When Hegel speaks of conscience, he is referring to the gut feeling of the universal conscience or the moral consensus of consciousnesses as a whole. Simply, conscience is decided by our gut feeling. All consciousness’ conscience act in the same way and this is a result of the conscience’s confidence within itself. Yet this is not always true, because the conscience thinks it knows the right thing as a moral agent, yet it does not know morality. Therefore, the conscience causes the consciousness to be afraid to act because it is obsessing over good intentions. It feels it will be judged by the other consciousnesses.
In reviewing Hegel’s ideas on morality, I began to think about how emotion can affect gut feelings, and I came to conclude with Marx that Hegel did not apply his philosophy to reality and instead focused on the ideals. Otherwise, he would have seen that even the thought of being judged represents self-doubt, which is an emotion. The fear of judgment can cause the acting consciousness not to act and become the “beautiful soul.” Does Hegel underestimate the power of emotion? In his analysis of conscience, he seems to not bring up the idea of emotion as being associated with “gut-feeling”, but rather leaves gut-feeling as the defining factor of the conscience.
In my own personal accounts where I have listened to my gut feelings, a lot of the time my emotions played a large role in the deciding factor. We speak every day about how love, anger, and sadness can affect our personalities, and in return those emotions can alter how we feel about situations. Although we may not want to admit the strength of emotions, it is a difficult aspect of decision making within reality and one that I feel Hegel underestimated.
Also, by looking at emotions, we begin to see how individualized gut feeling is to people in different situations. Even within my close friend group or within my family, when we are faced with similar situations we chose different ways of acting. Some according to gut feeling and others vary from it. It made me wonder how Hegel could state gut feeling as being universal, without considering the impact of emotion. These are aspects of the morality of the conscience I feel that Hegel missed by not applying his concepts to reality. Yet, questioning these ideas of his philosophy made me wonder if I misunderstood him? Can emotion be separate of gut-feeling? Does emotion play a role in gut-feeling? Can gut-feeling be the same for everyone? And if so, how are these gut-feelings universalized?
Interesting questions of course. I wonder if maybe Hegel saw the gut feeling response as a kind of pure, unfiltered reason? Maybe "gut feeling" as he meant it is supposed to be more of our immediate rational response, untainted by any constraints or lenses which could in fact bring in our emotional responses. I think Hegel is getting at the idea that a gut feeling is like a quick connection with ultimate knowledge, with understanding, with the mind telling the body exactly what the best choice in the given situation would be. Though I think I agree with you in terms of real world application: listening to your gut feeling is often something people only allude to in hindsight :/
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