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Richard Foster makes the point this way in Celebration of Discipline:. There is a solitude of the heart that can be maintained at all times. Crowds, or the lack of them, have little to do with this inward attentiveness. Quiet cannot be deemed essential to solitude for a similar reason. While we may think of solitude in terms of meditating in an ashram or studying in a monastic cell, is not the man running a trail or splitting wood alone both solitary and active? We can further define solitude on the basis of intentionality.
One can be disengaged from others, but not by choice. The result is a feeling of loneliness. Solitude is a state, rather than an emotion, and it can be filled with any emotion, positive or negative. So one can be lonely in solitude, but feeling lonely is not necessarily the same thing as experiencing solitude. In solitude, you are not merely alone, but have deliberately separated yourself from others. Taken all together, we can therefore define solitude this way: In the spiritual realm, it is not the literal absence of all noise, but the absence of all human-created stimuli.
Silence further encompasses not just the quieting of external noise produced by others, but also the noise produced by oneself; it requires the cessation of all talking, or speaking only when absolutely necessary. The man who preserves his selfhood ever calm and unshaken by the storms of existence—not a leaf, as it were, astir on the tree; not a ripple upon the surface of shining pool—his, in the mind of the unlettered sage, is the ideal attitude and conduct of life.
In defining solitude, we noted that silence is not an essential precondition for its existence. But while silence may not be strictly necessary for solitude, the two are very closely connected. There is then a direct relationship between the profundity of silence, and the depth of solitude.
To fully experience the latter does require the presence of the former, and we will thus largely be talking about silence and solitude as an inseparable pair. It affords it the necessary opportunities for repose and recovery. The need for silence and solitude obviously seems incredibly relevant to the over-convenienced citizens of the modern world who feel saturated with the ceaseless noise that issues from every corner of their lives.
But as mentioned at the start, men have in fact craved these states for thousands of years, long before anything digital, or electronic, or urban ever existed. Humans are often called social animals, and we certainly are. But this quality developed more from necessity than choice; humans needed other humans to survive, and thus were kind of stuck with living life in community.
But people have always felt both gratitude and resentment for this obligation. We enjoy the pleasures of company, while simultaneously wishing to flee the responsibilities attendant to living in relationship. We are both attracted to, and repulsed by, our fellow man. A moderate dose of community makes us healthy; saturation with the other makes us sick. When we are able to be by ourselves, even for a short time, we affirm our independent identity, the reality of our individual existence; we temporarily thwart the law of the herd, that says we will die if we leave the tribe, and show ourselves we can exist alone, at least for a time.
This is the thrill of solitude; this is its magnetic allure. The re-charging spark of silent solitude is needed by all. Extroverts may need less, and introverts more, but neither group can entirely do without. Solitude remains a need whether one lives in a situation of luxury and noise, or deprivation and quiet. When the famous psychiatrist Viktor Frankl was imprisoned at Auschwitz, he could not have lived a more stripped down and vulnerable existence, and yet he still felt the impulse to break away from others:.
The prisoner craved to be alone with himself and his thoughts. He yearned for privacy and for solitude. Behind the earthen hut where I worked and in which were crowded about fifty delirious patients, there was a quiet spot in a corner of the double fence of barbed wire surrounding the camp. A tent had been improvised there with a few poles and branches of trees in order to shelter a half-dozen corpses the daily death rate in the camp.
There was also a shaft leading to the water pipes. I squatted on the wooden lid of this shaft whenever my services were not needed. I just sat and looked out at the green flowering slopes and the distant blue hills of the Bavarian landscape, framed by the meshes of barbed wire.
I dreamed longingly, and my thoughts wandered north and northeast, in the direction of my home, but I could only see clouds. The corpses near me, crawling with lice, did not bother me. Only the steps of passing guards could rouse me from my dreams.
Solitude and silence compel us the way food and sex compel us; they bespeak basic human needs that, if not as physically vital, are psychologically essential. How much so, and the effect that a non-stop life of crowds and noise may have on us, typically goes completely unrealized, since we never hit pause and step out of that clamorous flow. When writer Patrick Leigh Fermor went to live at a monastery in Europe in order to work on a book, he initially found his adjustment to the new environment difficult and went through a kind of withdrawal period during his first few days there.
The two ways of life do not share a single attribute; and the thoughts, ambitions, sounds, light, time and mood that surround the inhabitants of a cloister are not only unlike anything to which one is accustomed, but in some curious way, seem its exact reverse. The period during which normal standards recede and the strange new world becomes reality is slow, and, at first, acutely painful.
