Goethe’s Conscience

For Rainer Nägele

Any student or reader of the works by Rainer Nägele knows his insistence on what he calls surface reading. Those who have had the privilege of sitting in his classes will also know his reactions to metaphors of depth, hidden meanings, and truths to be uncovered: They do not belong to the practice of reading. Reading is to discover the textual connections that are out in the open and on the surface; it is about the “carpet of truth,” as one of his essays famously ends,² and about a “reading of correspondences.”³

The following reading is inspired by Rainer Nägele’s work. I would like to suggest how conscience, or in German das Gewissen, can be found as operating on the surface rather than as a deep interior faculty. Conscience might not be governed by deep-seated feelings of right and wrong, but might instead be structured at least partly by almost mechanical linguistic maneuvers and associations. With the help of Rainer Nägele, this is what my reading of Goethe will allow us to consider. Structuring this reading of conscience and of conscience in Goethe, especially in Faust, are the subsequent arguments:

1. 1. Conscience is not a “deep” or “interiorized” faculty of the mind concerned with good and evil. Rather, it comes about if someone fails to have a response. Bad conscience results if one cannot or does not want to rebuff an accusation with a response, be it even a bad excuse. Hence, it is one’s task to develop mechanisms of replying to accusations to defend oneself and immunize oneself against attacks.

2. 2. Nevertheless, one cannot or should not shield oneself entirely and has to remain available. Otherwise, one would become limited to mere presence and unreachable by the demands of others.

The following notes are brief and go only a few steps in the direction of these arguments. My hope is that readers will be able to use this sketch as a starting point for their own thoughts.

Conscience

Contemporary discussions of morality usually focus on moral judgment.⁴ The implicit idea about morality is the assumed presence of a third-person observer who observes, evaluates, and judges human behavior, including one’s own, like a script with interchangeable players. This focus on moral judgment may be in line with legal considerations, but it does not explain the development of moral faculties. Moral development is more likely to begin with a key experience, a first-person experience. Specifically, contemporary theorists often locate the beginning of moral development in the experience of being a victim. For example, the Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen begins his account of morality by quoting Dickens: “there is nothing so finely perceived and finely felt, as injustice.”⁵

Following Goethe (and Rainer Nägele’s readings of Goethe), I will suggest, however, that a primal scene of morality is actually that of being an agent and perpetrator. It is bad conscience that forces us, through its nagging insistence, to confront our actions. In the case of bad conscience, the experience is shaped by Nachträglichkeit (belatedness); that is to say, it comes about later and in a way structured by codifications of language that mark an event as morally “bad.” The “first” experience is already a later reflection. We may not have a bad conscience because we did something wrong, but because someone, perhaps an inner voice, accuses us afterwards that we did something wrong. As opposed to a simple delay in time, Nachträglichkeit involves, as Rainer Nägele puts it, a “rupture of continuity” and a shift to the domain of language.⁶

What is bad conscience and how does it come about?

It helps to look at certain contemporary notions of conscience, the most prominent of which are probably the ones deriving from Jean Piaget’s famous model of the formation of conscience. Lawrence Kohlberg, building on Piaget’s suggestion, has divided the stages of moral development (conscience) into three types: pre-conventional (avoiding punishment), conventional (following norms) and post-conventional (comparing norms).⁷ The idea is that...