Conscience

Phenomena and Theories

Hendrik Stoker, Philip E. Blosser

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780268103200
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Conscience: Phenomena and Theories was first published in German in 1925 as a dissertation by Hendrik G. Stoker under the title Das Gewissen: Erscheinungsformen und Theorien. It was received with acclaim by philosophers at the time, including Stoker's dissertation mentor Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, and Herbert Spielberg, as quite possibly the single most comprehensive philosophical treatment of conscience and as a major contribution in the phenomenological tradition. Stoker's study offers a detailed historical survey of the concept of conscience from ancient times through the Middle Ages up to more modern thinkers, including Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and Cardinal Newman. Stoker analyzes not only the concept of conscience in academic theory but also various types of theories of conscience. His work offers insightful discussions of problems and theories related to the genesis, reliability, and validity of conscience. In particular, Stoker analyzes the moral, spiritual, and psychological phenomena connected with bad conscience, which in turn illuminate the concept of conscience. The book is deeply informed by the traditions of western Christianity. Available for the first time in an accessible English translation, with an introduction by its translator and editor, Philip E. Blosser, it promises to be of interest to philosophers, especially in Christian philosophy and phenomenology, and also to all those interested in moral and religious psychology, ethics, religion, and theology.

1

Current Scholarship and Orientation

One of the most interesting, profound, and important challenges to depth-psychology¹ and psychology in general is the question concerning what conscience actually is, particularly a guilty conscience. It claims dominion over the whole of a person’s experience. Its power plays a vastly important role in one’s life. The phenomenon mystifies the researcher, yet it is patently obvious to anyone with a troubled conscience. In some people it is evinced as a horrible dread, driving them further and further away in flight and leading them to perceive all other people as a threat. In other people it reigns as an unspeakable shame, leaving in them the desire to sink into utter oblivion. In others it works as an infinite grief and loving sorrow, producing acts of redemptive and consoling repentance. In still others it works as an electromagnetic sensor for detecting the presence of a dangerous electric current, warning and restraining them from committing an irrevocable and irreversible evil act. What we glimpse in the dread and contrition of conscience is no trivial or superficial matter, but it touches us in our deepest core and seems to bring us into immediate proximity with the higher principles of personal justice and love by which we feel ourselves to be governed. In no way is this a vague, imperceptible, mystical, or incomprehensible experience, but rather a phenomenon whose movement in us is felt concretely, individually, personally, intensely, powerfully, and with complete clarity.

Nevertheless, psychology has hitherto treated this phenomenon in an all too negligent and perfunctory way. When one consults the table of contents of any psychological works or handbooks on this subject, it is astonishing how few observations and acknowledgments may be found directly bearing on the phenomenon. Why is this? Perhaps it could be said that psychology is still a young science and has had to tackle the more superficial problems of the inner life and to work through these first before it could begin to plumb the depths of the inner life and take on the more fundamental problems. Perhaps it could also be said that psychology in its beginnings has stood directly under the spell and influence of the mathematical sciences and the scientific method of the past century and could not yet break free of their mathematical ideals and atomistic hypotheses. Perhaps also, since conscience and the problems related to it do not lie in the foremost line of interest for researchers in psychology, it may also be said that this negligence is a matter related to the particular outlook of our times, and that a positivistic scientific orientation must inevitably turn its back on the deepest essence and meaning of this type of phenomenon.

Today one sees everywhere an awakening to new questions of greater human significance. Psychology has recently entered a new phase, with phenomenological investigations, such as those by Max Scheler, F. J. J. Buytendijk, Alexander Pfänder, and others; works of gestalt-psychology, such as those by Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka; the endeavors of Eduard Spranger in psychology of culture; the psychoanalytic studies of Sigmund Freud; the works of William McDougall in behavioral psychology—to mention only a few new movements in psychology. All of these, regardless of how they may differ, are united by their common desire to overcome the older natural-scientific orientation of atomistic psychology (Elementenpsychologie) and the earlier school of associationist psychology, and by their conviction that the proper subject for psychological investigation is not to be found in discrete atomistic data but in the whole “nature,” the Gestalt, the “complex,” and the “structural-unity” of the mind as a “totality,” and that the realities signified by these words form the fundamental basis of psychology.² This turning point—this crisis—within the discipline of psychology today has yielded a resurgence of interest in deeper, more fundamental problems, which, it may be hoped, may soon give conscience the attention it properly deserves.