The explanation is simple enough: Then the tremendous accumulation of tiredness, which must be the common property of all our contemporaries, broke loose and swamped everything. No demands, once I had emerged from that flood of sleep, were made upon my nervous energy: The Abbey was at first a graveyard; the outer world seemed afterwards, by contrast, an inferno of noise and vulgarity. But that is no justification for making him a mere cog in a totalitarian machine—or in a religious one either, for that matter. In actual fact, society depends for its existence on the inviolable personal solitude of its members.
Society, to merit its name, must be made up not of numbers, or mechanical units, but of persons. When men are merely submerged in a mass of impersonal human beings pushed around by automatic forces, they lose their true humanity, their integrity, their ability to love, their capacity for self-determination. When society is made up of men who know no interior solitude it can no longer be held together by love: But when men are violently deprived of the solitude and freedom which are their due, the society in which they live becomes putrid, it festers with servility, resentment and hate.
Sought passively, out of visceral craving, the simple forms of solitude and silence provide an elemental salve to the psyche; sought deliberately, for the purpose of exercising and edifying the soul, solitude and silence become spiritual disciplines, and their benefits expand to the spirit.
When solitude and silence are cultivated and actively utilized, these disciplines produce many vitalizing and strengthening effects on the soul:. The world is a noisy, wordy place. Every nook and cranny of your life is filled with messages about what you should do, think, be. In the thick of this constant din, it can be difficult to hear the voice of God and to identify your own voice. In the midst of so much static, it can be hard to tune into these faintest of frequencies.
In the hush of silent solitude, you find the space needed for undistracted and thus fruitful reflection; you can finally focus on picking up on sacred signals and listening to their urgent broadcasts. We can no more hear these voices in the clatter and crash of our busy lives, than a whisper can be heard across a loud nightclub. Alternatives to such metaphysical and idealist opinions about conscience arose from realist and materialist perspectives such as those of Charles Darwin. Darwin suggested that "any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or as nearly as well developed, as in man.
Such an inquiry, he believed, fell wholly within the scope of the existing social sciences. For others, however, an action seems to be properly termed 'internally right', merely because they have previously regarded it as right, the idea of 'rightness' being present in some way to his or her mind, but not necessarily among his or her deliberately constructed motives.
A Very Easy Death. Michael Walzer claimed that the growth of religious toleration in Western nations arose amongst other things, from the general recognition that private conscience signified some inner divine presence regardless of the religious faith professed and from the general respectability, piety, self-limitation, and sectarian discipline which marked most of the men who claimed the rights of conscience. A good life need not be an especially reflective one; most of the best lives are just lived rather than studied. But there are moments that cry out for self-assertion, when a passive bowing to fate or a mechanical decision out of deference or convenience is treachery, because it forfeits dignity for ease.
The philosopher Peter Singer considers that usually when we describe an action as conscientious in the critical sense we do so in order to deny either that the relevant agent was motivated by selfish desires, like greed or ambition, or that he acted on whim or impulse. Moral anti-realists debate whether the moral facts necessary to activate conscience supervene on natural facts with a posteriori necessity; or arise a priori because moral facts have a primary intension and naturally identical worlds may be presumed morally identical.
John Ralston Saul expressed the view in The Unconscious Civilization that in contemporary developed nations many people have acquiesced in turning over their sense of right and wrong, their critical conscience , to technical experts; willingly restricting their moral freedom of choice to limited consumer actions ruled by the ideology of the free market, while citizen participation in public affairs is limited to the isolated act of voting and private-interest lobbying turns even elected representatives against the public interest.
Some argue on religious or philosophical grounds that it is blameworthy to act against conscience , even if the judgement of conscience is likely to be erroneous say because it is inadequately informed about the facts, or prevailing moral humanist or religious , professional ethical, legal and human rights norms. English humanist lawyers in the 16th and 17th centuries interpreted conscience as a collection of universal principles given to man by god at creation to be applied by reason; this gradually reforming the medieval Roman law -based system with forms of action, written pleadings, use of juries and patterns of litigation such as Demurrer and Assumpsit that displayed an increased concern for elements of right and wrong on the actual facts.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.
Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching.
It has been argued that these articles provide international legal obligations protecting conscientious objectors from service in the military. John Rawls in his A Theory of Justice defines a conscientious objector as an individual prepared to undertake, in public and often despite widespread condemnation , an action of civil disobedience to a legal rule justifying it also in public by reference to contrary foundational social virtues such as justice as liberty or fairness and the principles of morality and law derived from them.
