I can’t decide whether self-consciousness is a virtue or a vice.
It’s a fact of life, I suppose, but so is envy and greed and all the other things good people try to control and mitigate. It might be good, because self control requires us to possess self-consciousness. And yet even something as good as self control is against nature, and could be considered contrived and false. If our nature is good, we don’t need to control ourselves; and therefore we don’t need to be self-conscious.
The Bible — if read naturally and holistically — teaches that we are inherently evil, but that God convicts our spirits and drives us to repent. We do not change ourselves, we are changed by Him. That is an important distinction. Change comes through submission to something higher, not by controlling yourself and being hyper-aware. Although it also teaches to “examine yourself” on a regular basis to determine whether you are living up to your divine calling.
If we strip away the divine element of all that, we have a pretty classic view of humans as evil, and self-denial as good. The more self-conscious we are, the more fully we can deny ourselves. But if we go too far in our self-consciousness while failing to submit ourselves to something idealistic and pure, this self-denial is pointless and will only lead to a sense of defeat and hopelessness. We can kill ourselves, but only if we allow ourselves to be reborn as something better and beyond our reach.
In more pragmatic terms — where virtue and vice are irrelevant — self-consciousness is the same as every other human quality, in that it has the potential to be useful or counter-productive depending on the situation.
