CONSCIENCE OR LIFE?
We dedicate ourselves to the pursuit of happiness. But should we live our lives for the sake of worthiness?
CONSCIENCE OR LIFE?
Leo Tolstoy had once written, “The antagonism between life and conscience may be removed in two ways: by a change of life or by a change of conscience.” It is an insight that has long intrigued me. For Tolstoy, the dictates of conscience and the energy that propels life stand in opposition to one another.
We may conclude that for non-human species this tension is absent. Bereft of requisite cognitive capacities, animals are most likely devoid of conscience. Evolutionary psychologists will tell us that some higher species engage in cooperative behaviors that enhance their survival and, as such, serve as a foundation for morality. But it is unlikely that animals cognitively extend this behavior to form moral principles that they then reflect on, and from there guide or inhibit future behaviors that can be identified as ethical. Ethics requires intent.
It is this human capacity to formulate thought and principles, derived from our basic behaviors, that serves as the raw material from which conscience is created.
Conscience, as Tolstoy noted, stands in opposition to the life force, and we have a choice as to which we identify with, both in molding our lives and personalities in general and in specific circumstances. In choosing conscience we can edify and ennoble our existence. And by subsuming ourselves to it, as Sigmund Freud famously elaborated, we also make civilization possible.
But in our obedience to conscience, as Freud also recognized, we suppress the life instinct, and thereby render ourselves at least somewhat unhappy. In this vein, I have found wry humor in his assertion that the purpose of his psychoanalysis was to alleviate the sufferer of his neurotic unhappiness in order to restore him to the general unhappiness of humankind. Dynamically, our conscience resides in our superego, and it is the imposition of our superego in suppressing our instincts, identified by Freud as primarily sex and aggression, that makes a civilized life possible. Since our life energy seeks the release of our instincts, a release that is inherently pleasurable, their suppression places a veil of unhappiness over the human condition.
Freud was a naturalist who sought to legitimate psychoanalysis within a scientific paradigm. But the dichotomy between conscience and life finds its origins in philosophy.
Arguably the two-fold nature of our condition goes back to Plato, whose philosophy was appropriated by Christianity and instantiated into Western thought: creator and created, heaven and earth, spirit and matter, soul and body, mind and brain, conscience and life.
But it was the Germans who probably made the most of it. A view similar to Tolstoy’s was expounded by Felix Adler, the founder of the Ethical Culture Movement. Adler, who maintained that ethical ideals are sewn into the fabric of reality, had once written, “The purpose of life is not happiness but worthiness. Happiness may come as an accessory; we dare never make it the end.” Adler’s was the philosophy of the idealist for whom spiritual ideals, following the Platonic paradigm, are more real than the material and actual realm in which we live out our lives. Conscience bears a strong affinity to the world of ideals.
There is the key question that, no doubt, Tolstoy would have recognized: Are we to strive to live our lives in pursuit of making ourselves worthy, or do we live to maximize our happiness? If the latter, we may run roughshod over the legitimate needs and claims of others. We may violate what is most precious in them. If the former, we suppress, or at least sublimate, our desire for happiness in the service of seeking what Adler called “the higher life.”
Adler was striving to provide moral absolutes in a period when the Industrial Revolution was crushing the working class under its multiple oppressions. His was undoubtedly an austere philosophy, but it was not as austere as that of the Enlightenment luminary, idealist and Adler's philosophical mentor, Immanual Kant.
It was Kant’s ethical philosophy that insured that, in striving to be ethical, not a smidgen of motivation to seek happiness could be found. Here, life and moral conscience stand in stark conflict. He rigorously refuted any utilitarian basis for ethics, proclaiming that ethics derives exclusively from obedience to the Moral Law. The Supreme Moral Law, the Categorical Imperative, ultimately derived from the dispassionate dictates of reason, commands that we respect the humanity in ourselves and others as an end and not merely as a means. And humanity is a quality that transcends our natural attributes.
