The Walk · 1 of 14
KNOWING WITH
What does it mean to know with another, or with oneself?
Hellenistic Greek and Christian Latin. A moral and social vocabulary, not yet a laboratory word.
CON
SCIRE
Latin conscire
KNOWING WITH
to know with
Latin conscientia could mean knowing with another, or with oneself. That older sense is not a definition of the English word on the cover.
Two notebooks, one lamp. Not a photograph of a manuscript.
Hear
Before consciousness was a laboratory problem, it was a moral and social word. In Greek, syneidēsis.
In Latin, conscientia. Both can be heard as a knowing with.
With whom? Sometimes with another person.
Two people privy to the same fact. Shared knowledge.
Being in on something together. Sometimes with oneself.
An inner witness that will not quite go away. A knowledge you keep even when no one else does.
Paul, the apostle, writes in the Letter to the Romans of conscience as a witness that can accuse or defend.
Medieval writers later named an infallible spark, synderesis, and distinguished it from the fallible application they called conscience. None of this is yet the modern psychological word.
It is a territory: joint knowledge, inner witness, moral awareness. Keep the two later histories of with distinct.
This shore is knowing with. The other shore is sensing with.
They are not the same lineage.
Documented
Joint knowledge
The older European vocabulary does not begin as a name for private experience. Syneidēsis and conscientia can mean that two parties know the same thing.
To be conscious of a fact, in this register, is to be privy to it. The knowledge is shared.
It can be social, legal, even dangerous. Thomas Hobbes, the English political philosopher, will still be able to hear this sense in Leviathan, in 1651.
Documented
Inner witness
The same words also turn inward. Knowledge shared with oneself.
A witness that testifies when no second person is in the room. In Christian Latin this becomes a major moral technology: thoughts accusing or defending, a court inside the person.
That is not yet psychology as a science. It is already a theory of what it is to be answerable.
Limit
A witness is not a palace
Later, Augustine of Hippo, writing the Confessions around the year 400, describes memory as a vast inner place. A palace.
A stomach of the mind. A space one can enter.
That is not the same work as a witness in a court. This room keeps the witness: joint knowledge, accusation, defense, answerability.
It does not turn the inner man into a landscape. Some modern readers treat that interior as a later European invention.
The claim is contested. Either way, it is not this shore.
Documented
Synderesis and conscience
Medieval writers, reading Jerome, the late-antique translator of the Latin Bible, in his Commentary on Ezekiel, and building on Paul, distinguished synderesis, an innate grasp of first practical principles, from conscientia, the application of those principles to a case.
The spark was said not to err in its first principles. The application could.
This is moral psychology of a high order. It is not a theory of phenomenal feel.
Open question
What we may have lost sight of
This project may explore the thought that knowing with is something we have partly lost sight of. That is a project reading, not a documented historical law.
The texts show a semantic field in which moral witness and shared knowledge were at home. They do not prove that modern people became less moral when English acquired two words.
This walk is the history of the word. Stories of awakening live in Know With.
Sources
Paul the apostle. Letter to the Romans. c. 57.
Conscience bearing witness, thoughts accusing or defending. A major transmission path for conscientia in Christian moral psychology.
Jerome. Commentary on Ezekiel. c. 414.
A Latin treatment of the spark of conscience later read as synderesis. Important for the medieval conscience tradition, not a theory of phenomenal consciousness.
Hippo, Augustine of. Confessions. c. 397–400.
Memory as a vast inner place. Distinct from the moral inner witness of syneidēsis and conscientia.
Cited here as a limit: a palace is not a court. Not a claim that Augustine invented the inner self.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “Medieval Theories of Conscience.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. consulted 2026.
Synderesis and conscientia. Infallible first principles versus fallible application.
Thiel, Udo. The Early Modern Subject. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
The making of the early modern self. Essential on conscientia, consciousness, and the seventeenth-century subject.