The Happy Prisoner
On Conscience Versus the Moral Law
In Mary Oliver’s poem, “How Everything Adores Being Alive”, she invites the reader to imagine they’re a beetle. This is the toughest sell: imagine you’re just a beetle, and yet life is nonetheless something glorious.
The message of the poem is something like “consider the lilies”; life is simpler, you might say “less”, than ours for an insect or plant and yet life is something worthwhile; insects and plants enjoy life, love life, without worry.
The beetle in the poem is imagined falling into a flower, and then crawling around there, “night and day... kept there”, a “happy prisoner” in that their world is limited to this place that has everything they need for the time being: “... and what if you had / a sort of mouth, / a lip / to place close / to the skim / of honey / that kept offering itself...”
This concept of the “happy prisoner” is antithetical to a modern mind which values freedom above all. For example, take “conscience” as it is described in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: a kind of rebel against the moral law. The moral law considered as something decided externally to you, as a universal law which must be so because an already determined logical necessity... Conscience has seen how impossible it is to follow such strict rules, the end result being hypocrisy and “dissemblance”: the hypocrite says “I’m too weak to follow the laws, but I will make a pretence of it because, after all, one must set a good example for others...” Rather than be a hypocrite, conscience determines its own rules for living a moral life, and follows those.
For Kant, freedom is found in following the moral law; for conscience, freedom is found in ignoring the law and making rules for yourself. Neither side is denying the importance of freedom; in fact, freedom is everything for Hegel, and a stage in the development of “spirit” stands or falls based on its conception of freedom, or self-conception as spirit that is free. Conscience emerges when spirit decides that the moral law is a prison that must be escaped; conscience will collapse when it discovers that it has made a prison for itself and being closed up in your own personal moral universe is a kind of unfreedom.
The consciousness of the Phenomenology is courageous and noble in that it seeks out difficulty. It is possible, at every step in the story of consciousness, to become stuck; conscience could decide to remain where it is, insisting that the highest morality is that which comes from within one’s own soul. It’s a compelling position in a world that often seems to value individual freedom above all else.
But the trouble with conscience is that it can fall into arbitrariness; if your justification for any rule you set yourself ultimately comes from within, from an immediate sense of right and wrong, rather than from some external source, how can you call that a justification? It seems that what conscience needs is some external validation for its claims to righteousness without falling back into the strict, rigid, and ultimately hypocritical notion of morality it has already rejected.
In Hegel’s story, as presented in the Phenomenology, conscience gives way to “religion”. I’ve put this word in quotation marks because Hegel’s conception of religion may not exactly conform to an ordinary conception of what religion is, or what we have experienced religion to be in our actual lives, and in fact “religion” in the Phenomenology will develop in such a way that, by the end of the book, it will have taken many different forms. But at its heart, religion is a community in which rules for living are decided and in which those who break the rules can be forgiven. “Religion”, as Hegel describes it, is different from the moral law that conscience rebelled against because it lacks the rigidity of the moral law: within a religious community, rules and laws are negotiated and procedures are determined whereby those who fail to follow the rules can confess and repent for their wrongdoing and, importantly, whereby those who live alongside wrongdoers can forgive them and continue to live alongside them.
This is religion in an ideal form since, as we know, religion is in practice often stricter and crueller than the way Hegel describes it. But Hegel is showing what religion needs to be if it is to satisfy the demands of conscience and offer an external validation for moral belief without descending into the strict and impossible moral rules that are antithetical to human freedom.
The journey of Hegel’s Phenomenology, it could be said, ends with religion: though religion is ultimately sublated into “Absolute Knowing”, this kind of knowing is really just an affirmation of religion’s claim that community and individuality (universal and particular) must be reconciled through law, tolerance, and forgiveness. But what about the journey of a reader today, more than two centuries after the book was originally published? Look around and it is hard to argue that such a tolerant and forgiving community exists anywhere. What can a modern conscience do, in that case? With no community in which to find justification, tolerance, and forgiveness, it seems that conscience must retreat once more into itself.
Perhaps this is the reason it is impossible to resign oneself to being a “happy prisoner” today; to trustingly give oneself over to a community, whether that be the state, a church, a cult, or anything else, would result in the loss of oneself, rather than in the freedom that the modern soul craves. What the happy prisoner wants, above all, is to be free even as one is freed from the need to make moral decisions for oneself. As long as the world is cruel and unjust, it is impossible to find the kind of freedom Hegel urges us to find in his work.
And so I wonder whether modern spirit is stuck at the stage of conscience, isolated from any community, taking the only logical position in a world that fails to justify itself, or to offer compassion and forgiveness: going its own way. It is possible in this situation to take the Zen-like view of oneself as a beetle in a flower, to enjoy and love the moment without worry, to resign oneself to an enclosed existence. But the human spirit craves more than that, and so conscience is unhappy, and I think the end result of this impossible situation has to be conscience opening its petals once more, opening itself to the world, and making an effort to build a world capable of compassion and forgiveness.