In the book History of the Mind, the story behind the word “conscious”:

The word “conscious” derives from the Latin con, meaning “together with,” and scire, meaning “to know.” In the original Latin the verb conscire (from which came the adjective conscious) meant literally to share knowledge with other people. This implied, originally, sharing the knowledge widely. But, as time went on the usage changed, and it shifted to meaning sharing knowledge with some people but not others, sharing it within a small circle—and thus being privy to a secret. Caesar and his generals, for example, were conscious of their battle plans.
There was then a further change in this direction. The circle of those with who knowledge was shared became drawn tighter and tighter—until eventually it included just a single person, the subject who was conscious. To be conscious sibi, conscious with one-self, had come to mean that the subject was the only one who knew something—and by implication that he was unwilling to share it with anyone else. By the first century A.D. Horace could write that a man’s epitaph should be “nil conscire sibi”: to be “conscious with himself of nothing,” and so to have no guilty secrets.
After the word “conscious” came into English in the Middle Ages, its meaning underwent another shift. People wanted to make a distinction between, on the one hand, “having private knowledge that one would not want anyone else to have access to” (for example—as already implied by Horace—knowledge of one’s own secret)

The history of consciousness is the history of a retreat. The mind moves from the many to the one. In one’s head is a secret conversation. What are you saying? Who are you talking with? What are you two planning? We want to know these things that are being said in a whisper behind the eyes.

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Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

5 replies on “A Strange History”

  1. People often take the prefix “con-/com-” (itself related to “cum”) to mean “with.” Sometimes it does, yes. However, really what that prefix means is “collective” or “general.” Conscio doesn’t meant “knowing with” so much as it means “knowing in general.” The “con-/com-” prefix is cognate with German “ge-,” actually, in collective words like “Gebrueder” or “Gefilde.”

  3. Interesting… this memetic evolution of the word is not at all dissimilar to Julian Jaynes thesis for the evolution of individual consciousness — as the internal storyteller — being spawned from mirroring within the bicameral mind of shared communal dialogs and directions. (And the timeline matches pretty well too!)

  4. Consciousness is always the dialog of the slave (who is conscious) speaking to the master (who is unconscious). Trying to evoke pity? remorse? But not exactly trying to wake him.

  5. Since you were on a primate evolution kick earlier, I have to bring up that “What are you two planning?” and “Who are you talking with?” issues are why our eyes have whites, while the great apes do not. It makes it easier to keep up with the soap opera going on amongst all of us. Not that the other apes aren’t doing the soap opera intrigue, too. (And not that they’re talking, but, you know.)

    Are orangutans conscious? I dunno. Do they like Natalie Merchant? Probably. Heck, orangs like Julia Roberts, and she looks like a horse.

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