At a glance
Three histories. They do not become one.
The English word has a spine. Sensing with meets it later. Xin, the Buddhist cuts, and nafs remain parallel. Seeing the shape is part of learning it.
The English word
- syneidēsisGreek
- conscientiaLatin
- consciencethe moral word
- consciousnessthe later word
- 1690Locke, perception
- 1694Locke, person
Sensing with, a second Greek trail
- synaisthēsisPlotinus
- con-senseCudworth, 1678
The atlas
Not a translation table
Each entry shows a range, what the word can mean, and what it should not be equated with. Parallel territories remain parallel.
Latin · Roman to medieval
conscientia
conscientia
Not yet split into two English words. Not every occurrence is modern consciousness.
English / French · medieval to modern
conscience
conscience
Not simply the old word for consciousness. The English split is a history, not a discovery that they were always two things.
English · seventeenth century philosophical sense onward
consciousness
consciousness
Not invented by Cudworth as a phenomenon. Not a clean replacement for conscience.
Not a universal translation of xin, citta, or nafs.
Classical Chinese · Warring States onward
xin
Not the ancient Chinese word for consciousness. Its importance is the different partition.
Sanskrit / Pali · early Buddhist and later Abhidharma
citta
Not interchangeable with manas or vijñāna. Not 'the Buddhist word for consciousness.'
Sanskrit / Pali · early Buddhist and later
manas
Not a self in the Upaniṣadic sense. Not a translation of consciousness.
Sanskrit (Pali: viññāṇa) · early Buddhist onward
vijñāna
Not an enduring self. Not proof that Buddhism had 'our' concept.
Schools disagree about storehouse consciousness and reflexive awareness.
Arabic · classical Islamic philosophy
nafs
Not Descartes' mind. The soul has a natural inclination for the body.
Internal senses are not 'consciousness' as a single term.
Greek · archaic to late antique
psychē
Not already 'mind' in the modern sense. Not consciousness.
Greek · classical to late antique
nous
Not phenomenal consciousness. Intellect is not experience as such.
German · eighteenth century onward
Bewusstsein
Bewusstsein
Not evidence that all European languages split the same way at the same time. French did not.
German · medieval German to modern
Gewissen
Gewissen
Not consciousness. The pair shows a split, not a hierarchy of importance.
When we say
Working English
The atlas is historical. This list is the language of the walk. A teenager and a professor should both be able to stay.
- Neoplatonic cosmos
- A late antique picture of reality as a cascade: from a first source, through intellect and soul, into the material world. Avicenna inherits a version of this. It is not a map of the brain.
- forensic
- Belonging to courts, law, reward and punishment. When Locke calls person a forensic term, he means a being who can be held to account.
- phenomenal
- What it is like. The felt quality of an experience, as opposed to what a system can report or do.
- plastic nature
- Cudworth's name for a living organizing power that can work in the world without express awareness. Not a modern unconscious.
- synderesissin-deh-REE-sis
- A medieval name for an innate spark of first moral principles, distinguished from conscience, which applies those principles to a case and can err.
- Yogācārayo-gah-CHAH-ra
- A Buddhist philosophical school that takes mind as the primary field of analysis. Some later writers in this lineage say awareness can know itself.
- Madhyamakamud-YAH-muh-kuh
- A Buddhist philosophical school that refuses to treat mind, or anything else, as a last substance. Some of its writers reject the claim that awareness knows itself.
- heart-mind
- A scholarly English rendering of xin: thinking, knowing, desiring, feeling, and ethical work in one faculty. Not two English words later glued together.
- Cartesian dualism
- The view, associated with René Descartes, that mind and body are different kinds of thing. Later readers sometimes hear it in Avicenna's flying man. The resemblance is not identity.
- apperception
- Awareness of one's own perceiving. Leibniz distinguished it from petites perceptions, minute perceptions of which we are unaware.
- behaviorism
- A scientific method, especially in the early twentieth century, that treated inner reports as unusable data and measured behavior instead. A method. Not a proof that experience had stopped.
- stream of consciousness
- James's 1890 name for how thought presents itself: personal, changing, continuous, selective. Later, a literary method. The metaphor is an account, not a proof.
- flow
- Csikszentmihalyi's name for absorption in which self-consciousness recedes. Another water. Not James's stream restated.