Conscience by Strohm Paul

Author:Strohm, Paul [Strohm, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2012-07-15T19:00:18+00:00

Conscience: troublemaker or second self?

Conscience’s identity as an uncanny ‘second self’ was already well established when Augustine’s conscience verbally assailed him at the end of the 4th century. Augustine’s conscience represented a split or division, a vantage point from which a person beholds his or her own actions. In his Discourse of Conscience (1596), theologian William Perkins commented shrewdly on what he called the two actions of the understanding: ‘The minde thinks a thought, now conscience goes beyond the minde, and knows what the minde thinks ... By meanes of this second action conscience may beare witness euen of his thoughts.’ His literary near-contemporary, Shakespeare’s Richard III, experiences a similarly paradoxical division, acknowledging that ‘I ... hate myself/ For hateful deeds committed by myself.’ In the 18th century, Adam Smith and Immanuel Kant formalized this reflexivity, with their theories of an impartial spectator who knows all about us and who monitors our actions.

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