Abstract

In this project I examine how one 20th century thinker, Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist, understood the meaning of the word "conscience" and the significance of the phenomena toward which the term points. I argue that Jung's theory of conscience, despite problems in his own presentation and distorted readings of him by advocates and detractors alike, is sound and significant, and may be successfully employed in refuting predominant criticisms of conscience as a plausible and consequential phenomenon; and Jung's theory of conscience---once made explicit---provides a hermeneutical lens, both optimal and necessary, for understanding the importance of his thought as a whole. ;Demonstrating these claims requires three sequential steps: describing the broad framework of Jung's psychology of moral experience and practice with attention to its underlying presuppositions and rationale, their relation to the totality of Jung's psychology, and its contrast to prevailing popular assumptions about Jung's psychology, namely, that it entails other-worldly mysticism, uncritical optimism, and solipsistic individualism; showing that the essential features of Jung's moral psychology of conscience are superior to, and can be defended successfully against, the major psychological theories of conscience in the modern and postmodern world, namely, the reduction of conscience to socialization or biological determinism, and the perspectival theory of all knowledge, including the moral claims of conscience; and critically assessing how the resulting "ontic" theory of conscience illuminates key problems regarding the appeal of Jung's thought in contributing to a contemporary moral psychology. ;In sum, for Jung conscience is that singular dimension of experience which is most definitive of our humanity, emerging in that moment when awareness of responsible and creative agency begins, when the merely "it is" becomes "I ought." Moreover, in its most decisive form conscience entails an encounter with an "other," a "knowing with," such that where there was once only id there shall now be a thou. This is neither science nor metaphysics, but rather the truth of subjectivity, i.e., clear discernment and forthright expression of one's most essential, compelling, and immediate inward experience