Tag Archives: Freud

The Argument from Conscience

Atheism, Creed, , , ,

In his book, Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, St. John Henry Newman gives account of what might be described as a philosophy of faith.  He thought logical proofs for things like the existence of God, even when sound, were unconvincing for many people because they failed to garner the right kind of belief or assent.  In Newman’s thought, assent to a proposition or a set of propositions can be of two types: notional and real.  Notional assent was a simple assent to a proposition or set of propositions as true.  Real assent takes those same propositions and moves them from the head to the heart so that it becomes concrete and personal.  A man patterns his life around a real belief while a notional belief only remains in the back of his mind.  When it comes to questions of facts, notional assent is often sufficient.  But when it comes to important questions, such as the existence of God, an assent “following upon acts of inference, and other purely intellectual exercises” is never a sufficient impetus to conversion.  Instead Newman thinks that only real assent can act as a means of paving the way for the invasion of grace. 

In Newman’s mind, it is very difficult for all but the most erudite of philosophers to give real assent to the logical, deductive, metaphysical proofs of someone like St. Thomas and his Five Ways.  These proofs are not defective in any way, in fact they are quite the contrary, having stood the test of time by offering certain proof of the existence of God.  Instead Newman thinks real assent can only be given when a person’s experience leads them to a real encounter with God.  For Newman this means turning to inductive proofs that leads one to the probable conclusion that God exists.  Newman thinks he found a universal subjective experience that proves the existence of God in moral obligation.

Conscience as a Universal Experience

Newman’s Argument from Conscience as it has most often been called is one of the most effective arguments for the existence of God.  This is because it builds upon a universal experience.  We all judge our own actions according to whether they are right or wrong.  Once this judgement is made, we experience an obligation to do what is right and avoid what is wrong.  We do not always judge correctly, but we cannot avoid judging.  Likewise, the experience of guilt always accompanies when we don’t choose according to our judgement. 

Stepping outside of ourselves and looking at the universality of this experience we must admit that it is rather strange, especially considering that we appear to be both judge and judged.  We speak of conscience as a voice (or an echo of a voice) that is both imperative and constraining and it is like no other dictate in our experience.  Who, in judging himself, would ever declare guilt unless the voice of conscience somehow connects us to someone beyond ourselves?  When we look in the world, we find no source for this voice (more on this in a moment) and so Newman thinks that “If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear.”  Conscience then, according to Newman, is “a connecting principle between the creature and his Creator.”

Freud would tether us to a this-worldly explanation to keep us from leaping from conscience to God.  He explains guilt as “tension between the ego and the superego.”  The superego is something akin to conscience but it contains only faint echoes of human authorities, especially in our formative years.  This mechanistic explanation of guilt however does not explain the absoluteness with which the dictates of conscience are felt.  Rather than seeming like a transgression of a merely human authority, guilt is experienced as a breaking with the Absolute.  We feel guilty because we know we are guilty.

Why the Argument Works

Recalling to mind the context in which Newman presents the argument, we can see why it might be so convincing.  Conscience as the “aboriginal vicar of Christ” presents God not merely as a Voice out there, but One Who is close to me.  To grasp this though we must move from the notion of conscience as a source of guilt to conscience as spurring us on towards what is truly good.  It is not just the voice of Judge, but of a Father, that desires our well-being in everything.  If we but listen to its voice, conscience no longer acts like a referee keeping us from breaking rules but a coach teaching us to excel in the game of life.  As Newman puts it, “the gift of conscience raises a desire for what it does not itself fully supply. It inspires in them the idea of authoritative guidance, of a divine law; and the desire of possessing it in its fulness, not in mere fragmentary portions or indirect suggestion. It creates in them a thirst, an impatience, for the knowledge of that Unseen Lord, and Governor, and Judge, who as yet speaks to them only secretly, who whispers in their hearts, who tells them something, but not nearly so much as they wish and as they need” (Sermons preached on Various Occasions, Dispositions for Faith).

Presented then in this light, Newman’s Argument from Conscience paves the way not just for notional assent, but real assent.  As the person begins to listen more and more to his conscience, even if poorly formed at first, he develops a taste for the good.  That desire for the Good manifests itself in desiring only what is truly good and the soul begins to look for the moral maps that God provides through the Church.  Judging correctly more and more often, especially as they open themselves up to grace as a gift from the God Who has speaks to them louder and louder through an informed conscience.  The Argument from Conscience truly paves the way for conversion.   

Master of Your Domain

Anthropology, Conscience, Contraception, Freedom, Homosexuality, Moralilty, Sexual Ethics, , , ,

A couple of months back there was an anti-vaping meme that circulating in social media that encouraged teens to masturbate rather than to vape: “Pleasuring yourself with Vape?  Try masturbation instead.  Masturbating alone or with a friend is a great safe alternative to vaping.”    Vaping may be bad, especially for teens, but the solution of masturbation is not a real moral alternative either.  The meme creators reasoned that when pleasure is the goal, it is better to choose masturbation because it is a relatively harmless activity when done in private (or even with a “friend”).  Unfortunately, anyone who contests this is puritanically shouting into the hyper-libidinous wind that keeps our culture sailing along.  Nevertheless, one could, and more importantly should, argue that masturbation is far more harmful to the person than vaping and therefore something that should also be avoided.

