conscience and living in process |
Not much content in "content", for it signifies something other than itself: what is contained. Conscience has no content for it is a marked response that depends on the occasion. We have principles, we have guides, we have examples. We can be instructed, but instructions lack the content of feeling, and feeling directs conscience. To follow strict precepts is to be at odds with a rebellious world, to get right conduct inflexibly wrong. Butting heads with circumstance. And circumstance, with a mind of its own, doesn't show great tolerance. Not if you keep butting heads.
To be rational, means to be judgmental. Fixing things, making them finite, brought down to what can be grasped and held, as a definite quantity or measurement, a length, a weight, a period. Establishing a constant base. [A variable can be a constant, so don't be fooled] Also a fixed quality or form or shape, a finite particularity or generality; closed, not open to change.
We fix things in place because, laudably, knowledge is power, it gives us command over events. We get things in process to settle at a certain place, in a certain form or shape so we can determine them better, get a lock on them, applying a logic we constructed from our observations of what is about us, including our own shapes and perspectives. We invented figures and directions. Judgments: so up, down, here, there; that one or the other or neither or both. Contraries and oppositions and appositions. Causes and effects. Things are not that way, they are made to seem like that.
We arrived at rational judgments because turmoil, ceaseless change is difficult to handle. Even in the copy. and we need to fix our attention to get the hang of things. You are made a one-year old for a year so you can feel secure in what you are, and we too, but you are never a one-year old, not even for a day, you are in process of change constantly. We notice it more the first year. So do you. To make you a one-year old is an expedient, a convenience, a standard to hold on to in the midst of upheaval, and anchor in the maelstrom of events.
We like things to change but we like them to stay as they are. To set them at rest. Strangeness is okay, under control: familiarity is more certain.
It is said* a simile cannot go on all fours. Because it is not real, it is a comparison, a figure of speech. If you try to make a figure or trope go on all fours then it becomes fixed, a judgment, and less real than it was as an example by comparison.
The content of conscience is letting things happen as they happen, not seeking to control them, to knock them into shape. Force begetting force. A "rational" act. Not always sensible. Especially if the force is the act of another human being. To re-act by reflex without consideration, without tolerance, without consulting what our private feelings have to say. If we understand our private feelings. Petty passions are ruffled passions, which speak to the fickle mood of the subject, temperamental retaliations in kind, or as perceived in kind, reflections of uncertainty. True rest in reason can assimilate and redirect arbitrary stimulations. Living with process means acting as an agent of permission: a contradiction, a paradox. "The medium is the message" in that the content of the message is not what you do but how you do it.
Difficult to express. We need examples. Applications. Take the moral injunctions and the ideal values out of conscience and what do you have? "Spiritual" guidance comes down to that - - no content. Take the life out of the body and it dies. Knowledge is not the life of the body, inspiration is!
Pneuma, psyche, zoe; Greek roots: breath, life, mind, soul, being itself: and ousia, the character that being presents, dependent on what it is. Out of the individuality of the being swells forth the conscience. A tough task to set an embodied self, enough to make a trope go on all fours, born to walk upright.
Judgments are tropes, pointers that rightly understood shape our representation of the behaviour necessary to validate what goes on "out there", guided by what's in us, our "in here", inherency, what we are because of the process that made us. The process in here adapted to, conforming to out there. Those are today's " spiritual values". Tomorrow's? Wait and see!
©Laurie Ashton, 1999
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