Conscience: Phenomena and Theories

by Hendrik Stoker, Philip E. Blosser (Translator)

Overview

Conscience: Phenomena and Theories was first published in German in 1925 as a dissertation by Hendrik G. Stoker under the title Das Gewissen: Erscheinungsformen und Theorien. It was received with acclaim by philosophers at the time, including Stoker’s dissertation mentor Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, and Herbert Spielberg, as quite possibly the single most comprehensive philosophical treatment of conscience and as a major contribution in the phenomenological tradition. Stoker’s study offers a detailed historical survey of the concept of conscience from ancient times through the Middle Ages up to more modern thinkers, including Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and Cardinal Newman. Stoker analyzes not only the concept of conscience in academic theory but also various types of theories of conscience. His work offers insightful discussions of problems and theories related to the genesis, reliability, and validity of conscience. In particular, Stoker analyzes the moral, spiritual, and psychological phenomena connected with bad conscience, which in turn illuminate the concept of conscience. The book is deeply informed by the traditions of western Christianity. Available for the first time in an accessible English translation, with an introduction by its translator and editor, Philip E. Blosser, it promises to be of interest to philosophers, especially in Christian philosophy and phenomenology, and also to all those interested in moral and religious psychology, ethics, religion, and theology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780268103200
Publisher:	University of Notre Dame Press
Publication date:	03/30/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	466
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Hendrik Gerhardus Stoker (1899–1993) was a leading Calvinist philosopher who taught in South Africa throughout his life.

Philip E. Blosser is a professor of philosophy at Sacred Heart Major Seminary.

Read an Excerpt

One the most interesting, profound and important challenges to depth-psychology and psychology in general is the question concerning what conscience actually is, particularly a guilty conscience. It claims dominion over the whole of a person’s experience. Its power plays a vastly important role in one’s life. The phenomenon mystifies the researcher, yet is patently obvious to anyone with a troubled conscience. In some people it is evinced as a horrible dread, driving them farther and farther away in flight, and leading them to perceive all other people as a threat. In other people it reigns as an unspeakable shame, leaving in them the desire to sink into utter oblivion. In others it works as an infinite grief and loving sorrow, producing acts of redemptive and consoling repentance. In still others it works as an electro-magnetic sensor for detecting the presence of a dangerous electric current, warning and restraining them from committing an irrevocable and irreversible evil act. What we glimpse in the dread and contrition of conscience is no trivial or superficial matter, but touches us in our deepest core, and seems to bring us into immediate proximity with the higher principles of personal justice and love by which we feel ourselves to be governed. In no way is this a vague, imperceptible, mystical, or incomprehensible experience, but rather a phenomenon whose movement in us is felt concretely, individually, personally, intensely, powerfully and with complete clarity.

Nevertheless, psychology has hitherto treated this phenomenon in an all-too-negligent and perfunctory way. When one consults the table of contents of any psychological works or hand-books on this subject, it is astonishing how few observations and acknowledgements may be found directly bearing on the phenomenon. Why is this? Perhaps it could be said that psychology is still a young science and has had to tackle the more superficial problems of the inner life and to work through these first, before it could begin to plumb the depths of the inner life and take on the more fundamental problems. Perhaps it could also be said that psychology in its beginnings has stood directly under the spell and influence of the mathematical sciences and the scientific method of the past century and could not yet break free of their mathematical ideals and atomistic hypotheses. Perhaps also, since conscience and the problems related to it do not lie in the foremost line of interest for researchers in psychology, it may also be said that this negligence is a matter related to the particular outlook of our times, and that a positivistic scientific orientation must inevitably turn its back on the deepest essence and meaning of this type of phenomenon.

