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Some milestones in the long journey of our Human reflection upon Consciousness. II

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In European medieval philosophy the concept of conscience is fundamentally applied in its moral dimension. For Thomas Aquinas, consciousness is an application of knowledge to present action, that is, it is an expression of the synderesis of the human intellect. We understand synderesis as the innate principle in the moral consciousness of every man, a principle which directs the human being to good and restrains her/him from evil. Such understanding of consciousness is akin to the Eastern concept of dharma. We cannot consider it as a mere moral concept in terms of the contemporary ethical framework of Human Law. It is not a direction of action based on reflections that rest on pragmatic principles of ethical action such as those that we find embodied in contemporary political constitutions. Rather, it is a way of thinking anchored in a Universal Law that makes the human being a transcendental being capable of thinking in universal and transcendental terms.

In Leibniz's Monadology we find perhaps the first appearance of the word "consciousness" as self-awareness in the Western modern tradition:

The passing condition which represents a multiplicity in the unity, or in the simple substance, is nothing else than what is called Perception. This should be carefully distinguished from Apperception or Consciousness, as will appear in what follows. In this matter the Cartesians have fallen into a serious error, in that they treat as non-existent those perceptions of which we are not conscious (Leibniz. Monadology. #14)

In Leibniz, consciousness is a property of the human soul, which is immortal and is in a process of self-knowledge. It is linked to memory, but not only to explicit memory, since it recognizes (as Paracelsus had already done) a form of unconscious memory linked to unnoticed perception. Consciousness as self-knowledge also appears in German transcendental idealism, as we observe in the philosophy of Schelling or Hegel. Thus understood, consciousness would be an intentional action of self-reflection. Consciousness and self-consciousness are two actions that arise from the same epistemological intention. We could say that its origin is the same desire to know that invariably includes self-knowledge. There is a will to know that precedes any knowledge and generates a process of unveiling of the subject that knows, as well as the known object. The origin of knowledge is in the Volitive Soul.


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