German · German moral vocabulary
Gewissen
Heard as guh-VISS-en
- Period
- medieval German to modern
- Semantic range
- Conscience, moral witness.
- What it can mean
- The moral inner court, distinct in later German from Bewusstsein.
- What it should not be equated with
- Not consciousness. The pair shows a split, not a hierarchy of importance.
- Primary or early source
- German religious and moral prose.
- Scholarly source
- Lexical histories of conscience and consciousness.
- Relation to other terms
- The German moral sibling of Bewusstsein.