One thing that has always amazed man is his own inner yearning to be good, an inner sensitivity about the "way things ought to be," and an excruciatingly warm and melting attraction toward the "rightness" of beauty, goodness, and perfection. We call this inner sensitivity "conscience." For the great philosopher Immanuel Kant it was one of the two sublime mysteries of creation, this "moral law within" man, and there was no way to explain it—it was just given. Nature carries feeling right in her own "heart," in the interiors of striving organisms. This self-feeling in nature is more fantastic than any science-fiction fact. Any philosophy or any science that is going to speak intelligently about the meaning of life has to take into account and treat it with the highest reverence—as 19th-century thinkers like Vincenzo Gioberti and Antonio Rosmini understood. Curiously, this vital ontology of organismic self-feeling—which was central for thinkers like Thomas Davidson and Henry Bergson—hardly made a rustle in modern science until the appearance of the new "humanistic psychology." This fact alone seems to me to explain the unbelievable sterility of the human sciences in our time and, more especially, their willingness to manipulate and negate man. I think that the true greatness of Freud's contribution emerges when we see it as directly related to this tradition of ontological thought. Freud showed how the particular rules for goodness or conscience were built into the child in a given society, how he learns the rules for feeling good. By showing the artificiality of these social rules for feeling good, Freud mapped out the dream of freedom of the Enlightenment: to expose artificial moral constraints on the expansive self-feeling of the life force.
But the recognition of such social constraints still leaves unexplained the inner urge of the human being to feel good and right—the very thing that awed Kant seems to exist independent of any rules: as far as we can tell—as I put it elsewhere—"all organisms like to 'feel good' about themselves." They push themselves to maximize this feeling. As philosophers have long noted, it is as though the heart of nature is pulsating in its own joyful self-expression. When we get to the level of man, of course, this process acquires its greatest interest. It is most intense in man and in him relatively undetermined—he can pulsate and expand both organismically and symbolically. This expansion takes the form of man's tremendous urge for a feeling of total "rightness" about himself and his world. This perhaps clumsy way to talk seems to me to sum up what man is really trying to do and why conscience is his fate. Man is the only organism in nature fated to puzzle out what it actually means to feel "right."
But on top of this special burden nature has arranged that it is impossible for man to feel "right" in any straightforward way. Here we have to introduce a paradox that seems to go right to the heart of organismic life and that is especially sharpened in man. The paradox takes the form of two motives or urges that seem to be part of creature consciousness and that point in two opposite directions. On the one hand the creature is impelled by a powerful desire to identify with the cosmic process, to merge himself with the rest of nature. On the other hand he wants to be unique, to stand out as something different and apart. The first motive—to merge and lose oneself in something larger—comes from man's horror of isolation, of being thrust back upon his own feeble energies alone; he feels tremblingly small and impotent in the face of transcendent nature. If he gives in to his natural feeling of cosmic dependence, the desire to be part of something bigger, it puts him at peace and oneness, gives him a sense of self-expansion in a larger beyond, and so heightens his being, giving him truly a feeling of transcendent value. This is the Christian motive of Agape—the natural melding of created life in the "Creation-in-love" which transcends it. As Rank put it, man yearns for a "feeling of kinship with the All." He wants to be "delivered from his isolation" and become "part of a greater and higher whole." The person reaches out naturally for a self beyond his own self in order to know who he is at all, in order to feel that he belongs in the universe. Long before Camus penned the words of the epigraph to this chapter [below], Rank said: "For only by living in close union with the god-ideal that has been erected outside one's own ego is one able to live at all."
Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful. Hence one must choose a master, God being out of style.
— Albert Camus