogeneity of the crowd, against his loss of the feeling of personality and of everything that makes him unique. But when the revolt becomes a mass revolt, the mass does not cease being a mass. It can only become a mass of a different kind, and this is not what they are revolting for.

Yet this is the phenomenon we are seeing these days. It is by no means confined to young people, though it shows itself among them in a more eruptive form. Everyone wants to be different. This should be easy, we might hastily assume, for there is only one way of conforming and the modes of nonconformity are indefinitely variable. But human limitations curtail an existential expression of this theoretical possibility.

Since only a few are gifted with productive originality, people begin to copy others' ways of being different and thereby destroy the differences the positively original people have created. Those who sense this but are insufficiently creative to be original in a constructive way content themselves with eccentricity and exhibitionism. Thus they can at least give some flattery to their ego and can make a passing flash for a week or two, until they sink back again into the undifferentiated mass. The really original ones have to wait until they are winnowed out by history, which alone can pass judgment on the permanent value of their works. But the judgment of history is hard to anticipate. Those most influential in shaping the character of the next age are as often as not the least noisy in their own age.

The revolt in morals seems to be following the general pattern. Morals used to mean customary human behavior and therefore something public. Where customs differed, there was an endeavor to criticize the customs of various groups by reference to some wider norm that would be valid for the whole race of men. Antigone's² famous refusal to obey the law of her uncle, King Creon, was not grounded on an appeal to her own personal judgment of what is right and wrong, but on an appeal to a higher law, the unchangeable ordinances of the gods. Her personal conscience did not make up morality, but merely discovered the discrepancy between what the king commanded and what the gods commanded. But it shows the beginning of a consciousness of a conscience in us, inasmuch as she had to decide which of the two laws to obey. The problem is still with us. There are public norms according to which we may decide moral matters, but in every case the decision must be made by oneself.

The distinction between objective and subjective morality does more than provide us with a glib linguistic answer to many moral difficulties. Like most such distinctions, it can be overdone, but it rests on the inescapable fact that error exists in the world and that some error is unavoidable even in the best of minds. Theoretically, no one ever need make a mistake, since where evidence is unattainable one can and should withhold judgment. But in the practical order decisions must be made, and often they must be made quickly, before the evident truth can be ascertained. As early as men reflected on their acts, they must have said to themselves: "I made a mistake, but I made it in good faith. Others have told me that I was wrong, and now I myself see how wrong I was; but at the time I judged that I was right. Can both judgments be true? They must be, each for its own time and in its own way." So conscience was born and a distinction between objective and subjective morals.

THE GREEKS AND MEDIEVALS

As for so many things, the Greeks gave us the word for conscience. They called it syneidesis, from the verb syneidenai, to know with.³ It meant the sharing of an awareness with someone else, of being privy to a secret, of "being in the know". But syneidenai heauto means being privy to one's own secret and not sharing it with another, a "knowing with" in the sense of knowing oneself and the state of one's mind together with the external object of knowledge. The Greek word and its Latin translation conscientia are not necessarily reserved for moral meanings and may signify mere psychological awareness. In English we have split the word into consciousness and conscience, which makes for clarity but leaves us without a common word covering both.

When used in the moral sense, conscience seems originally to have expressed a judgment that we make on ourselves, especially a condemnatory judgment resulting from the awareness of something shameful in our life. It soon came to include excusing judgments also. No matter how our actions may appear before the world, we know what we have actually done, how the act appeared to us when we did choose it, the good or bad motives which prompted us, the amount of self-control we had at the moment, and the judgment we ourselves who are "in the know" cannot help passing on our conduct.

With St. Paul,⁴ though the old meaning is kept, a new application comes in. If we cannot help judging our conduct after the act, why not make the judgment before the act and use it as a directing norm? Conscience thus assumes not only the role of a judge but also that of a legislator. It is a guide to future conduct as well as a judge of past conduct. It not only condemns or approves what we have done, but it also commands or forbids, persuades or permits what we are contemplating doing. Thus we can find some further use for conscience than merely to stand helpless before its inexorable verdict. We can use conscience as a light to guide our steps in the moral life.

It is no wonder that confusion began to appear in the notion of conscience. Past acts are over and done with. Even when we make the most condemnatory judgment against ourselves, all we can do is to acknowledge our guilt and do what we can to repair our mischief. But when we seek the guidance of conscience regarding the future, we do not always find that it speaks with a clear voice. In fact, we ask whose voice it is, and reflection on ourselves shows that it is no voice but our own. What is the point of consulting conscience if it shall say to us whatever we make it say? Can we discover something in conscience that shall speak to us authoritatively and with some assurance of objectivity? How can we make sure that the antecedent judgment of conscience guiding us before the act will correspond with the consequent judgment of conscience we know we shall have to pass on ourselves after the act?