To be moral, Kant declared, we must not act merely in accordance with the Moral Law, but from it. Hence, if we are motivated to do the right thing to enhance our sense of virtue, or from the sublime pleasure that derives from so acting, then our acts may be prudential, but they are not, strictly speaking, ethical. In short, we should do the right thing exclusively because it is the right thing to do, and not for any sense of reward whatsoever, however ratified. As with Tolstoy, Kant’s ethics sets in opposition happiness from morality, or, by extension, life from conscience. To be moral, including upholding the deliverances of conscience, brings with it a displacement of our happiness.
I have long argued that Kant’s ethic is an impossible one. As creatures of the flesh, we are fated to want something in return for the performance of our moral deeds, and it is this desire that at least partially motivates us. But Kantian ethics does recognize something distinctive about ethics. Ethical motivation does intuitively appear to stand above the mere transactions of a cost-benefit calculation. In other words, if I give money to charity for the purposes of enhancing my reputation, or for that matter help a friend in need in the hope that she will extend her kindness to me at some later time, we can rightfully ask what is distinctly ethical about my “charity” or my support of a friend. Ethics, herein, is arguably reduced to nothing but a calculated exchange of commodities or services, and thereby lost.
So here is the existential dilemma we confront: Do we commit ourselves to the pursuit of happiness, which in the broadest sense includes fulfilling our desires and passions and realizing our potentials, emotional, physical, sexual, and intellectual – individual and social - and all that makes life satisfying? Or, do we live committed to doing morally the right thing? Do we live primarily by the light of moral principle and, to that degree, suppress, or at best sublimate, our happiness, and thereby ennoble our lives and furthermore set an elevated example for others? Do we live to augment our happiness, or primarily to make of ourselves worthy persons? If the latter, do we thereby bring out what is most distinctively human and best in ourselves and others? Do we commit ourselves to rescuing the human condition from the snares of selfishness and self-aggrandizement, and the debasing material pursuits of extravagance and mindless consumerism? Such pursuits can often lead one to a blindness to the needs of their fellows and the call of elemental justice.
In these times of volatile political conflict - and politics is a form of power struggle - I conclude we witness the life force wildly asserting itself, greatly unrestrained by the powers of reason, higher principles, and moral conscience. Happiness has become too readily hitched to the struggle for power, and triumph of one’s interests and one’s tribe at the expense of others.
Conscience finds itself among such values as ennoblement, righteousness, and principled idealism. It places necessary restraint on life’s more unbridled and destructive manifestations. But a life lived in the ethereal realms of conscience comes with its perils as well. We often find saints insufferable. Moral conscience can not only be priggish but also lead to a stance of postured superiority. It can veer into moralism. And it too readily is joyless.
The response to this existential dilemma, like so many, is not to be found, I believe, in legalistic norms or rules. When it comes to the Tolstoian problem, I conclude that we need to live by an artful balance of both. To suppress our yen for happiness, as an expression of life’s yearning, is to defy our natures as biological and social beings in the most basic sense. It was Aristotle who affirmed unequivocally that “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”
But to ignore the call of conscience is to deny the essential commitments that lift us beyond our biological nature alone. Intellect, imagination, reason, morality, and conscience ensure that we are more than our biological endowments. By affirming conscience and acting upon it, we can the seek the best, and by so doing appreciate the farther reaches of our humanity.
Enjoyed the article. Happiness is the ultimate goal of human life. Every human chose his or her path to happiness. Since we human have free will to chose our own individual path. The path evolves from conscience. My question is conscience is universal meaning what is ethical for me might have different value for another individual. Enjoyed this thought provoking eternal question. I am sharing🙏
Since I no longer attend NYSEC (North Carolina is too far away), I read these mailings aloud to myself and picture you delivering them as part of a Sunday morning lecture. Thank you for stimulating my mind with your elegant scholarship and prose.