Conscience, Consciousness and the Parallel
Emergence of Religion and Guilt
“May the worm of conscience still begnaw thy soul.” – Richard III, I, iii
Long before the so-called breakthroughs of 20th century psychology and psychoanalysis, poets and playwrights well understood the shadow forces and dream voices that speak to us from a distant place, seemingly not of this world. From ancient scrolls to modern volumes, the body of world literature spills over with stories and legends of man’s quest and subsequent discovery of the distinction between good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice. While this dividing line seldom makes a clean cut, the gulf of morality that lies between has long provided a rich source of debate and a steady cause for individual reflection. A peek through the past, surveying several such stories, would even seem to indicate this question of goodness as fundamental to the very core of human consciousness. The vital need for a moral compass by which to guide one through life can be found in all cultures and eras, and more importantly, the burden of responsibility that accompanies such knowledge has demonstrated a special way of haunting us through our nagging conscience with dreams, ghosts, and fiery brimstone. With this development of the guilty conscience, humankind made its break from the lizards and gorillas of the lesser animal kingdom, paving the way for critical thinking, abstract communication, and the existence of god.
Freud on the Dawn of Consciousness
In Totem and Taboo, first published in 1912, Sigmund Freud spells out the vital importance of the conscience most clearly, unveiling the masks and metaphors of poetic allegory to present an explicit theory for the source of universal guilt that attends human awareness. “What is conscience?” he asks. “On the evidence of language it is related to that of which one is ‘most certainly conscious’. Indeed, in some languages the words for ‘conscience’ and ‘conscious’ can scarcely be distinguished. Conscience is the internal perception of the rejection of a particular wish operating within us.” (T&T, p.67-68) Cursory linguistic evidence as well as personal experience surely demonstrates that the conscience is a fundamental component of consciousness, if not the defining characteristic.
Imagine a Pleistocene hunter out tracking mastodons with his young son. Simple hunters with animal instincts, perhaps a slightly steeper forehead and a neo-cortex protruding a hairsbreadth wider from his frontal lobe than his neighbor’s, out performing an honest day’s work. Closing in on their prey, the boy picks up a rock and nails the mastodon on the forehead, causing the child to laugh hysterically while the beast flees to safety. Infuriated, the father clubs his son over the head as the next six weeks of dinner trots away into the forest. The father then sees that in his moment of rage he has killed his only son. Overcome with grief, filled with sorrow and regret, the hunter reflects on his own brutality in an unfamiliar way involving critical analysis self-awareness. Perhaps it was in doleful moments like this that the conscience opened the great door to human consciousness.
Freud postulates at great length on what he calls “emotional ambivalence,” the atavistic conflict between man’s unconscious desires and his stated taboos. “For, after all, there is no need to prohibit something that no one desires to do, and a thing that is forbidden with the greatest emphasis must be a thing that is desired.” (ibid, p.69) He emphasizes the apparent contradiction between man’s laws and his instinctive desires, and these shameful desires are precisely what engenders the universal sense of guilt, on which so many religions ravenously feed.
Freud notoriously traces all this guilt back to the Oedipal complex, and the unconscious urge to supplant or murder the father. While differing from the scenario suggested above, Freud still maintains that the first exercise of conscience awoke man’s nascent consciousness, and that it has been maturing and fine-tuning ever since. The story of our stone age hunters satisfies Freud’s emphasis on the conscience, but strikingly lacks the element of ambiguity, which would add something to the inner dialogue, namely the consideration of pros and cons. But once the deed has been committed, the conscience is activated and the weighing of pros and cons becomes irrelevant. Freud’s ambivalence addresses the shameful urge that has not been acted on. At this point the matter remains purely intellectual, and so the element of ambiguity essential, but once the crime (of sufficient magnitude) is committed, with or without justification or intention, the inner voice begins with its accusing, questioning and regretting. (It is interesting to note, however, that Freud concludes Totem and Taboo by claiming that it was not simply an urge, but an initial action that triggered this flowering of conscience and consciousness, and by citing Goethe’s Faust, “Am Anfang war die Tat.” [T&T, p.161])
Yet all this begs the question, where is the source of this disapproving voice? A vast contingency of educated people would insist that this is proof positive of an external, personal God. Freud, of course, would entertain no such frivolous notion. With Civilization and Its Discontents, which appeared in 1930, Freud delivers the master stroke against organized religion, calling it the result of infantile helplessness and a childish need manifested as an “oceanic feeling.”