A remark of St. Jerome⁵ introduces this new element. What may be only a copyist's error for syneidesis gives us the medieval word synderesis, which does not exist in Greek. The closest to it would be synteresis, which we can manufacture from synterein, a verb meaning to watch carefully. St. Jerome suggests that synderesis may be a fourth part of the soul in addition to the three Platonic elements of reason (nous), spirit (thymos), and desire (epithymia).⁶ If so, is he suggesting that we have a special faculty of perceiving right and wrong? Is this synderesis another name for conscience, or is it a part of conscience, or is it something else in us which governs conscience? Medieval speculation spent much effort on trying to solve this problem.

It was to be expected that the medievals would approach conscience from the standpoint of deductive logic, the instrument they applied to the solution of all problems involving a passage from the known to the unknown. Conscience is not regarded as a special faculty in man but is merely a name for the practical intellect reasoning on moral matters and arriving at a judgment of what has been done or is to be done in a particular instance. The major premise states the general moral rule, the minor premise subsumes the present case under the rule, and the conclusion asserts whether the act is allowed or not according to the rule. It is quite clear that we do engage in this type of moral reasoning, but it is a very superficial view of conscience. Even the medievals recognized that there is something more to conscience than mere logic. Where does one find the premises? The minor premise, usually factual, is not always beyond dispute. The major premise, announcing the general rule, can often be derived from still more general rules, but there comes the point of the most basic moral principles that have to be accepted on their own recognizance. Where do they come from and how do we know them? This is the function the medievals assigned to synderesis, reinterpreting St. Jerome's term so that it came to mean the habit of general moral principles.⁷

There should be no difficulty with the notion of synderesis if it means no more than a recognition that people do have moral principles and apply them to particular cases. They may gather these principles from varied sources, from home training, from schoolmates, from the customs of their society, from civil law, from personal insight, from connatural knowledge of every type. That people habitually possess such principles and have a certain ease in applying them is evident. The difficulty concerns the truth of such principles, for a correct as opposed to an erroneous conscience depends, not only on the validity of the reasoning from the principles, but also on the rightness of the principles themselves. And synderesis is the habit of right moral principles only.

In the last analysis appeal must be made to self-evidence. But who is to judge what is self-evident and what is not? ln matters of fact there is nothing to do but to point to the fact itself staring one in the face. Even in such cases, there may be some few who cannot or will not see it. ln matters of morals, and especially when there is question of an abstract moral principle that is not so general as to be tautologous, the number of dissenters is usually larger. We should note here that self-evidence does not mean the ability to convince others, only the ability to see and grasp the evident truth oneself. If the other person cannot see it despite the clearest of explanations, there is no use arguing. Because it is self-evident, it is not possible for it to be proved.

Consequently, the judgment of self-evidence is one's own judgment, where the clearness of the known truth forces the mind to acceptance. Minds are more or less open to the truth, more or less unclouded by prejudice, more or less free from disturbing emotions, more or less quick in grasping relationships. What is self-evident to one may not be so to another. Since not all share the same moral principles, and not all interpret facts in the same way, and not all are equally expert in logical reasoning, not all are going to draw the same conclusions of conscience.

The medievals did not immediately subscribe to the view that each one must follow his own conscience, even if it was different from what others saw as the objective rule of right reason. How could one be obliged to do the wrong? How could moral evil ever be morally mandatory? An early opinion stated that one is obliged to correct the error, which he can always do by acting against his conscience and submitting to authority.⁸ A mitigation of this opinion declared that conscience is our guide in matters that are morally neutral, but not in those which involve the possibility of transgressing God's law, which obviously has precedence over any human judgment, such as conscience is.⁹ But neither of these answers touches the crucial point of the problem: how do I know what is God's law? We have to wait for St. Thomas,¹⁰ who finally in his later works distinguishes between voluntary and involuntary, vincible and invincible, culpable and inculpable error, and announces that involuntary or invincible or inculpable error always excuses from fault. Even he will not go so far as to say that an act proceeding from an erroneous conscience is good, only that it is not bad. But his later followers completed the logic of the argument.¹¹

The undeveloped conclusion from this contest between objective and subjective morality is that the subjective should be conformed to the objective in every way possible, but in the ultimate show-down between the two, when the person is thoroughly convinced that he is right, the subjective decision of his conscience is paramount.

The medievals did not know it, but they were laying down here the basis of the philosophy of the person. They had inherited from Boethius a definition of person: "an individual substance of a rational nature",¹² which merely classified person as a species under the genus substance. They distinguished the concepts of person and nature in their discussions on the Trinity and Incarnation. But they treated the concept of person in the same detached and impersonal style in which they treated all other concepts. It is always about "person-as-such", but never delves into that hidden core of each person's being which makes him so utterly unique that he is not universalizable and therefore not conceptualizable. To refer to the person as the noblest variety of Aristotelian "first substance",¹³ which can be subject but not predicate, is merely to notice a rule of logic; and to adduce "incommunicability"¹⁴ as the chief property of person is to express uniqueness without in any way saying how that uniqueness is unique. Perhaps it is not possible to go further by these methods.

