The One Thing Needful: A Study in Ethical Difficulty

Abstract

This thesis investigates ethical life as a form of non-conceptual knowledge that mirrors the structure of a divine revelation. Drawing on philosophical and literary sources—including Levinas, Kierkegaard, Shakespeare's Hamlet, and Kieślowski's Dekalog—it argues that ethical obligation confronts us as a demand whose source and content are often unknowable yet existentially binding. The figure of the Ghost in Hamlet serves as a paradigmatic expression of this structure: a spectral presence that discloses injustice and summons responsibility without offering the means for its realization. It is also a figure that represents the particular structure experience of conscience. Conscience, in this account, is revealed not as propositional or rational knowledge but as a disruptive force that fractures identity and eludes political recognition. The paper explores the tragic dimensions of ethical life that emerge from this situation—of knowledge, action, and selfhood—and concludes by examining how conscience, though irreducible to law, nonetheless grounds political life in ways that simultaneously destabilize it.