Today one sees everywhere an awakening to new questions of greater human significance. Psychology has recently entered a new phase, with phenomenological investigations, such as those by Max Scheler, F. J. J. Buytendijk, Alexander Pfänder, etc.; works of gestalt-psychology, such as those by Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka; the endeavors of Eduard Spranger in psychology of culture; the psychoanalytic studies of Sigmund Freud; the works of William McDougall in behavioral psychology – to mention only a few new movements in psychology. All of these, regardless of how they may differ, are united by their common desire to overcome the older natural-scientific orientation of atomistic psychology (Elementenpsychologie) and the earlier school of associationist psychology, and their conviction that the proper subject for psychological investigation is not to be found in discrete atomistic data, but in the whole “nature,” the Gestalt, the “complex,” and the “structural-unity” of the mind as a “totality,” and that the realities signified by these words form the fundamental basis of psychology. This turning point – this crisis – within the discipline of psychology today has yielded a resurgence of interest in deeper, more fundamental problems, which, it may be hoped, may soon give conscience the attention it properly deserves.

While precious little has been said about the subject of conscience by those in psychology before now, the subject has managed to garner considerably more attention in theological as well as philosophical ethics. Unfortunately, however, within those disciplines the psychological point of view is usually subordinated to philosophical and theological interests – which are quite lethal for the problem of conscience itself, as well as for the other theories in question. As a result, a complete chaos prevails in ethics concerning the problem of conscience – a “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes) – and, at the same time, a consummate labyrinth of ambiguous concepts. One need only consult miscellaneous definitions in miscellaneous works of ethics to see this.

Conscience may be regarded as a divine oracle, as the highest court of reason, as human judgment, as feeling, as will, as a compulsion, or as an instinct. It may be identified with our general moral nature, or with syllogistic logic. It may be seen as infallible or, contrariwise, as “untrustworthy,” as grounded in convention, as the voice of the community, or individual subjectivity. It may be seen as something divine in the person, or as a bio-genetically predisposed experience of “guilt” found even in animals – as a condition, a function, an organ, an act, etc.

When we venture into the problem of conscience under such circumstances, therefore, it is imperative that we do not let such theories of conscience and the history of the problem prejudice our judgment. It is important, instead, to take as our starting point the objective reality – the actual experience of conscience as such – and to let this objective reality alone have the last word over the truth of the theories. This is what we intend in the present work – to endeavor to understand conscience, not as abstractly or theoretically conceived, but to grasp it descriptively in its concrete and actual existential depth, and to strive thus to understand its significance.

(excerpted from chapter 1)

Table of Contents

Foreword by D. F. M. Strauss

Translator’s Introduction

Editor's Foreword

Author's Preface

1. Current Scholarship and Orientation

2. The Ambiguity of Conscience

3. Intellectualism and Bad Conscience

4. Intuitionism and Bad Conscience

5. Voluntarism and Bad Conscience

6. Emotionalism and Bad Conscience

7. Personal Evil and the Essence of Conscience

8. The Problem of the Genesis of Conscience

9. Some Theories of the Development of Conscience

10. The Reliability of Conscience

Appendix: Brief Biographies of Authors Cited

Bibliography of Works Cited

Index of Names

Editorial Reviews

There are books that get more attention than they deserve, and there are books that, due to unfortunate historical contingencies, suffer unjust neglect. Stoker’s Conscience is one of the latter. Though Scheler and Heidegger recognized the significance of Stoker’s book when it first appeared in 1925, it did not get the reception that it merited. Philip Blosser has done an important work of retrieval by translating this work and making it available again. Everyone interested in the primordial human phenomenon of conscience has something to learn from Stoker. Notre Dame Press has given us a major new resource for a fundamental issue of philosophy.” —John Crosby, Franciscan University of Steubenville

“Blosser’s scholarship is excellent. He has done the tedious work, important to scholars, of correcting Stoker’s references to his source literature when they are in error regarding date or place of publication. The text is quite readable: it is stylistically up-to-date, and the description of obscure but important phenomena is clear.” —Eugene Kelly, New York Institute of Technology