We should not think it to be incongruous, therefore, to see schools of mysticism¹⁵ flourishing alongside this rationalism. A pale conceptualization of personality is no substitute for vivid personal experience. Though in mysticism one pole of that experience is God, the other pole is the individual personal self. Mystical experience may seek not only what God is like, but also what I should do and how I should live. God may give me a message not only about Him but also about me. The real danger of mysticism comes when this unique human soul becomes convinced that the will of God for him conflicts with the laws of society or of the Church or even with the natural law as expounded by the prevailing philosophers of the period. Then, what is the dictate of conscience? Should Joan of Arc obey her voices or her ecclesiastical examiners? She has to make the choice and thus obeys herself, but which of the two should she choose to follow?

Thus the subjective aspect of moral living had been acquiring prominence until the Reformation theology accentuated the movement.¹⁶ The picture of the human soul standing naked before its God and answerable to Him alone, apart from the mediation of an institutional Church, transferred responsibility from the Church to the individual person himself, who had to act solely in accordance with his own interior light without the assistance of an official interpreter. It took some time for this picture to develop, but it finally did in the evangelical sects.¹⁷ lt had enormous influence, even among those who did not accept the Reformation. One did not need to deny the institutional Church or flout its authority to come to the realization that being a member of it did not at all extinguish the human personality that membership in it was supposed to enhance. In no case is the person lost in the mass, but is meant to find therein his supreme fulfillment.

MODERN PHILOSOPHERS

Among philosophers the emphasis on the subjective stems from the founder of modern philosophy, Descartes,¹⁸ with his doubts about the external world and his discovery of himself as a thinking thing. The ethical tinge in Descartes' philosophy is faint and his discourse on conscience as distinct from consciousness is slight, but he set the stage. The tendency to look within, however disastrous it may be for a realistic epistemology and deleterious in its issuance in an ultra-dualistic psychology, began the period of self-examination and introspection that would culminate in our present preoccupation with such questions as "What am I?" and more significantly "Who am I?"

Looking within seems to be more amenable to an empiricist than to a rationalist approach. Locke's reduction of personality to the identity of consciousness¹⁹ is interesting because of the common root of consciousness and conscience. If personal identity does not consist in the body which is constantly changing its microscopic constituents, it can consist only in the unity of a train of memory of which we are conscious. Should that memory train be split or broken up, what remains of the person? Can he now be guilty of the acts he is no longer conscious of and for which his conscience no longer upbraids him? If his consciousness is somehow restored and his personality reintegrated, does his conscience then also revive? Locke admitted substance,²⁰ but his hold on it is slipping. If, as he suggests,²¹ matter might be able to think, if the matter of the living body is constantly being replaced, if there is no substantial principle such as an Aristotelian form to govern the arrangement of its parts, and if the mind is consciousness, which might be intermittent, then what happens to the continuity of the human person? The difficulty about personality here is metaphysical rather than ethical, but it is hard to see how there can be an ethical personality without a foundation of personality in metaphysics.

Hume's attack on the concept of substance in the sense of a permanent and lasting self reduced whatever meaning there is to self to a bundle of perceptions loosely united by bonds of association.²² So, if I am no more than a series or stream of mental phenomena, as Mill²³ and James²⁴ were later to make of it, then the acts which I call my own assume a proportionately greater importance with the disappearance of any permanent bearer of these acts. Conscience is reduced to an associative link between the thought of an act done or to be done and the emotional feeling of approval or blame. Adam Smith's²⁵ impartial observer is a dramatization of this view.

Nor could Kant's distinction of a phenomenal ego and a noumenal ego solve the problem, since the latter is unattainable by pure reason or speculative knowledge.²⁶ It is his use of practical reason that brought to the fore his emphasis on the human person and had repercussions on the use of conscience.²⁷ It is in the act of free choice that I experience myself as I really am, that I actually find myself exerting the only exercise of myself that I can truly call my own, and that I discover my personality myself in an act, not of intellect, but of will. This insight is of the greatest consequence in the study of the modern development of personality. That Kant saw this appears in his reemphasis on the distinction between person and thing, and his glorification of the person as that which must always be respected as an end and never used as a mere means.²⁸ Kant tries to unite an ethics of law and an ethics of person by having each person be his own legislator in morals, though one may wonder how strong is his law and how real is his person. Conscience speaks to us with the stern voice of duty, allowing no exception against her inexorable demands, which I myself lay on my own person by the categorical imperative. Freedom from external law is obtained only by becoming the legislator as well as the subject. Conscience is consciousness of acting out of the motive of duty. It seems to be peculiarly ineffective in determining what is the content of that duty, though this is usually what we are looking for in our appeal to conscience.

It is in the twentieth century that the subjective has come into its own. Since Freud²⁹ the term conscience has gathered a connotation it may never lose. We are back again in the days of myth when furies and erinys pursue man and submerged dreads rise to haunt us. Man's true self, his ego, is overlaid with a superego of totems and taboos derived from his parents and other influences of his childhood, serving the good purpose of making him superficially acceptable to the society in which he must live, but also having the bad effect of stifling and dwarfing his true personality. How to make himself the proper combination of conformist and rebel, how to act against the false conscience of the superego when it cramps him and to express the true conscience of the ego when it demands freedom, this is the problem of developing maturity. Freud sees conscience almost wholly in the light of the superego, of those irrational prejudices which his reason is constantly criticizing but which he feels guilty in transgressing. Conscience is therefore not seen as a function of reason, which would be the ego, but as an irrational psychological force we ought to escape from but often cannot. In this view consequent conscience does not usually give us a true judgment of actual guilt for wrongdoing, but rather a disturbing picture of false guilt for we know not what; and antecedent conscience can hardly be a guide for satisfactory living. One gets the impression that for Freud the ethical is quite submerged in the psychological, and that what is worse than living immorally is the inability to tolerate immorality in oneself. In such a view, it is better not to have a conscience. If such an interpretation is unjust to Freud, it seems to be deserved by some who use his methods and in the admittedly inadequate popular understanding of his theory.

The attitude of overcoming conscience rather than being guided by it, the glorification of rebellion against conscience in the name of freedom as the center of personality, is a feature of the existentialist outlook. Nietzsche,³⁰ acknowledged as a forerunner of existentialism, considers conscience as a sort of creative sickness of mankind, a sickness insofar as the ruling classes had to suppress the will-to-power and the aggressive instincts of the masses in order to keep their own place of superiority, and creative insofar as this suppression is only partial, not rooting out these instincts but driving them within where they boil and fester until they erupt in historically creative revolution. Conscience is man's self-condemnation for his natural cruelty and destructiveness and aggressiveness, which are the remains of the animal in him and which he has been taught to believe are bad. In this sense "conscience makes cowards of us all."³¹ Man will never amount to anything if he remains submissive to this voice of the moral conscience and follows the values of the herd. If he is to follow a true conscience, it must be a transmoral conscience. He must become a creative spirit, one who needs conquest, adventure, and danger.³² He must not scruple to throw himself into the fray, to express his zest for life, his joy in freedom, come what may either to himself or others. Thus he passes beyond good and evil. Conscience as we know it is to be suppressed and, if the word conscience is to be used, it must conform to the transvaluation of all values.

There are varied ways of embracing moral evil as an essential ingredient in human life, either by denying as in Nietzsche that it really is evil, or by sanctifying it with theological faith in admitting man's essential sinfulness from which he is redeemed by God's grace. Those who refuse to admit a distinction between subjective and objective morality, and between the direct willing of an evil and the indirect permitting of unavoidable evil consequences as smacking too strongly of scholastic legalism and casuistry, must conclude that we are simply forced to accept moral evil into our lives and learn to live with our own sinfulness. This desperately pessimistic view of man's nature leads to despair; it becomes the source of all the anxieties and dreads bred by our guilty conscience. There would be no remedy, were not the despair overcome by the heroic commitment of my helpless being into the hands of God by the act of faith, by a blind trust in His goodness and mercy, who has willed to overlook the evil I cannot avoid and has extended to me a helping hand out of the morass of iniquity in which I am naturally sunk. Thus human reason has no answer to the mystery of evil, nor has been conscience conceived as a function of reason; the ethical must be transcended by a nonrational act of religious faith.³³

Nontheistic existentialists cannot make an appeal to faith. All they can do in the face of moral evil is to defy it. The most outspoken expression of such defiance is found in the philosophers of the absurd, such as Sartre³⁴ and Camus,³⁵ who find that they can save their self-respect only by the vigorous assertion of their freedom, which consists in saying No to the evils of life, even though they can find nothing to say Yes to, except to their own personal freedom, which consists in saying No.

One of the deepest treatments of conscience in this century has come, as we might expect, from Heidegger.³⁶ He dismisses the ordinary interpretation of conscience, with its distinction into good and bad, as superficial. His own existential interpretation identifies conscience with a call, the call of care, summoning the self away from conventional demands. It speaks to us in silence and what it says is: "guilty!" This is no ordinary guilt for some recognized misdeed, but the guilt of existence itself. It is the recognition of the nothing in the center of our being, our authentic possibilities for being, and the demand on us to realize those possibilities by the authentic use of our freedom. So our attitude must be one of resoluteness in the pursuit of authenticity. Heidegger's use of conscience and guilt has little in common with the traditional use of these terms, as he admits, but what he says opens up vistas for our following discussion.

