How explain conscience if the soul is a mere life-principle? To be alive is not the same as to have a conscience. There are plenty of living things that do not and cannot have a conscience, and there may be dead souls with a conscience.\u00a0 But even if the property of being alive and the property of having a conscience were co-extensional they would not be the same property.<\/p>\n
Each living thing has its own life that it naturally affirms and protects. Although life is ceaseless self-assertion and self-protection, conscience may demand self-denial to the point of sacrificing one’s life for others or for one’s cause. A curious life-principle it would be that would preside over the death of the soul-body composite of which it is the animating principle.<\/p>\n
Conscience reveals the discrepancy between what I am and what I ought to be. The awareness of this gap and its concomitants such as regret, remorse, desire to do better, and so on, is not reasonably ascribed to a mere life-principle. Thought, too, like moral evaluation, goes well beyond what a mere life-principle could deliver.<\/p>\n
Animation, cogitation, evaluation. A soul worth its salt ought to be adept at all three. Whether one and the same item or ‘principle’ can fill the bill is a topic that needs careful thought with deep attention to the researches of the twin titans of our tradition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How explain conscience if the soul is a mere life-principle? To be alive is not the same as to have a conscience. There are plenty of living things that do not and cannot have a conscience, and there may be dead souls with a conscience.\u00a0 But even if the property of being alive and the … Continue reading “Notes on Conscience”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[402,317,59],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-body-and-soul","category-conscience","category-soul-and-body"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13764"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13769,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13764\/revisions\/13769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}