In the Second World War , Great Britain granted conscientious-objection status not just to complete pacifists , but to those who objected to fighting in that particular war; this was done partly out of genuine respect, but also to avoid the disgraceful and futile persecutions of conscientious objectors that occurred during the First World War. Amnesty International organises campaigns to protect those arrested and or incarcerated as a prisoner of conscience because of their conscientious beliefs, particularly concerning intellectual, political and artistic freedom of expression and association.
In legislation, a conscience clause is a provision in a statute that excuses a health professional from complying with the law for example legalising surgical or pharmaceutical abortion if it is incompatible with religious or conscientious beliefs. Many conscientious objectors are so for religious reasons—notably, members of the historic peace churches are pacifist by doctrine. Other objections can stem from a deep sense of responsibility toward humanity as a whole, or from the conviction that even acceptance of work under military orders acknowledges the principle of conscription that should be everywhere condemned before the world can ever become safe for real democracy.
Conscience , according to Johnson, was nothing more than a conviction felt by ourselves of something to be done or something to be avoided; in questions of simple unperplexed morality, conscience is very often a guide that may be trusted. Civil disobedience as non-violent protest or civil resistance are also acts of conscience, but are designed by those who undertake them chiefly to change, by appealing to the majority and democratic processes, laws or government policies perceived to be incoherent with fundamental social virtues and principles such as justice, equality or respect for intrinsic human dignity.
Hansen , environmental leader Phil Radford and Professor Bill McKibben were arrested for opposing a tar sands oil pipeline [] [] and Canadian renewable energy professor Mark Jaccard was arrested for opposing mountain-top coal mining; [] in his book Storms of my Grandchildren Hansen calls for similar civil resistance on a global scale to help replace the 'business-as-usual' Kyoto Protocol cap and trade system, with a progressive carbon tax at emission source on the oil, gas and coal industries — revenue being paid as dividends to low carbon footprint families.
Notable historical examples of conscientious noncompliance in a different professional context included the manipulation of the visa process in by Japanese Consul-General Chiune Sugihara in Kaunas the temporary capital of Lithuania between Germany and the Soviet Union and by Raoul Wallenberg in Hungary 1n [] to allow Jews to escape almost certain death. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace! World conscience is the universalist idea that with ready global communication, all people on earth will no longer be morally estranged from one another, whether it be culturally, ethnically, or geographically; instead they will conceive ethics from the utopian point of view of the universe , eternity or infinity , rather than have their duties and obligations defined by forces arising solely within the restrictive boundaries of 'blood and territory.
Often this derives from a spiritual or natural law perspective, that for world peace to be achieved, conscience , properly understood, should be generally considered as not necessarily linked often destructively to fundamentalist religious ideologies, but as an aspect of universal consciousness , access to which is the common heritage of humanity. Edward O Wilson has developed the idea of consilience to encourage coherence of global moral and scientific knowledge supporting the premise that "only unified learning, universally shared, makes accurate foresight and wise choice possible".
The microcredit initiatives of Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus have been described as inspiring a "war on poverty that blends social conscience and business savvy". The Green party politician Bob Brown who was arrested by the Tasmanian state police for a conscientious act of civil disobedience during the Franklin Dam protest expresses world conscience in these terms: The American cardiologist Bernard Lown and the Russian cardiologist Yevgeniy Chazov were motivated in conscience through studying the catastrophic public health consequences of nuclear war in establishing International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War IPPNW which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in and continues to work to "heal an ailing planet".
A challenge to world conscience was provided by an influential article by Garrett Hardin that critically analyzed the dilemma in which multiple individuals, acting independently after rationally consulting self-interest and, he claimed, the apparently low 'survival-of-the-fittest' value of conscience -led actions ultimately destroy a shared limited resource, even though each acknowledges such an outcome is not in anyone's long-term interest.
The philosopher Peter Singer has argued that the United Nations Millennium Development Goals represent the emergence of an ethics based not on national boundaries but on the idea of one world. Noam Chomsky has argued that forces opposing the development of such a world conscience include free market ideologies that valorise corporate greed in nominal electoral democracies where advertising , shopping malls and indebtedness, shape citizens into apathetic consumers in relation to information and access necessary for democratic participation.
We have produced one firearm for every ten inhabitants of this planet, and yet we have not bothered to end hunger when such a feat is well within our reach. This is not a necessary or inevitable state of affairs. It is a deliberate choice" see Campaign Against Arms Trade. In a notable contemporary act of conscience, Christian bushwalker Brenda Hean protested against the flooding of Lake Pedder despite threats and that ultimately lead to her death. Conscience played a major role in the actions by anaesthetist Stephen Bolsin to whistleblow see list of whistleblowers on incompetent paediatric cardiac surgeons at the Bristol Royal Infirmary.