THE POSSIBILITIES OF FREEDOM

It can be seen from this inadequate historical review that whereas the trend of philosophy in general and of ethics in particular has been from an objective emphasis in the ancients to a subjective emphasis in the moderns, the concept of conscience has been pursuing an opposite direction. Conscience traditionally meant my own subjective application of general objective laws to my own individual act in my own personal situation. It has become a judgment on the general evilness of mankind, in which we all share even against our will, and toward which we must all adopt some attitude of release or resistance by the supreme use of our freedom. Freedom is indeed a subjective and personal matter, but the modern tendency is to affirm that we have it and to exhort us to use it, without giving any guide as to its proper use in a given case. Perhaps it is intrinsic to freedom that it must be left free to decide on its own exercise, not only without being forced but even without being led. Here we run against a paradox: Freedom without a guide does not know what to do and is therefore not free to do it.

Among the young people today--and others not so young--the view is current that anything I do is good so long as I freely choose to do it.³⁷ I may even have a moral code, but it must be one I myself have freely chosen. To myself I must be true, but what I am I must discover for myself and I am the sole judge of what truth to myself shall mean. My life must be the expression of my personality, the authentic outflowering from the root of my being, not some foreign bud grafted onto me. No one else must try to mold me into what he thinks I ought to be. That might be an authentic expression of himself but not of myself, and I am myself and not he. So laws, rules, regulations, and restrictions should have no place in my life, unless they are ones I myself have made and the fewer of these I have the better. Thus I can "do my own thing". This is no call to solitude. Indeed, it is necessary to live in society and to have consideration for other people. In fact, the social aspect of man's life is as important as the individual aspect, and in some respects more important since I can find fulfillment only in others. But my life with others is not to be structured by the traditional forms of social living embodied in laws and statutes and customs and public institutions, but in that bond which authentically and personally unites me with others, the bond of love. So, with regard to others I must do the loving thing, and, since I am a partner in the relation of love, doing the loving thing is also doing my own thing.

One senses here the pathetic cry of youthful idealism. The shams and hypocrisies of the social structure are transparent to the most unpracticed eye, revealing the latent hatreds and injustices in all their hideousness. Why should one tolerate them in society any more than one would tolerate them in oneself? Why should I not require that society come up at least to the standard I require of myself? Since it demands that I conform to it, it should embody in itself still higher standards, setting me a pattern of better living. If society, then, fails to meet with my approval, I should use every means to make it more what I think it ought to be or else remove myself from its influence and live my life apart as I see fit.³⁸

Thus there is a contest between private conscience and public conscience, and in the view we have been describing private conscience wins. But what does it have to offer? Sincerity is not enough:³⁹ it is not sufficient to mean well. One must also do well, insofar as that is possible, otherwise one does not even mean well. This doing requires the setting up of objective standards, which can be tested for their own worth independently of the shifting subjective preferences of individuals. "We have no idea of what we want except that it must be different from what we have" is too childish an attitude to be set up as the goal of intelligent and mature persons.

Can we salvage the good in this view, its idealism and sincerity, its freedom and love, its personality and authenticity, while at the same time giving some body to it and making it a usable guide to practical living? Is there an irreconcilable contradiction between the old idea of conscience as the practical application of objective law and the new idea of conscience as the expression of personal freedom? No contradiction, it seems, if we have the correct idea of law and of freedom.

We, as human beings, must first recognize both our commonness and our uniqueness. Whatever be our philosophical solution to the perennial problem of the one and the many, there is no doubt of the experienced fact that human beings form a many, of which each of us is one. The term human nature indicates only those aspects of our being which we have in common and which differentiate us from those beings which are not human. But the kind of nature man has is such that it is a personal nature, so that to be human is also to be a person.⁴⁰ Each member of the human race is a unique, unrepeatable, and irreplaceable unit that we call a self. We exaggerate nature and falsify it if we think that human nature will manifest itself always in exactly the same way and that we can make laws for it with no regard for the uniqueness of the person. We exaggerate person and falsify it, if we think that each person is so unique a center of consciousness that human persons have nothing in common and that no laws can be made for them at all.

The requirements of his nature necessarily restrict the freedom of man. He cannot be anything else but human, and the first lesson he has to learn in life is how to act in such a way as to express his humanity.⁴¹ Any choice of behavior that is destructive or subversive of his nature cannot be authentic, for it is an endeavor to be some other kind of thing than he necessarily is. It matters little whether one wants to call such a perception of the general requirements of human living by the term natural law. If the word law has acquired such a restrictive connotation as always to suggest coercive decrees of external authority, it has no place here. That was not its meaning before self-appointed authorities and interpreters turned genuine legality into formalistic legalism. The words genuineness, sincerity, and authenticity, though usually reserved for the personal aspect of man, apply just as well to his natural aspect, for a man must be as truly a man as he must be authentically the person he is.⁴²

If a person's freedom is restricted by his nature as a human, it is still more restricted by his unique personality. Not only is one unable to be anything else, but a humanly one is also unable to be any other person than the one they are. Human nature is noted for its plasticity, for the almost infinite possibilities open to it, which are developed in a different way by each one, resulting in the bewilderingly rich variety of human characters the race has produced. But I am not able to produce in myself any of those other characters. All those other possibilities are cut off from me from the beginning by the fact that I am myself and not those others. I can imitate others, but even when I do so, I do it in my own style, which I cannot wholly put off, and if the imitation is more than play it can be seriously damaging to my own distinctiveness.

