The idea of conscience in the myst icism of Richard Rolle and Hegel’s philosophy

Abstract

This article examines the problem of mystical and religious foundations of morality, which are interconnected, first of all, with the inner world of a person - with duty, conscience, self-esteem. In what follows two theories of conscience are analyzed, compared and contrasted: those of the fourteenth-century mystic Richard Rolle and those of the philosopher Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel. The main attention is paid to the comparative analysis of the idea of conscience in the mysticism of Rolle and in Hegel’s moral philosophy. If for Rolle conscience is the voice of the supreme transcendent God, for Hegel conscience is a generalized voice of significant others transferred to the inner plane, which is conditioned by a person’s political views or social position. These points of view do not exclude each other: one focuses on how conscience matures, how it is formed on the basis of mystical aspiration and love for God, while the other focuses on the mechanism of functioning of a mature conscience, which realizes itself in society in a sense of duty. According to Rolle, conscience is the beating of an inner intelligence. In the absence of this, we are unlikely to act upon the knowledge that conscience presents to us. According to Hegel, conscience is the divine voice with immediate knowledge of existence. But to goad us into action conscience must be more than this; its content incorporates an experience with a religious or spiritual quality that is beyond conceptual analysis.