The voice of disapproval, the great giver of guilt, Freud labels the superego, “which sets itself over against the rest of the ego… in the form of ‘conscience’…” (ibid, p.84) How then does this differ from what theists continue to call the Almighty Father? Freud naturally takes this paternal title as further evidence of an Oedipal complex, rife with fear and reverence. But when he speaks of an inner voice that tempers the unbridled desire of the ego, calling for patience, tolerance and moderation, is he not simply applying a different name to the same voice? Or should we see the super-ego as the loudspeaker through which god speaks to each of us, one at a time? Internal or external, the images of Christians and Freudians alike describe a realm of energy beyond our conscience understanding, one to be mastered or one to be worshiped; but first and foremost, this energy commands our respect. And ultimately, they both prescribe the same objective: know thyself. Psychoanalysts instruct you to listen to that voice, while Christians suggest developing a relationship with it, but they boil down to the same goal: inner wisdom.
Indefatigable in his skepticism, Freud insists that all good-natured tendencies are rooted in some angle of self-interest. The inclinations toward modesty and temperance result only from a fear of lost love, he says, the selfish desire to maintain respect and adoration. (C&D, p.85-86) But any pious believer will declare that the voice of moderation is not speaking from self-interest, but through genuine altruism. Either way, it’s the same case of a spirit divided, or what Freud calls emotional ambiguity, that echoes everywhere, from the yin and yang, to the Lord’s Prayer (“lead us not into temptation”), and Goethe’s Faust (“Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust”).
Despite Freud’s careful and clever analysis of opposing impulses that drive human nature, it remains to be proven how an obvious transgression like parricide leads to an abstract moral code, and how it is that certain behaviors should be universally forbidden while others are diametrically debated, such as killing one’s neighbor, rescuing a child from a rushing stream, or choosing to terminate a pregnancy after five or 10 weeks. A crime like parricide would be labeled “wrong” by any standards, but today’s moral dilemmas often walk a much finer line, and most consciences are tormented by transgressions of a far more delicate nature. In the case of such subtle violations, the origin of the conscience and its moral standards becomes the source of deep mystery and violent debate.
While many values are universal, we can agree that each individual subscribes to his own code of morality; and furthermore, every religion and every sect dictates a particular set of moral principles. Are we to believe that a universal god has created each person with his moral yardstick just as he has his own finger print? Or has god simply laid the framework – those matters that we can agree on – and left culture and personal experience to fill in the grey areas? Does the voice of god instruct each of each differently? It would be easier to believe that we’ve each been endowed with our super-ego, which grows and adapts like every other aspect of the psyche. Certainly the morality of a four year old differs dramatically when he turns 24, 44 or 74.
Whether by divine intervention, personal experience, or due diligence, or some combination of the three, the individual consciousness inevitably changes, usually for the better, through growth and maturation. Nothing encourages that maturation as effectively as trial and error, learning from one’s mistakes, a process where the conscience plays a most integral role.
Guilt and Salvation
Before Freud took the scientific approach to expose the phantom of conscience as the pre-requisite to human consciousness, centuries of writers and philosophers had reckoned with this demon on their own colorful terms. Perhaps no other author confronted these issues as deeply and vividly as Fyodor Dostoyevsky with his Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. In the earlier novel, Dostoyevsky spilled a grotesque quantity of ink to examine and re-examine the guilt of spilt blood that haunts his dubiously heroic Raskolnikov.
James Joyce, hardly a novice in the art of depicting the subconscious landscape, once refuted his son’s claim that Crime and Punishment was the greatest novel in history, commenting “only that it was a queer title for a book that contained neither crime nor punishment.” (Ellmann, p.499) Perhaps Joyce would have preferred the title “Guilt and Salvation,” for his writing reveals a deep, lingering concern with man’s universal need for atonement in spite of his ineluctable tendency toward transgression. While Dostoyevsky’s novel portrays an intensely internal drama, the terms “crime” and “punishment” would indicate forces acting from without. Crime suggests the violation of a socially determined code, and punishment implies some punitive action delivered through political means. Raskolnikov’s worries, however, lie not with his defiance of state ordinances, but in the breech of his own standards; and his torture swings not from the tail of the Tartar’s knout, but through the scourge of his own conscience.
Page after page recounts the dialogue between Raskolnikov’s inner voices, at times begging him to kneel down and confess, other times urging him to stand proud in defiance. But both voices speak in reaction to the character’s overriding sense of contrition over an act he knows was wrong. The novel’s message resonates in the pithy words, “Do a man dirt, you yourself hurt.” (C&P, p.138) This statement could be interpreted both as noble, altruistic compassion or as Freudian self-preservation. Freud might argue that one is motivated to do good deeds out of self-interest, simply to avoid being haunted by the specter of guilt. This then is precisely the function of the conscience; the presence of guilt creates the self-interested motive, so the line of reasoning becomes tautological and invalid. Despite repeated efforts to distract or redirect his thoughts toward more trivial matters, Raskolnikov is never able able to silence the incessant voice within.
