I Am a Strange Loop

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 creatures that have small souls, and from yet others that have none or next to none.

I think it’s obvious, or nearly so, that mosquitoes have no conscience and likewise no consciousness, hence nothing meriting the word “soul”. These flying, buzzing, blood-sucking automata are more like miniature heat-seeking missiles than like soulful beings. Can you imagine a mosquito experiencing mercy or pity or friendship? ’Nough said. Next!

What about, say, lions — the very prototype of the notion of carnivore? Lions stalk, pounce on, rip into, and devour giraffes and zebras that are still kicking and braying, and they do so without the slightest mercy or pity, which suggests a complete lack of compassion, and yet they seem to care a great deal about their own young, nuzzling them, nurturing them, protecting them, teaching them. This is quite unmosquito-like behavior! Moreover, I suspect that lions can easily come to care for certain beasts of other species (such as humans). In this sense, a lion can and will internalize certain limited aspects of the interiority of at least some other creatures (especially those of a few other lions, most particularly its immediate family), even though it may remain utterly oblivious to and indifferent to those of most other creatures (a quality that sounds depressingly like most humans).

I think it’s also obvious, or nearly so, that most dogs care about other creatures — particularly humans who belong to their inner circle. Indeed, it’s well known that some dogs, displaying incredible magnanimity, will lay down their lives for their owners. I have yet to hear about a lion doing such a thing for any animal of another species, although I suppose some dog-like lion, somewhere or other, may have once fought to the death against another beast in order to save the life of a human companion. It’s a bit too much of a stretch, however, to imagine a lion choosing to be a vegetarian.