Jules van Schaijik

I’m glad you read some of the comments under this video.  Some of them really had me in stitches last night.  One of my favorites was by EagleOnTheRhine:

My favorite part of this peice is at about 2:10 where the silence really intensifies.
I think John Cage did an incredible job of combinding the quietness of the strings and the muteness of the woodwinds.
I’ve been working on learning to play this, but I keep bursting into song at about 4:11. Almost there.

The funny thing is that according to Cage himself, there is no such thing as silence.  It’s all about the surrounding noises; the role of the orchestra is simply not to interfere.

Unfortunately, they still don’t get it here in Philadelphia.  At a recent performance of La Traviata, the orchestra and singers were so loud that I could hardly hear what the people behind me were whispering.  Very annoying.

Hi Scott,
The first 20 pages or so of chapter 5 of the Grammar of Assent are by far the most relevant to the issue we have been discussing.
In the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, it is especially chapter 5 that is of interest.

I agree, Scott, with what you say about conscience being an integral part of human nature. All persons have it, not because they are believers or in a state of grace, but simply in virtue of being human. It is crucial to insist on this.

But I continue to think that the term “voice” is very appropriate and descriptive. It captures what is so unique about the experience of conscience: the sense of not being alone, of being watched, addressed, and held accountable by another. These elements, I think, are part of the immediate experience of an awakened conscience. But you write as if it can only be inferred from that experience: “it is possible to conclude, with careful philosophical reflection upon the interior qualities of the experience of conscience, that it must have a divine origin, and that this origin must be one and personal.”

It is on this point, it seems, that we still differ. On my view it is much more literally true than on yours, to say that conscience is a “dialogue of man with God” or that it is “the witness of God himself, whose voice and judgement penetrate the depths of man’s soul” (Veritatis Splendor, #58).  These phrases represent, in my view, a more deeply personalist view of conscience than can be found in, say, St. Thomas, whose perspective is, to use Wojtyla’s term, much more cosmological.

One more point, just to be clear:  I don’t mean to say, of course, that in conscience we encounter God as clearly and directly as we encounter one another in conversation.  Nor, I can only suppose, is the experience of conscience anything like an interior locution such as some saints have received. But neither is it just an inference.  I therefore call it a sense or a feeling.

It is true, of course, that it makes an importance difference whether the errors of conscience are invincible or culpable.  But I don’t think that that issue changes the point I tried to make above.  It just adds another issue to the mix which, for clarity’s sake, I decided to leave out.

In a nutshell, however, here is how I see things:  A person who has a culpably erroneous conscience is precisely a person who is not sincerely seeking to follow his conscience.  Such a person, as the encyclical describes him, “shows little concern for what is true and good, and [his] conscience gradually becomes almost blind from being accustomed to sin.”  He may even say to himself that his conscience is clear.  But he is not a morally serious person.  To quote the encyclical again:

before feeling easily justified in the name of our conscience, we should reflect on the words of the Psalm: ‘who can discern his errors? Clear me from hidden faults’.  There are faults which we fail to see but which nevertheless remain faults, because we have refused to walk towards the light.

But think now of a man who has lived a morally unserious life and whose conscience, as a result, is weak and malformed.  Imagine that he has a genuine conversion and wants to turn his life around.  What should he do?  His conscience is in bad shape, and he is largely to blame.  Should he set it aside and live according to someone else’s?  Should he, for instance, follow his confessor’s conscience instead of his own?  Many people are inclined to think that he should.  They say that a person has a duty to follow his conscience as long as that conscience is properly formed.  But I think they are wrong.  (I was going to say why, but I would only repeat myself.  And it’s past my bedtime.)

—

As to Dignitatus Humanae, I cannot agree with you that its teaching is unclear or problematic at all.  But I don’t know what more I can say on that score.

I think there is much more to the “voice” quality of conscience than you, Scott, or St. Thomas think.  What makes conscience unique among our faculties, as Newman points out, is that in our experience of it we have to do with more than just ourselves.  It is not just a combination of our inclination to do good with our rational judgement as to where the good lies in a particular case.  Rather, the experience includes an element of “being held to obedience” by another.  The following lines from Veritatis Splendor are therefore not just poetical:

Moral conscience does not close man within an insurmountable and impenetrable solitude, but opens him to the call, to the voice of God. In this, and not in anything else, lies the entire mystery and dignity of the moral conscience: in being the place, the sacred place where God speaks to man.

