The Unknown Distance: From Consciousness to Conscience—Goethe to Camus

Edward Engelberg

Published by Harvard University Press 1972

The Unknown Distance

From Consciousness to Conscience—Goethe to Camus

Edward Engelberg

https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674333239

Overview
Contents

About this book

Edward Engelberg argues that Conscience and Consciousness have slowly drifted apart from their once nearly identical meanings: inward knowledge of oneself. This process of separation, he shows, reached a critical point in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the age of "dualisms."

Tracing the evolution of the severance of Conscience from Consciousness, he demonstrates from a wide range of examples in literature and philosophy how such a division shaped the attitudes of important writers and thinkers. The study opens with the Romantics and closes with Kafka, Hesse, and Camus. It includes analyses of Hegel, Dostoevsky, James, Conrad, and Freud and brings together for comparison such pairings as Poe and Mann, Goethe and Wordsworth, Arnold and Nietzsche.

Engelberg concludes that the cleavage of Conscience from Consciousness is untenable. To dispossess Conscience, he asserts, man would also need to dispossess a full awareness, a full Consciousness; and a full Consciousness inevitably leads back to Conscience.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xiii
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	xvii
The unknown distance Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xix
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
I. Conscience and Consciousness: Dualism or Unity? Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	8
II. The Price of Consciousness: Goethe's Faust and Byron's Manfred Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	40
III. The Risks of Consciousness: Goethe's Werther and Wordsworth's the Prelude Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	58
IV. Some Versions of Consciousness and Egotism: Hegel, Dostoevsky's underground Man, and Peer Gynt Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	87
V. Consciousness and Will: Poe and Mann Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
VI. The Tyranny of Conscience: Arnold, James, and Conrad's Lord Jim Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	144
VII. Towards a Genealogy of the Modern Problem: Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	186
VIII. A Case of Conscience: Kafka's the Trial, Hesse's Steppenwolf, and Camus's the Fall Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	208
Conclusion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	242
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	257
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	281

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Copyright year: 1972
Edition: Reprint 2014
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Front matter: 18
- Main content: 288
Keywords: LITERARY CRITICISM / General; Self-knowledge in literature.; Consciousness.; Conscience.

eBook

Published: October 1, 2013
ISBN: 9780674333239

Hardcover

Published: February 5, 1972
ISBN: 9780674333222