E.G.

Inward light is what I take to be the central idea of Quakerism. In its main forms, it has the following four features:

It's in you: To find inward light, you're supposed to look inside yourself. This is something you are supposed to do instead of taking directions from religious authorities or texts. "Silent waiting" is the Quaker way to find inward light.

It's not you: Paying attention to inward light—or (maybe this is better) paying attention to what is made visible by inward light—is a very different sort of activity from paying attention to your own feelings, desires, beliefs, etc.

It's action-guiding and specifically moral: Inward light shows you what's right and what's wrong, what's evil and what's good, what you must do and what you must not do, etc.

It's got something to do with God, or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit, or something like that: Quakerism's inventor, George Fox, influentially said: "There is that of God in everyone." This slogan was about and is generally taken to be about inward light.

Inward light is a valuable and interesting idea that today's Quakers have inherited, and they have a great deal of freedom in deciding what to do with it. One of the beautiful things about Quakerism is that Quakerism has no fixed doctrine, and this leaves Quakers free to extensively shape, mold, add to, and chip away at their religion. Quakerism is very unlike most of the other Christian and Christ-haunted religions of our world, such as Catholicism and so on, which generally tend to have a lot of intellectual baggage from humanity's dark past that their adherents have no choice but to continue to carry.

There's disagreement among Quakers about which of the above features should be emphasized, which should be downplayed, and which should simply be left behind. Some Quakers want to completely drop the God stuff. Others think that you need to keep the God stuff in there in order to get the whole package to hold together.

Some worry that if you drop the God stuff, then you can't make sense of the claim that inward light is anything other than you and your own wants and needs and feelings and so on. Thus, for example, in his 2018 book written for a Quaker audience entitled Primitive Quakerism Revived, a theistic Friend of some influence named Paul Buckley laments:

The older sense of the Inward Light as "not of us but of God" has been lost [among modern Quakers who have de-emphasized the God stuff] and is reduced to "this little light of mine." The older sense of a powerful searchlight probing the depths of our hearts and piercing our souls is almost entirely gone.

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At the start of Freedom & Reason (1963) Hare observes that moral questions have two features, "the combination of which seems to confront us, as philosophers, with a paradox, or even an antinomy." I'll quote him at length here, because I like the way he lays out the paradox. On the one hand, Hare says,

a man who is faced with [a moral question] knows that it is his own problem, and that nobody can answer it for him. He may, it is true, ask the advice of other people; and he may also ascertain more facts about the circumstances and consequences of a proposed action, and other facts of this sort. But there will come a time when he does not hope to find out anything else of relevance by factual inquiry, and when he knows that, whatever others may say about the answer to his problem, he has to answer it. If anyone were to suggest that the answer must be such and such, because everybody says so—or that, even, he would be abusing the English language if he gave any other answer—he will, if he understands what moral questions are, feel that to accept these suggestions would be to accept a diminution of his own freedom. For one of the most important constituents of our freedom, as moral agents, is the freedom to form our own opinions about moral questions, even if that involves changing our language.

On the other hand, Hare says:

Against this conviction, which every adult has, that he is free to form his own opinions about moral questions, we have to set another characteristic of these questions which seems to contradict it. This is, that the answering of moral questions is, or ought to be, a rational activity. Although most of us think that we are free to form our own opinions about moral questions, we do not feel that it does not matter what we think about them—that the answering of moral questions is a quite arbitrary business, like the choice of one postage stamp from the sheet rather than another. We feel, rather, that it matters very much what answer we give, and that the finding of an answer is a task that should engage our rational powers to the limit of their capacity. So the freedom that we have in morals is to be distinguished from the freedom which comes when it simply does not matter what we do or say. That is why, when people grow up to the stage at which they start to understand that in moral questions they are free to form their own opinions, they feel this freedom not as an emancipation but as a burden.

Hare offers a moral philosophy that is supposed to resolve this antinomy between "freedom and reason." I am not a fan of the resolution that Hare proposes, but I am a fan of Hare's presentation of the problem, which I think can be called Hare's Paradox.

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Part of what I think is valuable about Hare's presentation of the paradox is that it is presented as a paradox. In moral thought, you are somehow both free and unfree. This is closely related to the paradox presented by the Quakers' idea of inward light. The light is supposed to be in you and distinct from you, like something in your gut that is both one of your internal organs and a foreign object that has been implanted in you.

It seems possible to me that what Quakers are talking about, when they talk about inward light, is just the same thing that Hare is talking about when he talks about confrontation of a moral problem. This may or may not mean that inward light should be understood as conscience.

I do not think the paradoxical or mysterious quality of this situation is satisfactorily resolved by Hare's universal prescriptivism. I also do not think it is satisfactorily resolved by God talk. I do not think the paradox is unresolvable but I think it is a really tricky problem.

I think that Quakerism, as an existing and developed human institution, may be particularly well positioned to give ordinary people a way to wrestle with this paradox: to make it a central mystery of the ordinary person's religious practice and contemplation. And this strikes me as a much more important mystery than the mysteries of most of the other religions that I know about. For example, I think it is much more important to wrestle with this mystery than to try to understand the Trinity, which is simply nonsense. This is one of the ways that I think Quakerism is an especially useful religion.