If my possibilities are curtailed by the fact that I am myself and no one else, how many possibilities remain to me? Even here the number is infinite, for the many versions of myself that might have been but never will be had an equal chance of existing as the one version of myself which I brought into existence by the choices that I actually did make. As there is an infinite number of numbers and an infinite number of fractions between any two numbers, so there are an infinite number of possibly different persons in the human race, and an infinite number of possible histories of this particular person. The actual history of this person resulted from the exercise of his own free choice within the limits set for him by conditions over which he had no control, but the possibilities of choice within those limits are also infinite. It is true that some of those possibilities may make little significant difference, but each possibility realized opens up a whole vista of choices that would not be offered were the first choice other than it was. So one may ask whether the uniqueness of my personality really does restrict my freedom after all. In a way it does, but in another way it opens up before me all that freedom is meant to be for, besides being the actual use of freedom. Each exercise of freedom leaves me unfree to do the alternative I did not choose, but presents me with a new possibility of choice I would not now have unless I chose the way I did.⁴³

THE MEETING OF LAW AND LOVE

We must bring our reflections back to conscience. There is no doubt that our freedom is and should be curtailed by our nature, that certain modes of behavior are worthy of us and that others are unworthy, that our reason is able to perceive these modes, to express them in general form as the norms of human conduct, and to apply them to various situations in which we find ourselves. Consciousness testifies to what we have done and conscience passes judgment on the moral worth of these deeds. Conscience remains as our guide, the only one we have, regarding particular actions we are contemplating doing. No amount of discourse on love and openness can eliminate this highly rational use of conscience, which is its traditional meaning, unless we are prepared to forego our intelligence, sink down to the animal level, and lose even the personality which is the ground of our freedom.

Thus conscience commands what ought to be done, forbids what ought not to be done, and permits what may be done. This is as far as law, even moral law, extends. But when it comes to persuading us to follow the better path of two that are both permitted, then law ceases to speak to us. We enter into the realm of love. The man who loves himself, in the true and legitimate sense of self-love, will want to do the best he can for himself. He will want to give his personality its fullest possible expression, so that his life will represent his person as the utmost attainment of the highest moral ideal his mind can conceive. He knows that such perfection is beyond his reach, but he wants as close an approximation to it as he can achieve. Likewise, the man who loves others will do for them all that he possibly can. He wills for them all the good that he desires for himself, and he spends himself in helping them to reach their ideal as fully as he hopes to reach his own. If he does not do so his conscience will reproach him, not for having done anything wrong or immoral or sinful, but for having been less good than he might have been, for having disappointed his promise, for having turned in a fairly satisfactory but rather mediocre and second-rate performance. If those who hold that evil is inevitable in life mean nothing more than that we must always fall short of utter perfection, we shall have to admit that such evil is inevitable, but it is evil in quite a different sense from the deliberate choosing of what we know to be wrong. This latter evil is avoidable and it is our responsibility to avoid it, whereas the recognition of our shortcomings along the path to perfection is a virtue, the virtue of humility, by which we accept, without excusing them, the weaknesses that are part of our limited being.

Conscience in its function of a rational application of the moral law to a particular case can speak with a clear and distinct voice. It does not always do so, and the problem of solving a doubtful conscience will always remain a part of the business of moral science. Casuistry⁴⁴ cannot be wholly eliminated so long as laws are general and actions are particular, but any rigidly legalistic use of casuistry must be tempered by loving concern for the persons involved, by an understanding of what is the purpose of law, by a correct hierarchy of values, and by a recognition of the fact that law is for man rather than man for the law.

Conscience in its function of urging man forward toward the perfection of love and the highest use of his freedom in the expression of his unique personality can hardly speak with any clearness at all. It shouts no commands, it thunders no accusations, it does not even wave us on with a gesture of permission. All this belongs to its legal aspect. The conscience of love can only hint and beckon. This should not be surprising. If conscience is to suggest what we should do with our freedom, it must leave us free. Therefore the guidance of conscience in any positive use of our freedom is bound to be as indefinite as following the direction of our own echoing voice. Conscience can only say, "You decide". Because in this function conscience is nothing else but you.

