Beliefs About Conscience?

Question

What are some philosophical beliefs about the soul and conscience?

Answer 1

Just to be quick I'll say 'Bhagavad Gita' in particular 2nd chapter and a book originally written in Bengali language in late 1800s called 'Jaiva Dharma-' the nature of the soul. If I can come back to this I'll elaborate. Right now the laptop is running on battery so.....

Answer 2

philosophical view of conscience?

Answer 3

The conscience is the intellectual faculty of identifying and judging one's own actions; the soul is the emotion one senses when the conscience is brought into action, or when one is looking back over his life--

"that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul—that to live requires a sense of self-value, but man, who has no automatic values, has no automatic sense of self-esteem and must earn it by shaping his soul in the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man, the rational being he is born able to create, but must create by choice—that the first precondition of self-esteem is that radiant selfishness of soul which desires the best in all things, in values of matter and spirit, a soul that seeks above all else to achieve its own moral perfection, valuing nothing higher than itself—and that the proof of an achieved self-esteem is your soul’s shudder of contempt and rebellion against the role of a sacrificial animal, against the vile impertinence of any creed that proposes to immolate the irreplaceable value which is your consciousness and the incomparable glory which is your existence to the blind evasions and the stagnant decay of others."

John Galt's Speech; "Atlas Shrugged"; Ayn Rand

Everything from "the image of his moral ideal, in the image of Man," describes how men may achieve Aristotle's standard of "Man qua Man." Aristotle described "the good" as that which is good for Man, and that is the short description of "Man qua Man." So Aristotle would say that if one knows "what is good for Man" and goes willingly against it, his conscience will tell him something, but believing in free will, he is free to follow what his conscience tells him or to ignore it and risk the consequence.

The part about not being a sacrificial animal can be described this way:

"Christ, in terms of the Christian philosophy, is the human ideal. He personifies that which men should strive to emulate. Yet, according to the Christian mythology, he died on the cross not for his own sins but for the sins of the nonideal people. In other words, a man of perfect virtue was sacrificed for men who are vicious and who are expected or supposed to accept that sacrifice. If I were a Christian, nothing could make me more indignant than that: the notion of sacrificing the ideal to the nonideal, or virtue to vice. And it is in the name of that symbol that men are asked to sacrifice themselves for their inferiors. That is precisely how the symbolism is used."

“Playboy’s Interview with Ayn Rand,” March 1964.

What sort of soul or conscience would allow such an immoral perversion of philosophy over the death of a good and moral man?