Consciousness — A multivalent term that names, in a broad sense, a being’s capacity to be aware of itself and of the world. Etymologically it derives from the Latin conscientia (cum + scire, “to know with”), which fuses both a moral sense — the “conscience” that approves or condemns one’s own acts — and a cognitive one, knowledge accompanied by reflection. In modern philosophy, John Locke, in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, defines consciousness as the perception of what passes in one’s own mind and ties it to personal identity: what makes someone the same person over time is the continuity of consciousness, not the underlying substance. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, consciousness is a dialectical movement through which Spirit comes to know itself through the other, as the celebrated master-slave dialectic illustrates. Husserl and phenomenology investigate consciousness as intentionality: all consciousness is consciousness of something, always directed toward an object; there is no empty consciousness. Sartre radicalizes this thesis by claiming that human consciousness is a “nothingness,” for it defines itself through negation — through the capacity to negate the given and project possibilities, thereby grounding freedom. A further distinction sets consciousness of something (intentional) apart from self-consciousness, the consciousness that turns back upon itself. Closely related concepts are intentionality, subjectivity, and, in the moral tradition, the notion of conscience as a tribunal of ethical judgment.
← Glossary