Because we are oversexed any conversation on this topic will naturally require some backing up of sorts.  Our culture may be obsessed with sex, but so are the apparent puritans who are always moralizing about it.  We will back up in order to first understand why sex is such a big deal. 

Sex and Desire

Our human desires all seem to point to some personal need that we have.  Hunger and thirst point to the need to eat and drink for example.  While quelling the hunger pains and slaking the thirst may bring us pleasure, that cannot be enough to decide what and how we should eat and drink.  We must always keep the purpose of the desire and its fulfillment in mind.  The pleasure is meant to be a motor that moves us towards something that is good for us.  In other words, those things we choose to eat and drink must actually meet the needs of nutrition and hydration.  Those that do not, we label as perverted.  Eating plastic coated with strawberry jelly and drinking antifreeze both might bring us pleasure, but ultimately they fail to meet the need or purpose of the desire.  In short, there are right and wrong things to eat, even if some of the wrong things are pleasurable.  Every desire must be submitted to our reason that judges right and wrong according to the purpose of the desire.

Sexual desire is similar to hunger and thirst in that it is an innate human desire, but it differs because it is more complex.  It is more complex not just because it points to the “need” to reproduce, but because it also points to two other important distinctly human aspects.  First, sexual desire points to sexual fulfillment.  By sexual fulfillment I don’t mean an orgasm, but to our fulfillment of what it means to be made as men and women.  Our sexual desire points to our personal fulfillment in women becoming wives and mothers and men becoming husbands and fathers.  I don’t want to go down the rabbit hole of people finding fulfillment in other ways, but just to emphasize that we are talking about sexual fulfillment, that is, what the meaning or telos of being made as a man or woman is.  Even the most ardent LGBT activist admits this truth when they preach gender identity.  In any regard, because our sexual fulfillment is so vital to our personal identity, it is our strongest desire.

The vehemence of the desire is the second aspect.  Not only is its tie to personal identity the reason for its strength but the fact that it is the biological motor by which we come out of ourselves.  It is a social desire in that it finds its true fulfillment in uniting with another person.  But its relative strength also means that it is the one which is mostly likely to become perverted, making it prone to abuse and rationalizing Therefore, it is also the one, in our fallen state, that we need the most need of instruction by which reason might govern its use. 

It would be hard to dispute the fact that it is other-directed.  Even the person masturbating invokes their imagination to call to mind another person.  Sexual pleasure is not just a passive response to being touched, but an intentional pleasure caused by another person to whom one is attracted to.  It can never be like scratching an itch where one only receives relief from some tension, but a desire directed towards another person.  Kinsey and Freud might have duped us moderns into thinking is was just some physiological response that causes the arousal of the person, but we all know that it is the bodily contact in conjunction with the presence (real or imagined) of another person that one finds attractive.  The object of our attraction and our arousal must be a subject.    

What’s the Harm?

This other-directedness of sexual desire seems obvious so that we can see why we might label masturbation as wrong.  But it seems to be little more than a “guilty pleasure” causing no real harm.  The harm may be hidden, or, more accurately, we might say we are blinded to it, but it is a real harm nonetheless.  The harm comes into view when we call to mind that human beings are creatures of habit, or virtues and vice.  No act occurs in a vacuum but always moves us towards virtue or vice.  Because sexual desire is so strong, there is perhaps no field of human activity where the law of habit is more obvious.

Masturbation by its very nature is a self-directing of sexual desire.  The aim is not to unite to another person, but to gain pleasure.  The turning to the self is no mere guilty pleasure but forms a habit of thinking and acting in that way.  It isn’t just a self-indulgent act, but makes someone selfish.  The person becomes habituated to seeking their own pleasure first and their partner’s pleasure becomes only a calculated concern.  They want their pleasure only so that they will come back around. 

Because sexual arousal is an intentional act, the person develops the habit of mind that makes arousal by a real person increasingly difficult.  A real person does not always do what the other person wants in the way that they want.  Masturbation becomes in a very real sense a gateway perversion to ever-greater perversions.  Nearly all sexual deviants began with masturbation.  This is not to say that everyone who masturbates will become a depraved sexual predator, but that it sets a person on that path because of what we will call the law of diminishing pleasure.

As we have said, pleasure is like the motor that moves the human engine towards truly good things.  But when pleasure becomes the finish line and not the motor, it always diminishes.  One then has to find new and more exciting ways in order to increase pleasure or re-direct the pleasure back to its intended end.  The point is that the chaste man derives far more pleasure from the marital embrace than the “stud” who traverses from woman to woman, just as the temperate man enjoys a scotch more than a drunk or the temperate woman enjoys a fine steak more than a glutton.  When we moderate our pleasures to only the right use of those things that cause the pleasure, pleasure always increases. 

Returning back to the anti-vape campaign mentioned at the beginning, we can now see why masturbation is a horrible alternative.  Indulging the strongest of our desires may reduce the desire for a lesser one, but it only further ensnares the teenager in a loop of pleasure seeking.