The Ontology of Becoming and the Ethics of Particularity

III. Conscience and Authenticity

c h apte r t h r ee ................................... conscience and authenticity 1. the question Can there be authentic obedience to the call of conscience? Conscience is a name for a rift within the self. Authenticity is a name for unity within the self. When I hear the call of conscience, the caller and the called are not the same. When I am authentic, I am my ownmost self. Just to stipulate that it is my ownmost being not to be at one with myself is not to resolve the issue: one must ask the question of how this identity in selfdifference is to be conceived. The axis of my questioning here is the tension between obedience and freedom: If I obey the call of conscience, am I behaving as a responsible free agent? 2. conscience as vox dei And it came to pass . . . that God tested Abraham and said to him, Abraham. And he said, Behold, here I am. And he said, Take now your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of the Amorites; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains of which I will tell you. And Abraham rose up early in the morning and . . . went to the place of which God had told him. (Genesis 22) Abraham obeys God and God rewards him for his obedience. Had Abraham not been free to disobey, to reward him would make no sense. Abraham’s obedience is exemplary because it is abject: he obeys without question a command whose rationale transcends his understanding, and does so simply because he believes the command came from God. God’s command to sacrifice Isaac contradicts Abraham’s finite reason because it violates their original covenant,1 that requires Isaac to live on and generate progeny. 124 the ethics of particularity The Old Testament God was inclined to be preemptory. What of the New Testament God? Here is what Aquinas said: Human knowledge is assisted by the revelation of grace. For the intellect ’s natural light is strengthened by the infusion of gratuitous light, and sometimes also the images in the imagination are divinely formed, so as to express divine things better than those which we receive naturally from sensible things, as appears in prophetic visions; while sometimes sensible things, or even voices, are divinely formed to express some divine meaning. (Summa Theologica, Q 12, Art. 13)2 The natural light of reason is insufficient to know God and must be assisted by supernatural means, but it does reflect our finite likeness to God and our propensity to seek to know him as the source of our happiness and perfection. Natural reason alone can and does go astray, but this is a mark of human finitude , not a frailty of reason itself. God as ens perfectissimum is Being itself, sheer intelligibility . When God speaks to us and reveals himself, he does not contravene Reason itself, but draws us beyond our capacity for understanding toward an intelligibility that necessarily transcends us during our time on earth. The call of conscience as the voice of God calls from beyond ourselves but calls us toward ourselves: it calls us to a potentiality for being more perfectly ourselves than we have hitherto been. If we choose to heed the call and obey it, we must transcend our finite natural reason in order to be in accordance with a more perfect rationality than we can understand. The question posed by conscience as vox dei is whether the choice to obey a command we cannot understand can be described as a free choice if personal responsibility is taken to be a necessary condition for freedom. If abject obedience is irresponsible , can it be free? Can I take full personal responsibility for an action I can justify only by appeal to faith in understanding beyond my own? What meaning can be assigned to the notion of transfinite reason, the understanding beyond that differs qualitatively from my own? 3. nietzsche: Übermenschlichkeit and authenticity You do not want to kill, O judges and sacrificers, until the animal has nodded? Behold the pale criminal has nodded: out of his eyes speaks the great contempt. conscience and authenticity 125 “My ego is something that shall be overcome: my ego is to me the great contempt of man,” that is what his eyes say. That he judged himself, that was his highest moment; do...