"Few subjects are more important today that the question regarding the nature of moral conscience and its origin, development, reliability, and validity in a person's life. In this profoundly original and significant work, the late South African philosopher, Hendrik Stoker (1899–1993), addresses this question in a masterly way—a point highlighted by philosophers Martin Heidegger and Max Scheler—that is of relevance not only to scholars in the areas of moral and religious psychology, philosophical anthropology, but also to theologians, epistemologists, and those interested in moral issues generally. Translator Philip Blosser, who also wrote an illuminating introduction to Stoker's thought in this English translation of Stoker's 1925 German work, should be congratulated for retrieving Stoker's unfortunately neglected study of conscience. May this eminently accessible and readable work be enthusiastically received for its contribution to a crucially important subject." —Eduardo Echeverria, author of Divine Election: A Catholic Orientation in Dogmatic and Ecumenical Perspective

“The scholarship is solid and amazing, displaying a sound knowledge of related literature reflected in notes and wide-ranging references. Stoker was on the forefront of knowledge about the leading figures of various fields of study. His exposition on the ideas and conceptions of the leading intellectuals of his time is impressive and in many instances could serve as a brief orientation in the views of the authors discussed by him.” —Danie Strauss, North-West University

“Stoker sets forth his argumentation with force and verve. Equally interesting are the lengthy analyses of theories touching on this subject: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, J.H. Cardinal Newman, Buytendijk, Bavinck and Hepp, of course.” —Philosophical Reformata

“Stoker’s work on conscience is of enormous value, especially in its historical range and experiential focus.” —New Oxford Review

From the Publisher

There are books that get more attention than they deserve, and there are books that, due to unfortunate historical contingencies, suffer unjust neglect. Stoker’s Conscience is one of the latter. Though Scheler and Heidegger recognized the significance of Stoker’s book when it first appeared in 1925, it did not get the reception that it merited. Philip Blosser has done an important work of retrieval by translating this work and making it available again. Everyone interested in the primordial human phenomenon of conscience has something to learn from Stoker. Notre Dame Press has given us a major new resource for a fundamental issue of philosophy.

John Crosby

Stoker’s work on conscience is of enormous value, especially in its historical range and experiential focus.

New Oxford Review

"Few subjects are more important today that the question regarding the nature of moral conscience and its origin, development, reliability, and validity in a person's life. In this profoundly original and significant work, the late South African philosopher Hendrik Stoker (1899–1993) addresses this question in a masterly way—a point highlighted by philosophers Martin Heidegger and Max Scheler—that is of relevance not only to scholars in the areas of moral and religious psychology and philosophical anthropology but also to theologians, epistemologists, and those interested in moral issues generally. Translator Philip Blosser, who also wrote an illuminating introduction to Stoker's thought for this English translation of Stoker's 1925 German work, should be congratulated for retrieving Stoker's unfortunately neglected study of conscience. May this eminently accessible and readable work be enthusiastically received for its contribution to a crucially important subject."

Eduardo Echeverria

Blosser’s scholarship is excellent. He has done the tedious work, important to scholars, of correcting Stoker’s references to his source literature when they are in error regarding date or place of publication. The text is quite readable: it is stylistically up-to-date, and the description of obscure but important phenomena is clear.

Eugene Kelly

Stoker sets forth his argumentation with force and verve. Equally interesting are the lengthy analyses of theories touching on this subject: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, J.H. Cardinal Newman, Buytendijk, Bavinck and Hepp, of course.

Philosophical Reformata

The scholarship is solid and amazing, displaying a sound knowledge of related literature reflected in notes and wide-ranging references. Stoker was on the forefront of knowledge about the leading figures of various fields of study. His exposition on the ideas and conceptions of the leading intellectuals of his time is impressive and in many instances could serve as a brief orientation in the views of the authors discussed by him.

Danie Strauss

Stoker sets forth his argumentation with force and verve. Equally interesting are the lengthy analyses of theories touching on this subject: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, J.H. Cardinal Newman, Buytendijk, Bavinck and Hepp, of course.

null Philosophical Reformata