Conscience and Collective Pressure

Abstract: In the present paper, my aim is to show that Freud confuses conscience with what I call collective pressure. (I also touch on certain, fundamental but problematic assumptions in Kant and indicate how they connect to moral philosophy in general.) What Freud accounts for is, actually, not conscience but collective pressure. I have chosen to reveal this confusion by discussing the way collectivity is constituted by guilt. Guilt is not a fundamental, moral response, but rather a repression of bad conscience. We try to escape our difficulties with the I–you relationship that is characteristic to conscience by understanding ourselves in impersonal, collective terms. But because conscience cannot be simply erased, it is covered over by guilt, which is a distortion of bad conscience.