Jankelevitch, Vladimir. the Bad Conscience
2017; Philosophy Education Society Inc.; Volume: 70; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2154-1302
Autores Tópico(s)Religious, Philosophical, and Educational Studies
ResumoJANKELEVITCH, Vladimir. Bad Conscience. Translated by Andrew Kelley. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. xxii + 179 pp. Cloth, $35.00--Jankelevitch's Bad Conscience was initially published in 1933 as La mauvaise conscience, one of two doctoral dissertations submitted by the author, with subsequent revised editions published in 1951 and 1966. Andrew Kelley, associate professor of philosophy at Bradley University, includes in his English translation a detailed annotation of changes within the text, and an account of their historical development within his accessible introduction. Jankelevitch, who held the Chair in Moral Philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1951 to 1978, died in 1985, leaving behind him more than twenty books, including Le Pardon (also translated by Andrew Kelley as Forgiveness, University of Chicago Press, 2005), an important work for which Bad Conscience serves as a philosophical groundwork. Bad Conscience provides a challenging but rich and complex description of the phenomenon of remorse. book is divided into three chapters, followed by a postscript, On Joy. first chapter, The Semi-Conscience, opens with the observation that a truly bad is a rare occurrence: Apart from Boris Godunov and Macbeth, everyone has a good in general. Egoism is a failure to recognize that, [d]espite its ambiguous character, the bad ... is an exaltation of consciousness. A bad opens the possibility for moral awareness, repentance, and necessary change, leading ultimately to joy and recovery. Remorse is a kind of suffering, however, and we see it appropriately as a true punishment. It arises as a consequence of evil that is done, in ways comparable to natural evil, which is itself a kind of metaphorical conscience: Pain is, in a certain way, the bad of our sentiments. Yet the bad is particular in its origination, for whereas [p]hysical suffering arises from a violence done to nature, remorse [arises] from a concession to this same nature; I suffer very often for not having suffered! French term indicates either or conscience and Jankelevitch plays on this linguistic ambiguity for philosophical effect: [T]he bad is ... a consciousness that accuses itself, that loathes itself. Conscience is partly defined in terms of consciousness, but it is also possible to view consciousness, especially philosophical consciousness, as constituted by or arising from a certain kind of as well: Metaphysics, all in all, is born not so much from 'astonishment' as from a crisis of conscience; metaphysics is the daughter of scruples. …
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