The Koningsburger Lecture at the University of Utrecht

GIVING VOICE TO CONSCIENCE

What is the connection, one might ask, between

conscience and giving expression to it? If we go by the

definition in any basic dictionary, we will find

conscience to be an inner voice guiding us to the

rightness or wrongness of our actions. As a paradigm, we

might think of our being witnesses to something we

believe to be wrong, or unjust, and rather than turning a

blind eye to it, we choose to speak up, pointing a finger

at it, and expressing our dissent from it, risking as we do

so our chastisement or admonishment by our peers. Thus

it is that Professor Koningsburger, after whom this

lecture is named, spoke up to denounce the then-growing

practice to discriminate against Jews at this university

during the time when Nazism was on the rise in Europe.

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It was in connection with the later trial of Nazi leader

Eichmann in Israel in 1961 that Hanna Arendt, in an

attempt to understand and explain Eichmann’s inhumane

motives, invoked Socrates, attributing to him the source

of what eventually came in the Western tradition to be

described as conscience.1 There are two aspects of this

Socratic background that I must immediately clarify and

distinguish from one another- both together providing us

with the answer to our initial question about how

conscience and speaking up are connected: there is, first,

the famous passages in Plato that Arendt quotes where

Socrates speaks about the compulsion to be at one with

oneself 2; and there is, second, that other side of the story,

namely, of Socrates describing himself as a gadfly with

respect to the people around him. In this role, what

Socrates could be understood as doing is to externalize

his inner voice with respect to the people around him,

acting as it were as if he were their own audible

conscience. I shall return later to discuss the curious

public role Socrates has in this manner appropriated, and 1 Hanna Arendt, Eichmann In Jerusalem 1963.2 Idem, The Life of The Mind New York: Harvest Book, 1978, Vol. I, 5. Arendt uses two quotations from Plato’s Gorgias and Hippias Major to argue that bringing two opposed constituents into harmony is precisely what self-examination in Socrates is all about. See next note.

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from which originates an entire epic in the history of

political thought concerning the role of the philosopher –

from being that of a political leader at one end of the

spectrum, to being a silent recluse at the other.

Meantime, suffice it to say that it is presumably this

inter-connectedness between the daimonoi and the

gadfly, so to speak, that could explain to us why we

expect conscience to be displayed in some tangible

behavior –either objecting to doing something considered

inhumane or morally reprehensible, or speaking out

against it.

It is not necessary for us to pursue Arendt’s arguments

and conclusion with regard to Eichmann as a paradigm –

wondering whether it is simply the internal dumbness

and total absence of internal self-questioning that

explains how human beings can bring themselves to act

as he did, or whether, besides this, it is the fear of self-

censure3 consequent upon committing an injustice that

acts as the real deterrent. Where I wish to go from here is

3 See ‘Arendt, Socrates, and the Ethics of Conscience’, by Mika Ojakangas, www.helsinki.fi/collegium/eseries/...8/008_06_Ojakangas.pd

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to look more carefully into what speaking up, or

speaking out against an injustice, might mean. And from

there, I wish to return to the question of the role of the

philosopher, in particular in light of how, paradoxically

given how I have portrayed his daimoni earlier, he

himself explains what his own voice advised him his role

should be:

“. . . for you may be sure , gentlemen, that if I had meddled in public business in the past, I should have perished long ago and done no good either to you or to myself. Do not be annoyed at my telling the truth; the fact is that no man in the world will come off safe who honestly opposes either you or any other multitude, and tries to hinder the many unjust and illegal doings in a state. It is necessary that one who really and truly fights for the right, if he is to survive even for a short time, shall act as a private man, not as a public man.” (Plato, 437; 31d6-32e3 ).

It may be thought that the message Socrates here wishes

to convey is ambiguous –does he or does he not

admonish us to speak up? Is he suggesting a limit to how

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much one ought to speak up? It is clear that he addresses

two issues here- that of him assuming a public office, in

which case –he tells us- a direct confrontation over the

unjust and illegal doings by the system of which he

would be part would result, leading to his death, or to the

annihilation of his role altogether –both therefore being

useless outcomes; and that of him being a private

individual, in which case his role would be one to do

with telling the truth, that is, with speaking up. Even

then, he tells us, fighting for the right will not proffer

more than a short breathing space.