Climate Change Science Program, blew the whistle on a White House official who ignored majority scientific opinion to edit a climate change report "Our Changing Planet" to reflect the Bush administration 's view that the problem was unlikely to exist. At the awards ceremony for the metres at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City John Carlos , Tommie Smith and Peter Norman ignored death threats and official warnings to take part in an anti- racism protest [] that destroyed their respective careers.
Mark Felt an agent of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation who retired in as the Bureau's Associate Director, acted on conscience to provide reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein with information that resulted in the Watergate scandal. After being ordered to fire warning shots from her 50 calibre machinegun to make the boat turn back she saw it beginning to break up and sink with a father on board holding out his young daughter that she might be saved see Children Overboard Affair. Whittle jumped without a life vest 12 metres into the sea to help save the refugees from drowning thinking "this isn't right; this isn't how things should be.
The ancient epic of the Indian subcontinent, the Mahabharata of Vyasa , contains two pivotal moments of conscience. The first occurs when the warrior Arjuna being overcome with compassion against killing his opposing relatives in war, receives counsel see Bhagavad-Gita from Krishna about his spiritual duty "work as though you are performing a sacrifice for the general good".
Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live properly". Bradley discusses the central problem of Shakespeare 's tragic character Hamlet as one where conscience in the form of moral scruples deters the young Prince with his "great anxiety to do right" from obeying his father's hell-bound ghost and murdering the usurping King "is't not perfect conscience to quit him with this arm?
Bradley develops a theory about Hamlet's moral agony relating to a conflict between "traditional" and "critical" conscience: It is because this deeper conscience remains below the surface that he fails to recognise it, and fancies he is hindered by cowardice or sloth or passion or what not; but it emerges into light in that speech to Horatio. And it is just because he has this nobler moral nature in him that we admire and love him".
Anton Chekhov in his plays The Seagull , Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters describes the tortured emotional states of doctors who at some point in their careers have turned their back on conscience. A promiscuous student, for example, in The Fit describes it as a "dull pain, indefinite, vague; it was like anguish and the most acute fear and despair As Irina Ratushinskaya writes in the introduction to that work: One cannot help but wonder why?
Simply, because the lot of the people there was a bitter one, because nobody really knew about the lives and deaths of the exiles, because he felt that they stood in greater need of help that anyone else. A strange reason, maybe, but not for a writer who was the epitome of all the best traditions of a Russian man of letters. Russian literature has always focused on questions of conscience and was, therefore, a powerful force in the moulding of public opinion.
Carr writes of Dostoevsky 's character the young student Raskolnikov in the novel Crime and Punishment who decides to murder a 'vile and loathsome' old woman money lender on the principle of transcending conventional morals: Hermann Hesse wrote his Siddhartha to describe how a young man in the time of the Buddha follows his conscience on a journey to discover a transcendent inner space where all things could be unified and simply understood, ending up discovering that personal truth through selfless service as a ferryman.
Tolkien in his epic The Lord of the Rings describes how only the hobbit Frodo is pure enough in conscience to carry the ring of power through war-torn Middle-earth to destruction in the Cracks of Doom , Frodo determining at the end to journey without weapons, and being saved from failure by his earlier decision to spare the life of the creature Gollum. But we create human nature.
Men are infinitely malleable". A tapestry copy of Picasso 's Guernica depicting a massacre of innocent women and children during the Spanish civil war is displayed on the wall of the United Nations building in New York City , at the entrance to the Security Council room, demonstrably as a spur to the conscience of representatives from the nation states.
The impressionist painter Vincent van Gogh wrote in a letter to his brother Theo in that "one must never let the fire in one's soul die, for the time will inevitably come when it will be needed.
And he who chooses poverty for himself and loves it possesses a great treasure and will hear the voice of his conscience address him every more clearly. He who hears that voice, which is God's greatest gift, in his innermost being and follows it, finds in it a friend at last, and he is never alone! That is what all great men have acknowledged in their works, all those who have thought a little more deeply and searched and worked and loved a little more than the rest, who have plumbed the depths of the sea of life. The Ingmar Bergman film Seventh Seal portrays the journey of a medieval knight Max von Sydow returning disillusioned from the crusades "what is going to happen to those of us who want to believe, but aren't able to?
Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his last great choral composition the Mass in B minor BWV to express the alternating emotions of loneliness, despair, joy and rapture that arise as conscience reflects on a departed human life. Ludwig van Beethoven 's meditations on illness, conscience and mortality in the Late String Quartets led to his dedicating the third movement of String Quartet in A Minor Op. The American Society of Journalists and Authors ASJA presents the Conscience-in-Media Award to journalists whom the society deems worthy of recognition for demonstrating "singular commitment to the highest principles of journalism at notable personal cost or sacrifice".
The Ambassador of Conscience Award , Amnesty International 's most prestigious human rights award, takes its inspiration from a poem written by Irish Nobel prize -winning poet Seamus Heaney called "The Republic of Conscience. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For other uses, see Conscience disambiguation. For other uses, see scruple disambiguation. Not to be confused with consciousness. Origins of morality and Morality. Religious belief , Philosophy of religion , and Spirituality. Free will , Compatibilism and incompatibilism , Determinism , Libertarianism metaphysics , Theory of justification , Virtue ethics , Metaethics , Moral motivation , and Normative ethics. We might still have come to an understanding if, instead of asking everybody to pray for my soul, she had given me a little confidence and sympathy.
I know now what prevented her from doing so: In actual doing she made every sacrifice, but her feelings did not take her out of herself. Besides, how could she have tried to understand me since she avoided looking into her own heart? As for discovering an attitude that would not have set us apart, nothing in her life had ever prepared her for such a thing: Conscientious objector , Civil disobedience , Natural law , Natural rights , Nonviolence , Nonviolent resistance , Protest , Prisoner of conscience , and Keeper of the King's Conscience.
A man has not everything to do but something; and because he cannot do everything , it is not necessary that he should do something wrong It is for no particular item in the tax bill that I refuse to pay it. I simply wish to refuse allegiance to the State, to withdraw and stand aloof from it effectually. I do not care to trace the course of my dollar if I could, till it buys a man, or a musket to shoot one with—the dollar is innocent—but I am concerned to trace the effects of my allegiance Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator?
Why has every man a conscience, then? Comparative religion , Universalism , World government , Cosmopolitanism , and Common heritage of humanity. List of nonviolence scholars and leaders and List of whistleblowers. Old Traditions and Modern Transformations. The Light in Their Consciences: The Early Quakers in Britain — Universal Declaration of Human Rights , G. How Might We Live? Global Ethics in the New Century.
Ambassador of Conscience Award. Retrieved 31 December The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. University of California Press. Conscience and Other Virtues. From Bonaventure to MacIntyre. Moral Vision and Tradition: Essays in Chinese Ethics. Catholic University of America Press. University of Notre Dame Press. The Religious Experience of Mankind. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Steps Along the Path. Thanissaro Bhikkhu trans Theravada Library The Vision of Islam. A Concise Dictionary of Koranic Arabic. A Companion to Ethics. The Macmillan Company, New York. The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam.
University of Chicago Press. Winner of Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize. If God Spare My Life. New Bible Commentary 3rd ed. The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents. The Liturgical Press Gaudium and Spes He Does Not Impose. One must first remove the source of error and do one's best to achieve a correct judgment. If, however, one is not aware of one's error or if, despite an honest and diligent effort one cannot remove the error by study or seeking advice, then one's conscience may be said to be invincibly erroneous. It binds since one has subjective certainty that one is correct.
The act resulting from acting on the invincibly erroneous conscience is not good in itself, yet this deformed act or material sin against God's right order and the objective norm is not imputed to the person. The formal obedience given to such a judgment of conscience is good. Guerra, 'Thomas More's Correspondence on Conscience', in: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey. Conscience and Autonomy within Judaism: All that is required is that it should know this, and state its conviction that its knowledge and will are the right.
The expression of this assurance ipso facto cancels the form of its particularity. It recognizes thereby the necessary universality of the self. In that it calls itself conscience, it calls itself pure self-knowledge and pure abstract will, i. In the willing of the self which is certain of itself, in this knowledge of the self as the essential reality, lies the essence of the right. When any one says, therefore, he is acting from conscience, he is saying what is true, for his conscience is the self which knows and wills.
But it is essential he should say so, for this self has to be at the same time universal self. It is not universal in the content of the act: The universality lies in the form of the act. It is this form which is to be affirmed as real: Conscience, then, in its majestic sublimity above any specific law and every content of duty, puts whatever content it pleases into its knowledge and willing.
It is moral genius and originality, which knows the inner voice of its immediate knowledge to be a voice divine; and since in such knowledge it directly knows existence as well, it is divine creative power, which contains living force in its very conception. Through such expression the self becomes established and accepted, and the act becomes an effective deed, a deed carrying out a definite result. What gives reality and subsistence to its deed is universal self-consciousness. When, however, conscience finds expression, this puts the certainty of itself in the form of pure self and thereby as universal self.