Although precious little has been said about the subject of conscience by those in psychology before now, the subject has managed to garner considerably more attention in theological and philosophical ethics. Unfortunately, however, within those disciplines the psychological point of view is usually subordinated to philosophical and theological interests—which are quite lethal for the problem of conscience itself and for the other theories in question. As a result, a complete chaos prevails in ethics concerning the problem of conscience—a “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes)—and, at the same time, a consummate labyrinth of ambiguous concepts. One need only consult miscellaneous definitions in miscellaneous works of ethics to see this.

Conscience may be regarded as a divine oracle, as the highest court of reason, as human judgment, as feeling, as will, as a compulsion, or as an instinct. It may be identified with our general moral nature or with syllogistic logic. It may be seen as infallible or, contrariwise, as “untrustworthy,” as grounded in convention, as the voice of the community, or individual subjectivity. It may be seen as something divine in the person, or as a biogenetically predisposed experience of “guilt” found even in animals—as a condition, a function, an organ, an act, and so on.

When we venture into the problem of conscience under such circumstances, therefore, it is imperative that we do not let such theories of conscience and the history of the problem prejudice our judgment. It is important, instead, to take as our starting point the objective reality—the actual experience of conscience as such—and to let this objective reality alone have the last word over the truth of the theories. This is what we intend in the present work—to endeavor to understand conscience, not as abstractly or theoretically conceived, but to grasp it descriptively in its concrete and actual existential depth, and to strive thus to understand its significance.

Before we can proceed, however, it is unfortunately necessary to perform something analogous to a surgical operation. The term “conscience” and its referent (what it refers to) are burdened with immense ambiguities and perplexities that must be cut away. Much that is ordinarily associated with “conscience” has nothing to do with it. In chapter 2 and the Excursus of this work we will attempt to gain an overview of the many meanings of terms and concepts associated with “conscience,” and their sources, and to find a way out of the confusing labyrinth in order to establish, subsequently, which parties in this cosmopolitan assembly belong to the realm of conscience merely in name and which parties by ties of blood.

Then, and only then, can progress be made toward understanding the problem of conscience itself. Here three questions must be clearly distinguished. Too often the failure to distinguish these questions has led to disastrous effects for the resolution of the problem. The three basic questions are the following:

What is the essential nature of conscience?

How does it develop in the individual and in the community?

Is the witness of conscience absolutely valid and trustworthy?

These questions about the essential nature, genesis, and validity of conscience correspond to the following three parts of the work.³ It is wishful thinking to suppose, like Paul Rée (and many others), that all the problems of conscience can be solved merely by a consideration of The Origin of Conscience (as his [Rée’s] work is entitled).⁴ On the contrary, every question of origin or genesis is preceded in principle by the question of a thing’s essential nature. Every process of becoming or emerging presupposes something that becomes or emerges, which first must be grasped in its essence if we intend to do justice to the question of development. Otherwise the problems and investigations end up being turned on their head. Moreover, once conscience has been examined according to its nature and genesis, then the problem of validity also becomes clear.

The present work stems from my active interest in clarifying this poorly understood phenomenon of conscience. Even so, I am all too aware of my inadequacies in meeting the formidable challenges posed by this problem and that many more years of intense work would be required to do it justice. Perhaps a subsequent work will achieve this.⁵ Only through the cooperation of additional researchers can the precious gold be fully extracted from the rich mine of this issue. This work is intended, therefore, only as a contribution, a psychological-philosophical study toward a deeper understanding of the problem of conscience.

Not all of the problems of conscience dealt with in this work are treated in the same detail. Some are merely noted or suggested, insofar as a deeper treatment would take us too far afield from the main questions at issue. Such problems are still noted, nonetheless, insofar as they cast new light on the phenomenon and are important for its metaphysical implications, meaning, and nature.