So, if it is not as a public official but as a private man

that one could afford to make an intervention, then in

what way could this happen best, and by whom? Note

also that Socrates here makes a clear connection between

feeling called upon to intervene, and telling the truth. But

how can we understand this connection, or understand

what he meant by truth? It was perhaps in the 50s that the

Quakers in the United States introduced the now well-

known expression ‘speaking truth to power’. It was a

public attempt to circumvent what many democrats in

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America at the time feared may become official U.S.

support of fascism both within the U.S. and in the world

at large. In time, the expression came to be associated

with the so-called ‘public intellectuals’ –especially those

identified with being sympathetic to the leftist side of the

political spectrum in the United States. Noam Chomsky

may today exemplify this kind of intellectual, but it may

be very much to Edward Said’s credit that he articulated

this role, in particular with regard to U.S. policies in

South East Asia as well as in Palestine. But in doing this

he raised a very critical question: leaving aside the power

that is to be spoken to, what is the truth that has to be

spoken?

in effect, I am asking the basic question for the intellectual: how does one speak the truth? What truth? For whom and where?

What he was trying to determine in this context was

whether the intellectual is culture-bound, or a

universalist. Granted that giving voice to conscience

comes down to meaning to speak up, or to speak truth to

power, the question remains whether the conscience we

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have in mind is, or can be, universal, unfettered by the

specificity of the intellectual’s contingent identity.

Another way to put this critical question is to ask

whether, as a public intellectual, Edward Said’s views

would have been the same had he been Israeli? Are the

truths here the same? I realize this is a hard, even perhaps

an impossible question to answer. In fact, there are two

questions embedded in it and not one, as we shall

presently see. But it does raise the further question of

whether the persona of the public intellectual is the same

as that of the Socratic just-philosopher: ‘he who honestly

opposes the multitudes in order to hinder the unjust and

illegal doings of the state, and who really and truly fights

for the right’. In other words, it does raise that

fundamental issue of whether the public intellectual is a

‘truth-seeker’ in the philosophic sense of the word,

whose role is that of a gadfly or a moral agent in the

manner Socrates seems to have described himself – a

philosophic role which, one assumes, requires him or her

to have -not just a global outlook- but also a global rather

than a specific national or religious identity.

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Of course, there are many senses in which we use the

term ‘public intellectual’, including the sense by which

we refer to someone who is capable of ‘popularizing’ a

particular scholarly field, making it accessible to the

general public. Edward Said’s own Oritentalism may

come under this heading, as well as also, for example,

Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene, or Brian Greene’s

The Fabric of the Cosmos. But it is specifically in the

sense of ‘speaking truth to power’ that the role of a

public intellectual interests us here, inasmuch as it is or it

is not that role that fulfils the function of the Socratic

gadfly. And one way by which we can immediately

distinguish between such a person and the kind of moral

agent Socrates had in mind may be to consider the nature

and degree of personal risk involved in their speaking up

against an injustice, as well as, and perhaps more

importantly, to what extent such a stand is viewed by the

person concerned as a one-time engagement or part of

what they regard as their primary role in life, or in the

society or community in which they live. In determining

the nature and degree of risk involved, we have to

account for the fact that the power that may be of serious

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consequence is not only or primarily that of governments

and authorities -the Nazi Authority, or the Stalinist or

Fascist Regime or an Occupation –but also, recalling

Socrates, ‘the multitudes’ or public of which the person

is a part. Granted that in the Athens of Socrates the

‘multitudes’ also acted as the legislative authority and the

jury and judge in his own case, but ‘the multitudes’ are

typically also those publics –as in the Koningsburger

case- that do not constitute a legal authority but that act

as a kind of moral authority, determining what is

acceptable and what is not in that particular society. The

point to be emphasized here is that the truth is more often

unpopular with and a challenge to this kind of unofficial

public authority than it is unsavory to hear for the rulers.

And while the Socratic moral agent risks being

ostracized or –worse- being physically threatened by the

multitudes we are speaking of, public intellectuals in

contrast may well find themselves the center of public

admiration and recognition for the truths they give voice

to. But this can be read two ways: for while on the one

hand the truth being voiced may well be that of the

suffering voiceless, on the other hand it may well just

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reflect a coarse plebian passion, the intellectual in this

case simply trading self-examined conscience for public

admiration.

It is important to add here also that, on a smaller scale,

even having the courage to voice dissent from a

dominating opinion –where an evolving consensus seems

to being formed largely by virtue of an intimidating

rhetoric that leaves little room for disagreement- is itself

a case of speaking truth to power, even though the risk

may simply be that of unpopularity, and social

ostracization.

