The Boundary Of Subjective Rationality

Conscience can be understood as a self-consciousness as a synonym for subjectivity.This is reflected in the Delphi deity: "know thyself." Socrates chose to obey this god,rejecting any traditional conventional law according to his inner life,thus planting the seeds of division between moral subject and ethical life,also in the context of Western culture.The two dimensions of conscience lay the foundation for self-knowledge and common knowledge.We will see that the autonomy,subjectivity and supremacy of self-knowledge are always in a state of rapture between the objectivity and universality of conscience.The emergence of conscience freedom in modern times is directly related to the reform of religions.Its landmark practice is Luther's publication of the Outline of Article Nine.Among them,Luther condemned the absurdity of the Vatican's use of redemption vouchers to swindle people's belief that they were saved,and advocated the “Sola fide” doctrine,thereby returning faith to the private sphere.The Reformation of Protestantism is a landmark event of modernity.It established the basic characteristics of modernity,that is,replacing the revealed authority with rational authority and replacing heteronomy with self-discipline.Hegel believes that it was Protestantism that removed the ladder of objective authority that supports life,making people totally dependent on inner judgment.The subjectivity represented by the freedom of conscience went through Germany from Kant to Fichte to Romanticism.Kant took a narrower conscience concept than traditional one,resulting in the formalization and subjectification of conscience.Fichte tried to give Kant's formal conscience content,through reflective judgment to bridge the absolute free of human nature and the reality,which make conscience a pure belief.Romanticism succeeded the subjectivity of Fichte's philosophy,and Hegel tried to re-establish the objective rational basis of the conscience by revealing the one-sidedness of this kind of conscience.Phenomenology of Spirit reveals the subjectivity of conscience.Conscience is the third element of spirit that is certain of itself.In which conscience is divided into four small sections,which are the conscience of belief,arbitrary conscience,the conscience desiring for recognition and conscience for others.The conscience became a beautiful soul by retreating to its subjectivity which however under the pressure of action was divided into the conscience of action and the conscience of judgment.Eventually they conceded to mutual recognition and achieved the reconciliation.Phenomenology shows that conscience must go beyond the subjective abyss.Hegel showed us the mechanism of the dialectics of conscience in Elements of the Philosophy of Right.Conscience is divided into formal conscience and true conscience.The formal conscience has two claims: first,it stipulates the content of good from its own and considers itself as “the power of judgment”;second,formal conscience establishes itself as a moral authority and is an absolute certainty of itself.However,the problem is that,first of all,in regard to setting the good from the inside of the conscience,because the conscience only formally pursues the good,the formal conscience has emptiness.The judgment made by the formal conscience cannot guarantee its objective authenticity.Second,the formal conscience establishes itself as moral authority,but the content developed according to free will may be good or evil.Conscience is thus something that can be wrong and has the potential to become evil.It is hypocrisy if the conscience self-righteously regard evil as good.The subjectivity of conscience can only be overcoming by ethics,that is to say,conscience should hug the universally accepted norms.The moral conscience's self-legislation function(the right to give its own stipulation)is preserved when it enters the ethical domain,but its ability to judge good only from its own subjective beliefs must be abandoned.The formal conscience is supposed to develop itself to the true conscience.At this time,the conscience will no longer seek the stipulation of good within itself,but will pursue it in the external objective ethical system.The true conscience can be understood from two aspects in relation to the state: on the one hand,the true conscience believes that the country in its era has basic rationality and expresses an emotion which called by Hegel as political disposition;On the one hand,the true conscience recognizes that the existing state is different from the actual country,and carries out an internal critique of the existing state in order to realize the country's inherent principle of freedom and rationality.