Conscience from Shakespeare's fear to Heidegger's appeal

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Is the intellectual called for heroism in Socrates drinking poison, or does he have the same right as any human being to beware of the demagogue’s game with the mob, so that what happened to his predecessors from Hypatia through Ibn al-Muqaffa to Faraj Fouda does not happen to him?

The intellectual - from my point of view - is a very honest person, to the point where sometimes the hair is cut between courage and foolishness. Honesty, when broken down, is information and news. Among the pieces of information is that water boils at one hundred degrees Celsius, and the news is conveyed to you by the intellectual with confidence. The description of foolishness is caused by this intellectual’s conscience, which is sensitive to the importance of honesty with oneself to the point that it makes him look for you - to the end of the world - to tell you that his information is not accurate because water in high altitudes boils at a lower temperature, about ninety-two degrees. Celsius, because of the pressure difference. I chose the example of boiling because it is the most neutral example and the least causing misunderstanding.

But the truth of the information is different from the truth of the person, and this is what I experienced from the painful identification with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Turkish movie “Winter Sleep - 2014 AD”, which is a movie that is not suitable for those addicted to Hollywood commercial films, and it is not suitable for me either, as I needed some time to recover from it. Nihal blames her educated husband Ayden for his rude coldness towards a poor man and his son, and he explains to her about the lives of the poor and how they view themselves. Each one of them says: “The Our merciless fate is what disappoints us in all our work. Every morning I imagine all the wonderful things that I can do, but I spend my whole day wandering on my face.” She sincerely admonishes him: “And what do you want them to say?” He answers her with a phrase from Shakespeare in the words of King Richard: “Conscience is nothing but a word used by cowards, intended at first to frighten the strong. Let our strong army be our conscience, and swords our law.” I reviewed it and found it in Shakespeare’s play - Richard III, Act Five: Scene Three, p. 240, translated by Dr. Abdul Qader Al-Qat.

The long, psychologically exhausting film ended, but I remained stuck on the word “conscience” as a troubling existential question. Since I understood Freud and Marx, I began to see the conscience as a historical “supreme self,” created by a political force at a certain moment, and then a counterforce comes and moves the compass of conscience to the right or to the left.

In Tunisia, after independence, removing the head covering became a state policy led by Habib Bourguiba, known as the Great Mujahid. In Iran, women came out in March 1979 against the obligation to wear the hijab. Then the obligation became a law. Many hated the past of the Shah and were attached to a future that Khomeini was able to represent. Michel Foucault wrote in those days, fascinated by what he called “political spirituality.” Where is the voice of conscience in all this, and even where is the intellectual?!

I do not imagine an intellectual with a sword. Even Alexander the Great did not ask Aristotle to carry a sword, and any of the intellectuals who were involved with the sword turned into a politician, and here we understand the phrase that they mistakenly attributed to Goebbels: (When I hear the word culture... I release the safety lock on my pistol.) Its origin is a sentence in the 1933 play “Schlagter” by Hans Jost.

The validity of the phrase appears in the “political intellectual” because it is the secret of the danger, not the “educated politician.” The educated politician harnesses the latter/culture in favor of politics in its sublime and sublime sense, and here I mean “the three national constants: political authority, the people, and geography.” As for the “political intellectual,” he harnesses the latter/politics in favor of the swollen, inflated ego that makes him see that he is history, geography, the people, and power. This is why Gaddafi was an example of the arrogance of the intellectual in The Green Book, and the arrogance of the politician in the incident. Lockerbie, and farther from Gaddafi in madness and insanity are those who thought they were the voice of God on earth. These are not intellectuals but commanders of weapons, but the truth of their madness appears when they arm themselves, such as Osama bin Laden, Al-Zarqawi, and Joseph Kony, the leader of the Christian Lord’s Army...etc. They do not understand the dates of Levantine politics, nor the grapes of Yemeni culture.

Here Heidegger opens another door, as an intellectual with the rank of a philosopher, and he moves the battle of conscience from the arena of history and the victors, to the arena of existence. He completely rejects that conscience be values imposed by a society or a conqueror. He also rejects that it is the voice of a god, or a biological instinct. In his book “Being and Time,” Heidegger sees conscience in an amazing and different way, as it is a call issued by Dasein to itself, summoning it from its fall into the world of “concern.” We speak as he speaks. People, and we dress as they dress, and we imitate values just for the sake of imitation, and this is “inauthenticity” or false existence, and here comes conscience according to Heidegger, not as a judge scolding you because you stole or made a mistake, but rather it is a “call.” The caller is you, and the one being called is also you. It is a call that comes from the deepest depths of your true and alienated self, to be directed to your daily self, which is immersed in the trivialities of society and the directives of power and the victors. Conscience is a summons to authentic existence, so that conscience becomes a tool of individual liberation that is strict with itself, away from the prejudices imposed by oppression and domination from childhood until old age. What I have presented here is an abbreviation based on my humble understanding of what was stated by Heidegger in “Being and Time,” from pp. 481-520, translated by: Fathi Al-Miskini.

As for Heidegger joining the Nazi Party, I believe that we should reserve for him his right to make a mistake in the position because he is human, just as we reserve it for Sartre with the Soviet Union, Foucault with Iran, and all the way to Rajab Bou Dabous with Gaddafi, provided that we do not confuse the mistake of the position with the importance of the idea, because we do not know whether we would have seen Heidegger’s mistake if Hitler had won?! If conscience is the creation of the victor, then what right do we have to judge it? If it was an independent call - as he says - then why did he not hear it? Do we say, as Al-Qassimi said to the mind: O conscience, who saw you?!