I agree that conscience is a natural faculty.  It belongs to the essence of human nature.  It is not a miraculous, divine intervention in the ordinary state of affairs.  Still, it is unlike any other natural faculty, because in and through it the person, in some mysterious way, encounters God. To overlook this is to deprive conscience of its unique depth and imperative character.

It does not really matter what you call it.  St. Paul speaks about the spirit as opposed to the flesh, or of the two laws at war within him, the law of God vs. the law of sin.  Philosophers often use the contrast between reason and passion, and theologians oppose love to pride and concupiscence.

Conscience is the “organ” in man, which challenges him to be good and to live up to his high calling.  But it is not infallible. It can make mistakes.  Even when it does so, however, and this is the important point to see, “conscience does not lose its dignity, because even when it directs us to act in a way not in conformity with the objective moral order, it continues to speak in the name of that truth about the good which the subject is called to seek sincerely” (Veritatis Splendor, 62)

About your radical example, Steve.  I would say that a person who has sold his soul to the devil is not following his conscience at all.  His fault is not that his conscience is darkened, but rather that, such as it is, he has rejected it.

I strongly suspect that most abortion advocates are in the same position.  They are not following a badly formed conscience, but rather set it aside for things like money, power, prestige, and such like.

Katie’s post reminds me of Vaclav Havel’s great essay “The Power of the Powerless”. Written in 1978, way before the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, Havel argues that “a genuine, profound, and lasting change for the better” cannot come from “the victory ... of any particular traditional political conception, which can ultimately be only external”:

More than ever before, such a change will have to derive from human existence, from the fundamental reconstitution of the position of people in the world, their relationship to themselves and to each other, and to the universe. If a better economic and political model is to be created, then perhaps more than ever before it must derive from profound existential and moral changes in society. This is not something that can be designed and introduced like a new car. If it is to be more than just a new variation of the old degeneration, it must above all be an expression of life in the process of transforming itself. A better system will not automatically ensure a better life. In fact, the opposite is true: only by creating a better life can a better system be developed.

Havel’s ideas are confirmed by the profound impact they had on future events in Eastern Europe.  According to a member of the Solidarity movement in Poland the essay appeared at just the right time. A time in which people involved in or sympathetic to the movement were beginning to doubt what they were doing, and whether they could possibly be effective in the larger scheme of things:

Then came the essay by Havel. Reading it gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not give up, and a year later-in August 1980-it became clear that the party apparatus and the factory management were afraid of us. We mattered. And the rank and file saw us as leaders of the movement. When I look at the victories of Solidarity ... I see in them an astonishing fulfillment of the propheticies and knowledge contained in Havel’s essay.

I do not know the authors in question (Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Owen) very well. But even if all you say about them is true, why should that preclude some of their insights from being “deeply true” instead of just “apparently true”? Doesn’t that sort of thing happen all the time? Think of Nietzsche, Sartre, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, etc.

I like the passage Katie quotes in her post very much. It makes clear that for all their faults, both intellectual and moral, the early feminists had good and real grounds for wanting to change the way in which marriage was lived and understood in their time. There really is something oppressive about having to live “without intimacy in the most intimate of circumstances”. One does not have to agree with the solutions these feminists propose, to sympathize with the problems they experience.

That problem - sexual intimacy without love - is worth dwelling on for its own sake.  Why is it felt to be so problematic, often even downright degrading? What does it reveal about human sexuality? How is it that so many people engaged in the contemporary hook-up culture no longer feel this problem? What can we do to “make” them feel it? Or perhaps they do they feel it; perhaps they have just given up on their higher hopes.

Moreover, I think the problem is not limited to the sexual sphere. There are plenty of non-sexual situations in which the degree of intimacy that is somehow expected of persons far outstrips the degree of intimacy that is truly warranted. I have sometimes felt this way in religious “share groups”. But there are many other, similar cases.

So, while the larger historical and philosophical context in which these early feminists were operating is interesting, let’s not let ourselves be distracted from the main point of Katie’s post, which can easily be discussed apart from them.