Looking further into who, besides certain kinds of public

intellectuals, might be set apart in some of their roles as

moral agents, one could consider the question of the role

one takes on in life as well as the space one defines as

one’s area of interest or of competence: a journalist may

during his or her career pick on one or two issues to

challenge an injustice, but then turn to other matters in

which moral issues are not raised. But they could also

devote their entire careers in investigative journalism to

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exposing and fighting injustice, sometimes (as in the case

of Anna Politkovskaya recently in Russia) incurring the

mortal wrath of those exposed. But there are also the

more common cases of the rest of us, where we may find

ourselves during the course of our lives or work- not

seeking injustices to expose- but confronted with a moral

challenge where we may be called upon by our

conscience to take a stand which we know in advance

would or could bring suffering upon us and our loved

ones, and where we decide nonetheless to listen to this

conscience, and in so doing to give expression to it by

taking such a stand. So, whether it is a public intellectual

taking a stand calculated to invite a retaliation, whether

against an official authority or challenging the public

mood,4 or it is a journalist or a parliamentarian, or it is

simply a normal human being trying to live through his

or her private life but suddenly coming face to face with

an invited moral challenge involving a decision with a

fore-known price-tag - conscience seems to be a common

denominator, its voice however being sparked off in each

case, perhaps in different degrees of intensity, to the tune

4 See my treatment of this subject and of Juien Brenda’s Treason Of the Intellectuals in my Une Allumette Vaut-Elle Toute Notre Philosophie? Flammarion, 2012.

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of different truths the different individuals –again in

varying degrees- feel bound to stand up for or to expose.

But how generically different could such ‘trutghs’ be?

Could, they, for example. Be ‘inconsistent’ with one

another?

Interestingly from what has been said, the two subjects of

what truth and conscience are on the one hand, and what

kind of individuals are those who answer to both having

a conscience and caring about the truth on the other,

seem to be somehow inseparable. In other words, and

especially having invoked Socrates, what may have

initially presented themselves to us as the two apparently

separate and separable issues of meanings and men –

truth and those who speak it, and conscience and those

who give voice to it- have transpired as two issues that

are in matter of fact so welded together almost as to be

two sides of the same coin –defining truth somehow

being tied up with understanding what sort of person

speaks it. And indeed, as we further try to untangle the

matter of what truth or conscience mean, and what kind

of person is the moral agent of whom Socrates speaks,

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we may find that we cannot fully comprehend what one

is without also fully comprehending the other. Fully

unfolded, this may sound like a far-fetched claim, for it

may seem to reach out so as to cover what we in general

regard as ‘truths’, defining them subjectively in terms of

the people holding them to be such. This claim has in

some (mental-genesis or evolutionary) form indeed been

defended by very eminent philosophers, of which my

choice-analysis is that of the late Harvard logician

W.V.O. Quine. His analysis, however, does not allow for

inconsistent truths, defended on the grounds of their

being individual-relative. But the more specific claim of

displaying the integral relation between inconsistent

truths and those who stand up for them can perhaps be

displayed and resolved, especially when we focus our

attention on situations where truth is strongly bound up

with conscience. And here I come back to highlight a

second important observation, namely that, unlike truth,

conscience is monadic, that is, its meaning is fixed by its

being an inner calling to act righteously in defense of the

truth, whatever that truth happens to be, or is believed to

be. This last comment is critical. For, if we take into

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account the two observations that we cannot disentangle

truth from its speaker, such that it is the speaker’s

general character that comes to be at issue, and that

unlike truth conscience is monadic, then taken together,

these two observations can perhaps help us better

understand a whole hoard of conflictual issues, whether

regarding the role of the moral agent, or regarding the

cases where, like in Israel/Palestine, we come across for

example an Edward Said and an Amos Oz who, driven

by their respective righteous consciences, are passionate

upholders of irreconcilable narratives. Here, I would

claim, conscience being monadic, the judge of final

resort, and once facts have been clarified, conscience

cannot but uphold the one truth.

Let us then leave behind the common -but misguided, I

believe- practice, of trying to understand or define what

truth means as some abstract and ethereal entity, in

isolation from the real-life situations where the seeking

or speaking of truth comes in a package, so to speak,

presenting us with a person’s entire character. And let us

focus instead on truth-in-practice, as we might describe

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it, or on it as and when it is being sought, being told, or

being avoided or withheld, in real-life situations by real-

life people. There are three observations I wish to point

out about these situations: first, that truth-seeking, -

telling or –withholding and avoiding, or suppressing, are

behaviors that are importantly associated, when with a

particular individual, then with other human traits that

also characterize that individual on both the positive and

negative sides -some of them being considered praise-

worthy and others reprehensible. For example, being

truthful is associated with being honest, lying with being

dishonest. Honesty, on the other hand, may be associated

with people who keep their promises, while dishonesty

with people who break them. And so on. We may thus

collect together two distinct classes of all those different

traits, identifiable perhaps by the two opposite epithets of

good and bad. It is probably safe to say that the family of

traits characterized as good are generally held in high

esteem in most if not all cultures, while those displaying

traits of the second kind are looked down upon,

disrespected, and despised. These are of course only

general parameters, permitting for all kinds of important

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exceptions, which we need not go into here. But it is

worth noting that in all such exceptions another value is

typically appealed to, confirming the general sense of

respect for goodness, and what this stands for in our

moral calculus.