Others let the act hold as valid, owing to the explicit terms in which the self is thus expressed and acknowledged to be the essential reality. The spirit and the substance of their community are, thus, the mutual assurance of their conscientiousness, of their good intentions, the rejoicing over this reciprocal purity of purpose, the quickening and refreshment received from the glorious privilege of knowing and of expressing, of fostering and cherishing, a state so altogether admirable.
So far as this sphere of conscience still distinguishes its abstract consciousness from its self-consciousness, its life is merely hid in God. God is indeed immediately present to its mind and heart, to its self. But what is revealed, its actual consciousness and the mediating process of this consciousness, is, to it, something other than that hidden inner life and the immediacy of God's presence.
But, with the completion of conscience, the distinction between its abstract consciousness and its self-consciousness is done away. It knows that the abstract consciousness is just this self, this individual self-existence which is certain of itself: For a relation is mediate when the terms related are not one and the same, but each is a different term for the other, and is one only with the other in some third term: Having risen above the meaningless position of holding these distinctions, which are not distinctions at all, to be still such, consciousness knows the immediateness of the presence of ultimate Being within it to be the unity of that Being and its self: We see then, here, self-consciousness withdrawn into the inmost retreats of its being, with all externality, as such, gone and vanished from it — returned into the intuition of ego as altogether identical with ego, an intuition where this ego is all that is essential, and all that exists.
It is swamped in this conception of itself; for it has been driven to the extreme limit of its extreme positions, and in such a way that the moments distinguished, moments through which it is real or still consciousness, are not merely for us these bare extremes; rather what it is for itself, and what, to it, is inherent, and what is, for it, existence — all these moments have evaporated into abstractions. They have no longer stability, no substantial existence for this consciousness itself. Everything, that was hitherto for consciousness essential, has reverted into these abstractions.
When clarified to this degree of transparency, consciousness exists in its poorest form, and the poverty, constituting its sole and only possession, is itself a process of disappearance. This absolute certainty into which the substance has been resolved is absolute untruth , which collapses within itself; it is absolute self-consciousness, in which consciousness [with its relation of self and object] is submerged and goes under.
Looking at this submergence and disappearance from within, the inherent and essential substance is, for consciousness,, knowledge in the sense of its knowledge. Being consciousness, it is split up into the opposition between itself and the object, which is, for it, the essentially real. But this very object is what is perfectly transparent, is its self; and its consciousness is merely knowledge of itself. All life and all spiritual truth have returned into this self, and have lost their difference from the ego.
Story of a Man Torn Between Duty and Conscience Gene Baldwin. SILENT ECHOES Gene Baldwin Revised Copyright © by Gene Baldwin. Library. in the field of PTSD in war veterans and active duty personnel. of movement and sometimes stories of the journey stuck without Door at St. Peter's Basilica that tell the story of the journey from exile to redemption. Character and conscience are integral parts of a person's identity at me in silence.
The moments of consciousness are therefore these extreme abstractions, of which none holds its ground, but each loses itself in the other and produces it. The absolute certainty of self thus finds itself, qua consciousness, converted directly into a dying sound, a mere objectification of its subjectivity or self-existence.
But this world so created is the utterance of its own voice, which in like manner it has directly heard, and only the echo of which returns to it. Just as little has consciousness itself existence, for the objective aspect does not succeed in becoming something negative of the actual self, in the same way as this self does not reach complete actuality.
It lacks force to externalize itself, the power to make itself a thing, and endure existence. It lives in dread of staining the radiance of its inner being by action and existence. And to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with actuality, and steadfastly perseveres in a state of self-willed impotence to renounce a self which is pared away to the last point of abstraction, and to give itself substantial existence, or, in other words, to transform its thought into being, and commit itself to absolute distinction [that between thought and being].
The hollow object, which it produces, now fills it, therefore, with the feeling of emptiness. Its activity consists in yearning, which merely loses itself in becoming an unsubstantial shadowy object, and, rising above this loss and falling back on itself, finds itself merely as lost. This silent fusion of the pithless unsubstantial elements of evaporated life has, however, still to be taken in the other sense of the reality of conscience, and in the way its process actually appears.
Conscience has to be considered as acting. The objective moment in this phase of consciousness took above the determinate form of universal consciousness. The knowing of self is, qua this particular self, different from the other self. Language in which all reciprocally recognize and acknowledge each other as acting conscientiously — this general equality breaks up into the inequality of each individual existing for himself; each consciousness is just as much reflected out of its universality absolutely into itself as it is universal.
