I Am a Strange Loop - Douglas R. Hofstadter [214]
As is well known, Schweitzer’s simple but profound guiding principle was what he termed “reverence for life”. In the address delivered when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1953, Schweitzer declared:
The human spirit is not dead. It lives on in secret… It has come to believe that compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit itself to human beings.
The following anecdote, also from Aus meiner Kindheit und Jugendzeit, is particularly revealing. In the springtime, with Easter approaching, little Albert, seven or eight years old, had been invited by a comrade — a comrade-in-arms, quite literally! — to go on an adventure of killing birds with slingshots that they had just made together. Looking back at this turning point in his life from the perspective of many decades later, Schweitzer recalls:
This was an abhorrent proposal, but I dared not refuse out of fear that he would mock me. Soon we found ourselves standing near a leafless tree whose branches were filled with birds singing out gaily in the morning, without any fear of us. My companion, crouching low like an Indian on a hunt, placed a pebble in the leather pouch of his slingshot and stretched it tightly. Obeying the imperious glance he threw at me, I did the same, while fighting sharp pangs of conscience and at the same time vowing firmly to myself that I would shoot when he did.
Just at that moment, church bells began to ring out, mingling with the song of the birds in the sunshine. These were the early bells that preceded the main bells by half an hour. For me, though, they were a voice from Heaven. I threw my slingshot down, startling the birds so that they flew off to a spot safe from my companion’s slingshot, and I fled home.
Ever since that day, whenever the bells of Holy Week ring out amidst the leafless trees of spring, I have remembered with deep gratitude how on that fateful day they rang into my heart the commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” From that day on, I swore that I would liberate myself from the fear of other people. Whenever my inner convictions were at stake, I gave less weight to the opinions of other people than I once had. And I did my best to overcome the fear of being mocked by my peers.
Here we have a classic conflict between peer pressure and one’s own inner voices, or as we usually phrase it (and as Schweitzer himself put it), one’s conscience. In this case, fortunately, conscience was the clear winner. And indeed, this was a decision that lasted a lifetime.
Does Conscience Constitute Consciousness?
In this region of semantic space there is one further linguistic observation that strikes me as most provocative. That is the fact that in the Romance languages, the words for “conscience” and “consciousness”, which strike us English speakers as very distinct concepts, are one and the same (for example, the French word conscience has both meanings, a fact that I learned when, as a teen-ager, I bought a book entitled Le cerveau et la conscience). This may merely be a lexical gap or a confusing semantic blur in these languages (the meaning on a literal level is “co-knowledge”), but even if that’s the case, I nonetheless think of it as offering us an insight that might otherwise never occur to us: that the partial internalization of other creatures’ interiority (conscience) is what most clearly marks off creatures who have large souls (much consciousness) from