2

The Ambiguity of Conscience

“In the entire field of ethics there is probably no other concept that has been so subject to abuse, employed in such different and inconsistent ways, and been shrouded in such mysterious darkness—whether intentionally or otherwise—as the concept of conscience,” laments Friedrich Jodl.¹ Anyone who considers the countless popular uses of this term, or leafs through scholarly bibliographies comparing what philosophers, theologians, and psychologists throughout the centuries have understood by “conscience” (das Gewissen, la conscience morale, geweten, conscientia, συνείδησις), and wishes to grasp an underlying unity amidst the chaos of ideas, is faced with a daunting task. The situation cannot be altogether unlike that of a patient subjected to psychological experiments involving optical illusions, who may well declare: “Everything is so confusing and surreal, spinning around and running together in a confused jumble. For the life of me, I can’t distinguish what is real from what is illusion during the experiment.” No wonder Richard Rothe wants to throw out the word “conscience” from the “synagogue of scientific language” and substitute a completely different name for it, as he says, “because we conceive ‘conscience’ to be scientifically unserviceable.” In the same respect, as Rothe also notes, common parlance is so vague and vastly chaotic that any attempt to artificially delimit the meaning of the term would result in linguistic bewilderment. Conscience embraces all the various psychological phenomena in which the essential moral and religious nature of a person manifests itself—all of which Rothe breaks down rather rigidly into eight concepts: nature, meaning, instinct, and power, each divided into two subcategories according to its moral or religious sense.² Certainly Rothe is partly right here. Such an ambiguous concept (with even more meanings than the eight he lists) cannot be employed in a technical way without qualification. Yet this approach to “conscience” is much too mechanical and atomistic.

Are there actually no primordial phenomena of conscience, phenomena that present themselves as properly organized and constituted under the heading of “conscience”? Only if there were not, only if there were no more basic phenomena than those compartmentalized neatly by Rothe’s eight concepts would his protest and suggestion carry any weight here. But such primordial phenomena of conscience do in fact exist, and they form the basis upon which the various concepts of conscience are based—by way of derivation, abstraction, analogy, and so forth, and these concepts are applied, in turn, to various other phenomena. What prevents us, then, from uncovering these primordial phenomena and identifying them as the proper phenomena of conscience, particularly when we can distinguish all derivative concepts from one another by means of qualifying adjectives and descriptive attributes? It is by no means pointless to say, for example, that “guilty conscience” is a genuine phenomenon of conscience, whereas an “advisory conscience” or “conscience of the nineteenth century” has nothing at all to do with the genuine phenomenon of conscience. The relationships between these various sorts of concepts can be delineated quite easily by means of qualifying adjectives and descriptions; one merely has to clarify what is meant in each case. By such means, then, it may be possible to preserve for future scholarship a perfectly good word—a word full of linguistic life and breath, a word which, perhaps more than any other, has won its rightful place in both popular and technical language through its connections with profoundly human experiences. The word “conscience” ought to be avoided only where a more generic synonym may be used that does not carry the specifically personal connotations of “conscience”—for example, when a synonym might be used to signify “moral knowledge in general.” A great deal of confusion would be avoided if this point were observed. As an example of the confusion to be avoided, Oswald Külpe places an unnecessary strain on the concept of “conscience”—even if the term serves a technical and economical purpose for him—when he argues: “If we use the term ‘conscience’ for the function performed by moral judgment (in a broad sense not limited to one’s own actions), then the distinctions mentioned here designate different opinions concerning the origin of conscience.”³

It is of first importance, therefore, for the investigation of the problem, to gain an overview of the ambiguity of the term (and concept of) “conscience” and its underlying causes. This ambiguity may be assessed in terms of the following factors:

•The nature of the phenomenon as constituted in the depths of the soul

•The serious personal importance of the phenomenon

•The etymological origin of the word “conscience”

•The psychological (as opposed to logical) development of language (vernacular discourse and poetic license are the greatest offenders here)

•A distorted conceptualization of “conscience” in the sciences

•The place of “conscience” within philosophical systems inimical to it

The nature of the phenomenon as constituted in the depths of the soul

People have been playing around with the concept of conscience for some time. Poets, preachers, theologians, psychologists, and philosophers, and also ordinary people using ordinary language, have all taken part in the process. Moreover, the concept is one that lends itself quite easily to playful manipulation, as we shall see.

The primary means by which we apprehend the world given to us is through expressions of our mental (seelisch) experiences, rather than through any particular colors, sounds, or things around us. Yet the process of language formation seems to show th...