By this means there necessarily comes about the opposition of individuality to other individuals and to the universal. And this relation and its process we have to consider. Or, again, this universality and duty have the absolutely opposite significance; they signify determinate individuality, exempting itself from what is universal, individuality which looks on pure duty as universality that has appeared merely on the surface and is turned outwards: Conscience, which in the first instance takes up merely a negative attitude towards duty, qua a given determinate duty, knows itself detached from it.
But since conscience fills empty duty with a determinate content drawn from its own self, it is positively aware of the fact that it, qua this particular self, makes its own content. Its pure self, as it is empty knowledge, is without content and without definiteness. The content which it supplies to that knowledge is drawn from its own self, qua this determinate self, is drawn from itself as a natural individuality. In affirming the conscientiousness of its action, it is doubtless aware of its pure self, but in the purpose of its action — a purpose which brings in a concrete content — it is conscious of itself as this particular individual, and is conscious of the opposition between what it is for itself and what it is for others, of the opposition of universality or duty and its state of being reflected into self away from the universal.
While in this way the opposition, into which conscience passes when it acts, finds expression in its inner life, the opposition is at the same time disparity on its outer side, in the sphere of existence — the lack of correspondence of its particular individuality with reference to another individual.
It has to be made manifest that it is evil, and its objective existence thus made congruent with its real nature; the hypocrisy must be unmasked. Our mind is capable of knowing both the true nature of things as well as the fact that they can only find their fulfillment in God. Although humanity has no generally accepted definition of conscience or universal agreement about its role in ethical decision-making, three approaches have addressed it: It binds since one has subjective certainty that one is correct. Every content, through its being determinate, stands on the same footing with every other, even though it seems to have precisely the character that the particularity in the content is cancelled. When conscience is considered in relation to the single features of the opposition which appears in action, and when we consider its consciousness regarding the nature of those features, its attitude towards the reality of the situation where action has to take place is, in the first instance, that of knowledge. The theory produces a good deal but hardly brings one closer to the secrets of the Old One.
Its special peculiarity consists in the fact that the two elements constituting its consciousness — viz. Over against this internal determination there thus stands the element of existence, the universal consciousness; for this latter it is rather universality, duty, that is the essential fact, while individuality, which exists for itself and is opposed to the universal, has merely the value of a superseded moment. The first consciousness is held to be Evil by the consciousness which thus stands by the fact of duty, because of the lack of correspondence of its internal subjective life with the universal; and since at the same time the first consciousness declares its act to be congruency with itself, to be duty and conscientiousness it is held by that universal consciousness to be Hypocrisy.
The course taken by this opposition is, in the first instance, the formal establishment of correspondence between what the evil consciousness is in its own nature and what it expressly says. It has to be made manifest that it is evil, and its objective existence thus made congruent with its real nature; the hypocrisy must be unmasked. This return of the discordance, present in hypocrisy, into the state of correspondence is not at once brought to pass by the mere fact that, as people usually say, hypocrisy just proves its reverence for duty and virtue through assuming the appearance of them, and using this as a mask to hide itself from its own consciousness no less than from another — as if, in this acknowledgment and recognition in itself of its opposite, eo ipso congruency and agreement were implied and contained.
Yet even then it is just as truly done with this recognition in words and is reflected into self; and in the very fact of its using the inherent and essential reality merely as something which has a significance for another consciousness, there is really implied its own contempt for that inherent principle, and the demonstration of the worthlessness of that reality for all.
For what lets itself be used as an external instrument shows itself to be a thing, which has within it no proper weight and worth of its own. Moreover, this correspondence is not brought about either by the evil consciousness persisting onesidedly in its own state, or by the judgment of the universal consciousness. If the former denies itself as against the consciousness of duty, and maintains that what the latter pronounces to be baseness, to be absolute discordance with universality, is an action according to inner law and conscience, then, in this onesided assurance of identity and concord, there still remains its discordance with the other, since this other universal consciousness certainly does not believe the assurance and does not acknowledge it.
In other words, since onesided insistence on one extreme destroys itself, evil would indeed thereby confess to being evil, but in so doing would at once cancel itself and cease to be hypocrisy, and so would not qua hypocrisy be unmasked. It confesses itself, in fact, to be evil by asserting that, while opposing what is recognized as universal, it acts according to its own inner law and conscience.
For were this law and conscience not the law of its individuality and caprice, it would not be something inward, something private, but what is universally accepted and acknowledged. When, therefore, any one says he acts towards others from a law and conscience of his own, he is saying, in point of fact, that he is abusing and wronging them.
But actual conscience is not this insistence on a knowledge and a will which are opposed to what is universal; the universal is the element of its existence, and its very language pronounces its action to be recognized duty. Just as little, when the universal consciousness persists in its own judgment, does this unmask and dissipate hypocrisy. When that universal consciousness stigmatizes hypocrisy as bad, base, and so on, it appeals, in passing such a judgment, to its own law, just as the evil consciousness appeals to its law. For the former law makes its appearance in opposition to the latter, and thereby as a particular law.