The search for the real self beneath all the masks and disguises one can put on is a problem for the psychologist. Self-deception is so common a phenomenon that we must admit that the problem is there. On the other hand, the finding of the true self should not be so difficult as to be practically impossible for a normal person.⁴⁵ To suppose that there always lurks beneath the surface a person that I have never met and that this is the person that I really am, that only the acts that stem from this elusive me are my authentic acts and all others are the deceptive play-acting of a fake character I unconsciously assume, and that since I have never yet met my real self I cannot tell which acts represent the genuine me and which do not: all this is merely to state that authentic living is impossible. It would be as if the painter were trying to find the real picture already on the canvas, which he has only to bring out or express visibly. No, there is no painting on the canvas until the painter puts it there. What shall he paint? That is precisely where he must exercise his own free choice.

Likewise, conscience does not hold up to me a mirror picturing my true self already delineated, so that all I have to do is to make my acts expressive of the picture. Human freedom is such that life is not a mere copy of a foreordained series of acts according to a pattern set for me by something that is not myself, and yet that something is what I must call my true self. No, I set the pattern and, within limits, it is whatever pattern I choose. To pursue the previous analogy, the painter is limited by the size and texture of his canvas, by the quality and variety of his paints, by the extent of his training, and by the character of his genius. Likewise each individual person is limited by the general properties of human nature, by his unique inherited endowments, by the accidental circumstances of his life, and by his own history of personal choices now irrevocably congealed into his past. He can operate only within this framework. But, just as the painter, given his limitations, freely paints what he chooses both as to subject and manner, so the individual person, given likewise his limitations, freely acts out his life as he chooses and is responsible for what he makes of himself. Conscience as legislative can only point out to him the futility of evil living in the same way that the canons of art point out to the artist the unesthetic results of misusing his materials and prostituting his design. Conscience as a guide to the free use of the open future no more decides what that use shall be than a faithful observance of the canons of art will automatically guarantee the production of a masterpiece. Conscience can say: "I can guide you in arriving where you want to go, but I cannot tell you where to go; that is the decision of the part in you which is free, your own free will, which is simply yourself as free."

Dostoevski⁴⁶ has the Grand Inquisitor describe how frightened man is of his freedom and to what lengths he will go in order to shift off his responsibility onto somebody or something else. Fatalism has always been popular because it is easier to resign oneself to accepting evils that happen to us than to acknowledge evils as the freely chosen offspring of our own willful folly.⁴⁷ Various forms of determinism try to have their cake and eat it too, by denying free will but accepting responsibility, though it is known all along that it is a responsibility for which we are not really responsible, a letting ourselves be called to account and an assumption of seeming guilt for what the theory says we could not help doing.⁴⁸

Religion can also be misused in this manner, if God is conceived as so overwhelming in His omnipotence and so predetermining in His providence that our little wills are wholly absorbed in His and can only futilely struggle against His eternal decrees. Then He becomes the father-figure on whom we can cast all our responsibility. The same result occurs when God is made so kindly and loving and compassionate that He could not possibly hold us to account for the petty peccadillos with which we in our weakness and inevitable folly strew the path of our life. God, it is thought, has too much wisdom to expect much of us and overlooks our vices as we do the trifling awkwardnesses of a child.

But if religion can be thus misused, so can its opposite. We can vigorously assert our freedom of choice and willingly accept full responsibility for what we make of ourselves in life, not throwing it off on any other person or thing; yet, if that responsibility is only to ourselves, we find among us hardened souls who can make a shift toward accepting that responsibility and laughing it off without too serious a qualm. "If I have made a mess of my life, it is after all my life and who is to tell me that I may not mess it up as I please?" Does conscience answer? Yes, and with a sharp blast of reproof. Conscience can never be satisfied with a mess, and we know it. In these instances she speaks up clear and loud, even when not heeded, for here she resumes her legislative and judicial mantle.

In all ethics there is the tension between law and love. Neither can do without the other. Conscience tries to embrace both, but cannot do so in the same way.

Conscience began with law and reason and nature, and became the means by which one could reasonably settle the application of the law of nature to the particular case at hand. This use of conscience is as necessary now as it ever was. The social ills of our day, nuclear war, military intervention, minority rights, race prejudice, ghetto living, slum cities, popular demonstrations, civil disobedience, conflict of interests, the waste of the rich and the hopelessness of the poor, the rights of authority and the rights against authority, the revolt of youth and the education of youth, all these and many more require the formation and use of a right conscience in its legislative and judicial aspects. They cannot be settled by some vague appeal to love, when the love for one group necessarily entails hatred for another, nor by an irresponsible use of freedom which tramples on the freedom of others, nor by a proclamation of the grandeur of the person while ruining the society in which alone the person can find peace with justice. Here we need rational moral principles rationally examined, proved, and applied, even if we do not find the answer tomorrow.

But conscience does not end here. Supposing limits laid down by the moral law, it does stretch out beyond to love and freedom and person. Within the wide moral possibilities left open to us, it urges us on to the best and fullest use of our unique personality, which we find in the central core of our being and develop by every act of free choice by which we fashion our life. Here there are no rules, for no two personalities are alike and each one's history is his own. Here, for better or for worse, I am the person I have made, and will continue as long as life lasts in the creation of my own self until it achieves as high a fulfillment as I can give it in this world, while leaving it open for greater fulfillment in a world to come.

