Studies in Phenomenology



Article/Publication Details


THE «WATERWHEEL» OF GUILT: THE TAUTOLOGY OF CONSCIENCE IN WITTGENSTEIN’S NOTES

Title in the language of publication: «ВОДЯНОЕ КОЛЕСО» ВИНЫ: ТАВТОЛОГИЯ СОВЕСТИ В ЗАМЕТКАХ ВИТГЕНШТЕЙНА
Author: GEORGY CHERNAVIN
Issue: HORIZON. Studies in Phenomenology.
Vol. 11, №2 (2021), 544-557
Language: Russian
Document type: Research Article
DOI : 10.21638/2226-5260-2022-11-2-544-557 PDF (Downloads: 1293)

Abstract
The implicit conception of conscience from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notes from 1929 is brought into comparison with the theory of conscience as a paradoxical identity of guilt and innocence by Philip Konrad Marheineke (which served as a pattern for Kierkegaardian concept of “despair”) and of conscience as a (grammatical and temporal) redoubling by Vladimir Jankélévitch. Wittgensteinian views on conscience and feeling of guilt tend to Marheineke-Kierkegaard’s model (the guilt hides in innocence and vice versa) and to Jankélévitch’s model (the wrongdoing from the past makes us regret the innocence which preceded it in a far remote past). I explore these tautological models of conscience using the example of Wittgensteinian metaphor of “waterwheel”: of an engineering failure producing a constant sentiment of guilt. Austrian philosopher describes his “incapacity to think” as a source of background, freely floating guilt. “Uselessness” and “mediocrity” or as he puts it “groundlessness of your own existence” altogether with “incapacity to think”—those are the self-accusations of the thinker. This torturing state he at the same time considers to be the source of his own philosophical productivity. Would a conscience be possible which would be free of this tautological structure and of this endless “rumination” of the petty guilt? The article proposes a hypothesis how one could break the tautological circle of an idling scrupulous conscience.

Keywords
guilt, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Marheineke, conscience, tautology, Jankélévitch.

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