It has, therefore, no antecedent claim over the other law; rather it legitimizes this other law. Hence the universal consciousness, by its zeal in abusing hypocrisy, does precisely the opposite of what it means to do: This judgment [of universal consciousness], however, has, at the same time, another side to it, from which it leads the way to the dissolution of the opposition in question. Consciousness of the universal does not proceed, qua real and qua acting, to deal with the evil consciousness; for this latter, rather, is the real. In opposing the latter, it is a consciousness which is not entangled in the opposition of individual and universal involved in action.
It stays within the universality of thought, takes up the attitude of an apprehending intelligence, and its first act is merely that of judgment.
Through this judgment it now places itself, as was just observed, alongside the first consciousness, and the latter through this likeness between them, comes to see itself in this other consciousness. For the consciousness of duty maintains the passive attitude of apprehension.
Thereby it is in contradiction with itself as the absolute will of duty, as the self that determines absolutely from itself. It may well preserve itself in its purity, for it does not act; it is hypocrisy, which wants to see the fact of judging taken for the actual deed, and instead of proving its uprightness and honesty by acts does so by expressing fine sentiments.
It is thus constituted entirely in the same way as that against which. In both alike the aspect of reality is distinct from the express statements — in the one owing to the selfish purpose of the action, in the other through failure to act at all, although the necessity of acting is involved in the very speaking of duty, for duty without deeds is altogether meaningless.
The act of judging, however, has also to be looked at as a positive act of thought and has a positive content: The active consciousness declares its specific deed to be its duty, and the consciousness that passes judgment cannot deny this; for duty as such is form void of all content and capable of any. In other words, concrete action, inherently implying diversity in its manysidedness, involves the universal aspect, which is that which is taken as duty, just as much as the particular, which constitutes the share and interest the individual has in the act.
Now the judging consciousness does not stop at the former aspect of duty and rest content with the knowledge which the active agent has of this, viz. It holds on to the other aspect, diverts the act into the inner realm, and explains the act from selfish motives and from its inner intention, an intention different from the act itself. As every act is capable of treatment in respect of its dutifulness, so, too, each can be considered from this other point of view of particularity; for as an act it is the reality of an individual.
This process of judging, then, takes the act out of the sphere of its objective existence, and turns it back into the inner subjective sphere, into the form of private or individual particularity. If the act carries glory with it, then the inner sphere is judged as love of fame. If it is altogether conformity with the position of the individual, without going beyond this position, and is so constituted that the individuality in question does not have the position attached to it as an external feature, but through itself supplies concrete filling to this universality, and by that very process shows itself to be capable of a higher station-then the inner nature of the act is judged as ambition; and so on.
Since, in the act in general, the individual who acts comes to see himself in objective form, or gets the feeling of his own being in his objective existence and thus attains enjoyment, the judgment on the act finds the inner nature of it to be an impulse towards personal happiness, even though this happiness were to consist merely in inner moral vanity, the enjoyment of a sense of personal excellence, and in the foretaste and hope of a happiness to come.
What reality it has lies in the deed of some individuality, and the action thereby has in it the aspect of particularity. No hero is a hero to his valet, not, however, because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is — the valet, with whom the hero has to do, not as a hero, but as a man who eats, drinks, and dresses, who, in short, appears as a private individual with certain personal wants and ideas of his own. The consciousness, that so passes judgment, is in consequence itself base and mean, because it divides the act up, and produces and holds to the act's self-discordance.
It is, furthermore, hypocrisy, because it gives out this way of judging, not as another fashion of being wicked, but as the correct consciousness of the act; sets itself up, in its unreality, in this vanity of knowing well and better, far above the deeds it decries; and wants to find its mere words without deeds taken for an admirable kind of reality. On this account, then, putting itself on a level with the agent on whom it passes judgment, it is recognized by the latter as the same as himself. This latter does not merely find himself apprehended as something alien to, and discordant with, that other: Seeing this identity and giving this expression, he openly confesses himself to the other, and expects in like manner that the other, having in point of fact put itself on the same level, will respond in the same language, will therein give voice to this identity, and that thus the state of mutual recognition will be brought about.
His confession is not an attitude of abasement or humiliation before the other, is not throwing himself away. For to give the matter expression in this way has not the one-sided character which would fix and establish his disparity with the other: In making his confession he announces, from his side, their common identity, and does so for the reason that language is the existence of spirit as an immediate self.