What is conscience?

In our picture of the world, conscience is a judge who is located inside us and dormant until we, so to speak, have not “transgressed”. True, everyone has their own, the fate of the turkey is also different, but the conscience is the same, because evil, although there is less and more, still feels similar. Conscience is co-knowledge. We all “co-know” something. And this judge, when we do something wrong, wakes up and judges us, torments, gnaws. Torments, in general. The torments of conscience are terrible, and we will not get away from ourselves anywhere: we will suffer until we atone for our guilt.

This is our cultural script. And here we are clearly different from the Europeans, for example. Although both they and we are historically Christians and, it would seem, should not differ on this issue. But let’s break up. And to understand what exactly, let’s remember one more concept. Consciousness, like conscience, is co-knowledge, a common knowledge shared by all. But this word means something completely different – the result of a rational analysis of reality. The knowledge that co-knowledge operates with is located in the head, it is information about the outside world. And the knowledge that conscience knows is located in the soul, in the heart of a person, and there is nothing rational in them. The word “conscience” came to us from religious books, through the Greek language, and the word “consciousness” – through the scientific and medical works of past eras, that is, through Latin. So it turned out that we have such an extraordinary duality: on the one hand, the judge is in the heart, and on the other, the king is in the head.

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• Alone with conscience

Europeans use derivatives from the Latin word consciencia (literally “consciousness”), European consciousness lives in the head and, if it judges, it is extremely reasonable. Russian conscience connects us with God, European conscience connects man with nature and society. How to feel this difference in practice? It’s very simple: here lies a drunk on the sidewalk in the cold rain. Without dragging him into the warmth, the person in whom the Russian conscience lives will not be able to sleep. A European will do otherwise: he is a taxpayer! He will call on the phone and go to sleep peacefully, without even waiting for the arrival of the brigade. He has arguments why he can not mess around with no one knows who in the cold and rain. And a Russian person is always ready for an unpredictable development of events, and therefore his conscience is sharpened to the limit: do not argue, do not be clever, but do it so that later you do not suffer and do not curse yourself. A European in case of insomnia and a game of imagination will not blame his conscience. Depression, he decides, anxiety. And he will go not to a priest, but to a psychologist or a doctor.”