The second observation I would like to make in this

context is that all these truth-in-practice acts we are

considering (telling the truth, suppressing it, etc.) are

typically associated with some tangible, down-to-earth

rather than with some ethereal or metaphysical subject.

In other words, the typical situations where these acts are

practiced are those in which those involved are judges or

detectives or journalists, for example, trying to find out

the truth, or criminals trying to suppress it. Significantly,

it is not some ethereal philosophical meaning that is the

object of attention in these cases, but some down-to-earth

practical fact. This, by the way, is also what we might

deduce Socrates to have been interested in- not only what

justice is, but more practically what he viewed to be

instances of injustice, and instances of wrong and corrupt

acts in his milieu which he thought it was the duty of the

righteous man to stand up to.

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However –and this third observation harks back to a

point I already made- it is surprisingly not just or only

the facts that play an essential role here, or only the

people who relate to those facts as they are: it is often

also, paradoxically, what are believed to be the facts, and

how someone honestly believing them to be facts relates

to them, that become incorporated into the general moral

calculus distinguishing between the traits subsumed

under the respective epithets of good and bad, or

righteous and dishonorable. In other words, while we

may disagree with the facts of the matter as someone

presents them to us or to others, we can still recognize

that, in viewing them as representing a case of injustice

he or she feels called upon to stand up against, he would

be acting in good faith. Our judgment about the person

would be complex, thinking them to be all the way from

being misguided and wrong to being foolish. But over

and above this, we could still respect the fact they stood

up for what they believed was right. Our characterization

of their character would not be affected. In a sense,

given the close association we pointed out between

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someone saying the truth and their being honest, this

assimilation is not surprising: the difference between

Jean of Arc hearing bells and her believing she heard

them is not one which, especially in retrospect, makes us

think less of her. We respect her because –even under

threat- she stood up for what she believed was the inner

divine voice speaking to her. Therefore, what is often as

important to consider in this context as actually being

right in claiming what one says to be true, is in fact

believing it to be so, and therefore being honest in

standing up for it, and in thereby responding to the call of

his or her conscience in doing so. Such a person, let me

say at once, can be depended upon to change their

positions if they come to discover that what they

believed was true is in fact not. Paradigmatically,

conscience itself in such cases is the sole guarantor of

such a switch happening. Conscience is the determinant

of which of two conflicting claims is the truth.

It shouldn’t surprise us to find that traits that tend to be

grouped together in describing an individual’s character

in the real world are expressed by words that also are

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often related in many of our spoken languages. Let me

refer here for example to the two Semitic languages,

Arabic and Hebrew. In these two languages the trilateral

consonantal roots ts,d,q –from which the word for ‘truth’

in both languages is formed- can also together form the

word for being veracious -someone who speaks or says

the truth. But it so happens that, also in the two

languages, the very same roots then are also used to form

the word for being righteous. The word Sadeq (to say the

truth) is thus etymologically associated with the word

Tsiddiq (righteous), just as and in parallel fashion to the

way the traits themselves are associated with each other

in the real world, as characteristics of the same person.

I hope that my point is becoming clear: that certain

personality traits seem to come or to occur together, so

that someone who is a liar, for example, is also likely to

be dishonest, crooked, devious, dishonorable, etc., just as

someone who is veracious is likely to be honest,

honorable, righteous, ethical, etc., and that, furthermore,

even the words themselves expressing those traits are, if

not etymologically associated, then conceptually or

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semantically so. Indeed, I would venture to go as far to

claim, as we consider word-references, and in particular

what, in the context of meanings, what denotation,

connotation, implication and presupposition might mean,

that it would make perfectly good sense to introduce the

expression ‘reference-spread’ precisely to cover those

cases where one adjective we might use in characterizing

someone can be understood as referring at one and the

same time to a number of other character-traits belonging

to the same family and which are true of the person being

described, and as excluding by the same token a number

of opposite traits. If we think of someone as being

honest, we tend to think of them also as being other

things, such as being honorable, ethical, etc. In real-life

situations, the rule is this spread of character traits, and it

is the exception to assume that the person being

described as honest, for example, is imagined to possess

just that property, to the exclusion of those other

properties that are usually associated with honesty.