University of Santa Clara

Santa Clara, California

1. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1932). The last chapter might have been written today instead of over sixty years ago.

2. Sophocles, Antigone lines 450-461. Aristotle, Rhetoric, bk. I, ch. 13, 1373b 4.

3. Liddell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, abridged edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953). Democritus, in H. Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin: Wiedmannsche, 1960), vol. ii, 68 Demokritos, B fragm. 297. Eric D'Arcy, Conscience and Its Right to Freedom (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1961), pp. 5-8.

4. St. Paul, Rom. 13:3,5; 1 Cor. 4:4, 8:7-12, 10:25-29.

5. St. Jerome, Commentarium in Ezechielem, I, 1, in Migne, PL, vol. 25, col. 22. D'Arcy, op. cit., pp. 16-19.

6. St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, I, q. 79, aa. 12-13.

7. St. Thomas, ibid.

8. D'Arcy., op. cit., pp. 78-81.

9. D'Arcy., op. cit., pp. 81-84.

10. St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, I-II, q. 6, aa. 1, 8; q. 19, aa. 1-8. D'Arcy, op. cit., pp. 87-120.

11. D'Arcy, op. cit., pp. 120-141.

12. Boethius, De Duabus Naturis, seu Contra Eutychen et Nestorium, III (Loeb Classics). St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, I, q. 29, a. 1.

13. Aristotle, Categories, ch. 5, 2a 11.

14. St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, I, q. 29, a. 1; more explicitly in III, q. 3, a. 1.

15. Paul Tillich, Morality and Beyond (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), pp. 72-73. Etienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937), pp. 93-95, 104-105.

16. Erasmus-Luther Discourse on Free Will, tr. and ed. by Ernest F. Winter, (New York: Frederick Ungar Pub. Co., Inc., 1961). John Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, bk. III, ch. 12. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (New York: The Macmillan Co., l965).

17. Tillich., op. cit., pp. 54-56.

18. René Descartes, Meditations, passim.

19. John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk. II, ch. 27, sec. 7-20.

20. Locke, op. cit., bk. II, ch. 23.

21. Locke, op. cit., bk. IV, ch. 3, sec. 6.

22. David Hume, Treatise on Human Nature, bk. I, pt. 4, sec. 6.

23. John Stuart Mill, System of Logic, bk. I, ch. 3, sec. 8, 14.

24. William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: H. Holt & Co., 1890), vol. I, ch. 9-10.

25. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, pt. III, ch. 1.

26. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 381-405, B 414-432, A 682-684.

27. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, bk. I, ch. 1, sec. 1-2. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, sec. 3.

28. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, bk. II, ch. 2, sec. 5; Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, sec. 2.

29. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (London: Standard Edition, vol. XIX, Hogarth Press, 1961). Civilization and its Discontents (London: Standard Edition, vol. XIX, Hogarth Press, 1961), sec. 7-8.

30. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals (Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1910).

31. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act. III, sc. 1. See also Richard III, act. V, sc. 3.

32. Tillich, op. cit., pp. 78-80.

33. Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling & Sickness unto Death, tr. by Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941); Concluding Unscientific Postscript, tr. by David F. Swanson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941). Dietrich Bonhoeffer, op. cit., pp. 24-26, 66-70, 240-248, 263-276.

34. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. by Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1953), pt. I, ch. 1; Conclusion II. Existentialism, tr. by Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc., 1957).

35. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, tr. by Justin O'Brien (New York: Random House, 1959); The Rebel, tr. by Anthony Bower (New York: Random House, 1956).

36. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), II, 2, pp. 312-348.

37. From conversations with students. See Ortega y Gasset, op. cit. Pertinent from here to the end are: Ignace Lepp, The Authentic Morality (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1965) and Rollo May, Man's Search for Himself (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1953).

38. Louis Monden, Sin, Liberty and Law (New York: Sheed & Ward, Inc., 1965), p. 107.

39. The theological teaching on the Incarnation that in Christ there are two natures, human and divine, but only one person, and that divine, does not deny personality in Christ, but only that He is not two persons at once.

40. Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1962), pp. 157-161.

41. Monden, op. cit., pp. 102-111.

42. This is opposed to the peculiar view of Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, sec. 13, that, if the slightest detail of my life were changed, it would be the life of somebody else, not me.

43. Joseph Fletcher, Situation Ethics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966) pp. 19, 29, 52-55, 146-150. Even Fletcher needs casuistry, though he wants no law.

44. Lepp, op. cit. Maslow, op. cit. May, op. cit.

45. Feodor Dostoevski, The Brothers Karamazov, bk. V, ch. 5.

46. Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat expresses this view with great poetic beauty.

47. Sidney Hook (ed.), Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science (New York: New York University Press, 1958).