What about “evil consciousness?”

Some time ago I posted a very short essay based on one meet-up talk – about interrelations between conscience and consciousness. In short: consciousness may be interpreted as seeing myself from outside, as if I have to pairs of eyes, one looking at things, another one observing myself looking at things. An assumption that seems natural is that “second pair of eyes” is brought up in communication with other people. That requires to accept others as equal which means to have conscience. And vice versa: to accept other people I need to know that I do just that, that is, to be conscious.
The question brought up then was: what about “evil consciousness”? Theoretically, according to the above, such phenomenon as “evil consciousness” is not possible because that would mean for an evil individual to deny others as equal = to not accept them = to deny oneself of another pair of eyes for that matter and thus to become unaware of … what? OK, unaware of something whatever it is, to be “not-quite conscious” whatever that could mean.
When I wrote the previous assay that conclusion seemed to contradict mere facts of existence of “consciously evil” people. But does it? Really, can we deem an individual fully conscious if one does not see others as equal? One looks at other human beings, who objectively are of the same species, but one does not see that reality, one sees some other “unreal reality” where other people are not the same! So, does this one posses normal human consciousness? This individual is evidently lying to oneself, misses out some features and makes up another ones…. That is, “evil consciousness” is some kind of fantasy running from reality and in doing so denying itself. Evil person is an air monger, (s)he does not look at things but dreams about them. Unfortunately these dreams guide actions.

This entry was posted in Basic Ideas, Human psyche, Theory and tagged , , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply