A Comparative Analysis of Conscience and its Original Meaning in the Languages of Ancient Civilizations

This article is the first part of the main research, which aims to analyze the concept of conscience from different perspectives and describe its basic structure and process. A concentrated and comprehensive study of conscience is necessary, because it is the key to clarifying the historical tradition and logic of human morality, and especially it is also the cornerstone of the Kazakh moral system. The goal of this study is to achieve the historical linguistic and ethical understanding necessary to determine that conscience is a consciousness dimension in the horizon of personal morality. This article phenomenologically described the dominant role of conscience as self-monitoring and self-evaluation in the system of desire and choice; etymological and semantic comparisons were also made with historical concepts of conscience in Kazakh, Greek, Latin, Chinese and Persian languages; furthermore, a hermeneutic analysis of the related Kazakh default contexts was performed to determine the difference of conscience from the basic ethical categories such as shame, compunction and honor. Along with the correspondence between conscience and desire, conscience and reason, attention was also paid to the possibility of conflict between them. Despite its historical and cultural uniqueness, it was concluded that the Kazakh concept of «ar» (conscience) is synonymous with related terms in the system of world philosophical categories.