We can, I believe, draw a conclusion from all of the

above, namely, that where all or most of the positive

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traits associated with righteousness and honesty and

suchlike have coalesced with such strength and intensity

in a single person, and where acting in accordance with

his or her conscience in most or all matters comes to be

that person’s hallmark, it is often the case that such a

person comes to be viewed as being a source of truth,

rather than simply a transmitter of it. Admittedly, this

case would be an exception. But history has provided us

with examples. I have already mentioned the term

righteous in Arabic (al-siddiq) as an adjective that has

this reference-spread, and it is noteworthy that as an

epithet Muslims have concurred on using it to refer only

to the first of the Islamic Caliphs, Abu Bakr. The second

Caliph, Omar, was called the Just. Thereafter, as some of

you may know, Muslim consensus was broken. But in

describing those two Caliphs in this manner, the

individuals described had come to be seen as embodying

that reference spread covered by the simple epithets, the

Righteous, the Just. Above all, they were seen as being

guided by their conscience. All this being so, truth and its

interlocutor were inseparable from one another. Cases

throughout history abide, with some at one end, like

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Jesus, being fully pure of heart, and others somewhere in

between, like Socrates, or Ghandi, possessing faults, but

nonetheless being archetypes to look up to. But clearly,

together with saints and many others, including, above

all, also those who have stood up to give a voice to the

voiceless, such as the suffragettes, all these are models

that history has provided us with. And they are models

that teach us, in addition to whatever else, to become

aware of this important fact about truth, namely that, as a

companion to conscience, it is very much a down-to-

earth situation-by-situation affair, not some far-fetched

metaphysical notion.

As I already indicated, reducing the meaning of a word

from the abstract to its reference-in-practice reality in

real-life situations helps us understand not only what

such words mean, but also what speaking truth to power,

or the ‘telling of truth’ that Socrates refers to is. In saying

this I am not necessarily drawing on any particular

school of thought –such as that of the contextualist

theory of meanings, or, even more specifically, of

Foucault’s characterization of truth as a practical

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instrument. But if any such associations are felt to be

helpful in elucidating my point they would certainly be

welcome. But the association –even through Foucault’s

writings- with Socrates in this context is very relevant,

because much of our intellectual history is grounded

there, and the very subject of truth, saying it, and sticking

to it, and acting in accordance with one’s conscience is

very much at the heart of my subject in this particular

presentation.

What can one conclude, however tentatively, from these

observations? I referred in the beginning to ‘an epic’ in

the history of political thought concerning the role of the

philosopher. It is well-known that when Plato came to

write his Republic he conceived of a just political order

in which the philosopher would hold the highest public

office. Even though he knew such an order would be an

ideal, he argued that it is clearly best if such an Ideal is

emulated to the extent possible. But would a moral agent

survive having top public office in such a situation?

Clearly, he would if, even though he knew the truth, he

didn’t spell it out as it is to the multitudes around him.

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Having different appearances, it can be expressed

differently to different people. This way, he can survive.

But, neither forsaking his conscience or truth, he could

thus lead the republic towards what is best.

Plato’s thoughts on the subject became a major source of

influence in early Islam, influencing such major

philosophic figures like Alfarabi and Averrroes –the

latter partly known for his so-called ‘double-truth’

theory. However, if it in any way makes sense to claim,

as I have done already, that a person’s having

conscience, and being truthful, go along with a whole

package of other attributes that are integral to his or her

character, such as being honest, and righteous, and just,

and law-abiding, and virtuous, and decent, and so on,

then I believe it becomes highly improbable that Plato’s

earthly king could in fact be such a person –as he would

have to practice deceit, and not be honest, and would

need to employ all the ruses associated with politicians in

order to attain his or her objectives. Such a ruler can be

described –if on the positive side- by other epithets, such

as being clever, or successful, or visionary, but hardly as

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a righteous man, who will speak out against injustice no

matter what, or who will insist on revealing the truth,

however painful.

So I end up with the following claim, that while most of

us are moral agents some of the time, some of us act as

moral agents most of the time, and, depending on their

surrounding circumstances, they stand to being

ostracized to one degree or another, in proportion to the

importance with which the subject-matter being

intervened in is viewed by the general public, and their

degree of intervention and the circumstance. Going by

the Socratic code, then, a truly righteous man, to remain

such, and to remain able to speak up, and give voice to

his conscience, must so temper his interventions in

society as a private person so as to maintain the ability to

remain vigilant for the longest time possible, knowing

full-well that his self-examined life is always at risk, but

that this risk is precisely what his entire life is worth.

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Sari Nusseibeh

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