In his equally verbose but more thematically varied final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky embarks on one of the deepest examinations of morality in all the volumes of world literature. In this story, the force of conscience takes on a power greater even than one individual. The guilt of one parricide consumes the thoughts and actions of all the brothers. The least affected, in fact, would appear to be the one guilty, as if by performing the unspeakable act the perpetrator is somehow able to absolve himself psychologically. Or more likely, only the weakest conscience will permit such unlawful action.
Either way, the bothers share not only in the guilt, but Dmitri even bears the material punishment for his brother’s crime. This could easily be read to mean that none of us is innocent when one man is guilty. Father Zossima, speaking as the novel’s authority on righteous living, preaches at length on the virtues of salvation and brotherhood and touches on this theme of interconnectedness. “My brother asked the birds to forgive him. That sounds senseless, but it was right for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and bending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth.” (B.K., p.295)
Despite its sometimes torturous ambiguity, the novel in its powerful final chapters seems to reinforce Crime and Punishment’s assertion that regardless of legal culpability, there is no greater punishment than the weight of a guilty conscience. This much is clear from reading either of these Russian epics. The higher question on which to reflect is whether God wrote the laws of morality and delivered them to man, or if man derived these ethical standards from ordinary human experience and then ascribed them to his self-made deity.
Various characters throughout the novel make reference to Voltaire’s famous quote on the subject. “If there were no God, He would have to be invented,” Ivan tells the idealist Alyosha. “And what’s strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, viscous beast as man.” (B.K., p.216)
The words of Ivan, the cerebral, reasoning component of Dostoyevsky’s divided psyche, express the Freudian skepticism with such precision, as if Freud’s theories in Totem and Taboo could have lifted not from the anthropological works of Frazer and Frobenius, but straight from the pages of Dostoyevsky. Ivan goes even further to assert that the devil really does exist and that god was created by man, as if man created god to temper his own wickedness and satisfy his childish need. The intellectual brother, Ivan, least in touch with his conscience, remains unmoved by anything spiritual and thoroughly convinced of man’s natural capacity for evil. But it is not so much the majority of evil among men that plagues the world, but the potential for a small quantity of evil to spoil a world that’s mostly good, or at least no so evil, as one drop of bacteria will thoroughly contaminate a whole jug of milk. The conscience must always be on guard; for goodness, by virtue of its purity, is all too vulnerable and easily overcome by the periodic visitations of nasty ideas. In the background of daily living, the conscience works full time to fend off vengeance and selfishness, learn from mistakes, and uphold the connection with all things.
Ancient Psychology
Modern, post-enlightenment poets and psychologists point to the dissonant choir of voices that sing from within as evidence of multilayered consciousness, which they in turn name the id, ego and superego; or the conscious, subconscious and superconscious; or even the brothers of mind (Ivan), body (Dmitri) and soul (Alyosha). But the ancients had their own stories to accomplish the same dissection of the psyche. Many of today’s self-described scientists look with contempt upon those old myths and Bible stories and see nothing more than barbaric misconceptions of an early people who had no way of comprehending the world around them. Yet their hifalutin labels seem to identify the very same dynamics described by those savages in their primitive campfire stories.
One can discount the historicity of the Garden of Eden, for example, without rejecting the story in its entirety, for to do so would be no different than ignoring the tale of Hamlet simply because he fails to conform to the historical line of Danish royalty, a foolish mistake indeed. Instead, Genesis can be read as a story of psychological development, both in the individual sense of coming into awareness in early childhood, and in the collective sense of mankind’s transcending the instinctive animal brain and flowering into a conscious species.
The legend of Eden and virtually all creation myths distinguish themselves in their references to a unified identity that predates the separated consciousness. The story begins with Adam, sole resident in the garden, assigning names to the plants and animals, retaining complete control over his domain. In Adam, all mankind is one; with the introduction of Eve, mankind is divided in two. This division is brought into even sharper focus when Eve offers the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. With the knowledge of good and evil, mankind confronts the dilemma of consciousness; a line has been drawn not just between male and female, but also between human and divine, right and wrong, and all pairs of opposites. With this rise of duality, paradise has been lost; it has become man’s burden to differentiate between these pairs.
Freud comments on the importance of duality in Civilization and its Discontents, where he says “We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.” (C&D, p.25) Only through the juxtaposition of opposites are we able to make sense of the world. Cold means nothing until you’ve experienced hot, and so on. We have grown so accustomed to this mode of perception, that we can imagine no other; it is an illusion on which we have become dependent.
In the mind of the infant, the first separation occurs with the recognition of its hands and feet as part of itself, while the breasts and the rest of the world belong to something other. Freud points to that sense of unity which is lost in early infancy as some remarkable state of bliss that one will long for the rest of his life. The quest for unity and oneness pervades virtually every religion. Around the age of six or seven a child meets with the concept of death, and he realizes that life is only a temporary state, which must eventually end. At some point the child must learn to distinguish between right and wrong, a distinction that will likely undergo numerous revisions over the course of life. Sometimes those revisions are made to correct one’s own behavior, sometimes to judge others, and sometimes to justify one’s self. Cultural influence, based on legal and parental boundaries, plays a major role, of course, but the inner voice is a product of personal feeling not public authority. Personal experience reveals what sort of behavior brings joys and what brings pain, and with empathy we come to realize how these behaviors will affect others. Thus the conscience matures, as does the relationship with the great spirit, the universal mind, and the true self.
Origin of the Psyche
Even while the story of Eden was still brewing in the cauldron of near eastern syncretism, bringing together elements of Egyptian, Sumerian and Semitic folklore, the Greeks had already constructed the most elaborate and well-documented system of mythology the world has ever seen. Bridging the gap between primitive and modern civilization, no other society has come close in offering such a cogent series of psychological insights. Almost every modern example of literature and folklore worth considering can be traced back to its Greek origins. Some even claim that the entire body of world literature can be divided into two plot lines: The Odyssey and The Iliad. At the very cusp of civilization, their ability to grasp the transition from naivety to consciousness could not have been more profound.
Like so many of its counterparts, the Greek tale of cosmogony begins with a singular wholeness, Chaos, which rises alone from the void of nothingness and is subsequently divided. From the unified Chaos, Gaia (earth) and Uranus (sky) emerge, and all the pairs of opposites shortly follow, hot and cold, active and passive, and all the rest. Philosophically and psychologically, the most interesting lines are those which separate the men from the gods, and separate the self from everything else. The presence of these opposites signals the presence of consciousness, the ability to reflect and to “know thyself,” which lies at the core of sophrosyne. The importance of reflection (self-examination) appears again in the story Perseus, who is only able to see the face of Medusa in the mirror of his magical shield – a gift from Athena, the goddess of wisdom.
Every attempt at religious experience and psychological growth calls for the reunification of these polarities, heaven and earth, yin and yang, father and son. By the Greeks, this challenge is best illustrated by the heroes, always descended of mixed parentage – mortal and divine – and whose journeys always prove epic, in every sense of the word. So vital is the notion of the hero’s quest, that even today no novel, script or screenplay could stand up without it. It is the universal frame that makes a story meaningful, marking the course of individual growth, the ladder of societal development.
Among the best-known Greek heroes, Heracles spends his life performing the 12 proverbial labors in order to assuage his guilt for lashing out as a reckless youth and killing his music teacher, Linus. His guilty conscience drives him on a struggle for redemption, a lifelong journey that involves the slaying of numerous monsters, inner beasts that plague his human consciousness and separate him from divinity. These battles depict the struggles that each person confronts on the path to in-dividuality, to heal the divided psyche and return to the united whole. It is interesting to note that for so many heroes – Heracles, Jason and Christ, to name a few – this ultimate accomplishment is achieved only in death.
Guilt then drives the psyche toward resolution, encouraging a return to oneness by punishing those actions which serve to spread the gap between us and them. And self interest, contrary to Freud, is not the engine of progress, but the chief obstacle deterring it – unless by progress we mean the accumulation of wealth and power. But here and in every significant religious system, progress refers to inner growth, promoting the ideals of kindness, tolerance and compassion. The conscience is vocal, demanding, and can only be satisfied through thoughts and actions that honor life and foster interconnectedness. What quells the guilt pleases god, and what soothes the conscience brings us all closer together – and closer to the original unity that the soul craves and the Lord secures.
(March 2009)
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WORKS CITED
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Trans. Sydney Monas. New York: Signet Classics, 1968.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York: Signet Classics, 1957.
Ellmann, Richard. James Joyce. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.
Freud, Sigmund. Totem and Taboo. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W.Norton & Company, Inc., 1950.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. New York: W.W.Norton & Company, Inc., 1961.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust. 1808.
Shakespeare, William. Richard III. 1591.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. 1601.
