Abstract

This essay is an attempt to give conscience a fresh theological hearing. The first chapter accomplishes an initial sketch of the phenomenon largely by means of a meditation on conscience' portrayal in three literary works: Aeschylus' Oresteia Sophocles' Antigone and Twain's Huckleberry Finn. What emerges is a set of puzzling dualities. That is, conscience presents itself as somehow personal/impersonal, inner/outer, ego-establishing/ego-transcending, divine/demonic. The second chapter sets the stage for contemporary reassessment of conscience and its dualities by attending to two key modern evaluations: its apotheosis by Rousseau and its exposure as mendacious violence by Nietzsche. The oscillation of modernity between these contradictory judgments invites a more adequate criticism. This is attempted in six further chapters which comprise four stages. First, conscience is redescribed using the categories of the interpretive framework proposed by A. N. Whitehead. What emerges from this cosmological reflection is a view of conscience as a "politics of Beauty" in which the claims of God, the past self and a wide variety of others come together in each self-here-now. The strengths of this Whiteheadian interpretation are noted as is its key danger: the aesthetic reduction of conscience. This occasions a sharp turn in a very different interpretive direction: the philosophy of the human other advocated by E. Levinas. The radical disturbance and disorientation accomplished by the Other are shown to give a primacy and positive significance to bad conscience, opening the aesthetic to the generosity of the ethical. After pointing to how Whitehead and Levinas might be brought together in the description of an "ethical politics of Beauty," the essay concludes with a sketch of how conscience as tensive and intersubjective involves one in vulnerability to peculiarly ethical idolatry and despair and opens in an especially serious way the question of a God beyond but not against the ethical