[…]…that a particular theory of language has dominated ‘Western’ (and, indeed, ‘Eastern’) thought for over two thousand years. This approach sees the primary role of discourse (in fact, in many cases, its only role) as representational, and hence that it acts solely as a vehicle for thought (or, perhaps, an outer expression of ‘inner thought’), not as a means of communication. In fact, if discourse was ever (reluctantly) seen as a means of communication, it was then often regarded as a vehicle for communicating thoughts already arrived at independently of, and prior to, social interaction.
In fact, language was originally considered – by priests, theologians and philosophers, for example – to be a gift of the ‘gods’, and thus a ‘hot line’ the use of which would allow them to re-present their ‘thoughts’ to humanity – or, to be more accurate, re-presented only to a ‘chosen’ few. Alternatively, the latter could think ‘divine’ thoughts on behalf of the masses, which thoughts were often expressed in esoteric, allegorical, poetic or figurative language, who would then deliver these profundities to ‘expectant humanity’ as if they had come from on high.
Indeed, as Umberto Eco points out (in relation to the ‘western’, Christian tradition):
"God spoke before all things, and said, ‘Let there be light.’ In this way, he created both heaven and earth; for with the utterance of the divine word, ‘there was light’… Thus Creation itself arose through an act of speech; it is only by giving things their names that he created them and gave them their ontological status…
"In Genesis…, the Lord speaks to man for the first time… We are not told in what language God spoke to Adam. Tradition has pictured it as a sort of language of interior illumination, in which God…expresses himself…
“…Clearly we are here in the presence of a motif, common to other religions and mythologies – that of the nomothete, the name-giver, the creator of language.” [Eco (1997), pp.7-8. Bold emphases and links added.]
Language was therefore a vehicle for the “inner illumination” of the ‘soul’; a hot-line to ‘God’. Unsurprisingly, the theories concocted by countless generations of ruling-class hacks turned out to be those that – ‘coincidentally’, you understand – almost invariably rationalised or ‘justified’ the status quo, alongside obscene inequality and systematic oppression.
These ancient fantasies also suggested that not only had the heavens been called into existence by the use of language, but language – The ‘Word of God’ – now ran the entire show. And yet, the exclusive medium in which much of this fable was expressed wasn’t just any old language, and it certainly wasn’t the vernacular. It was a highly specialised language full of freshly minted, jargonised expressions, invented by these theorists in order to re-present the ‘divine’ order and ‘god’s’ thoughts to humanity. Ordinary words based on the lives and experience of ordinary working people were plainly inadequate. As the late Professor Havelock pointed out:
"As long as preserved communication remained oral, the environment could be described or explained only in the guise of stories which represent it as the work of agents: that is gods. Hesiod takes the step of trying to unify those stories into one great story, which becomes a cosmic theogony. A great series of matings and births of gods is narrated to symbolise the present experience of the sky, earth, seas, mountains, storms, rivers, and stars. His poem is the first attempt we have in a style in which the resources of documentation have begun to intrude upon the manner of an acoustic composition. But his account is still a narrative of events, of ‘beginnings,’ that is, ‘births,’ as his critics the Presocratics were to put it. From the standpoint of a sophisticated philosophical language, such as was available to Aristotle, what was lacking was a set of commonplace but abstract terms which by their interrelations could describe the physical world conceptually; terms such as space, void, matter, body, element, motion, immobility, change, permanence, substratum, quantity, quality, dimension, unit, and the like. Aside altogether from the coinage of abstract nouns, the conceptual task also required the elimination of verbs of doing and acting and happening, one may even say, of living and dying, in favour of a syntax which states permanent relationships between conceptual terms systematically. For this purpose the required linguistic mechanism was furnished by the timeless present of the verb to be – the copula of analytic statement.
“The history of early philosophy is usually written under the assumption that this kind of vocabulary was already available to the first Greek thinkers. The evidence of their own language is that it was not. They had to initiate the process of inventing it… Nevertheless, the Presocratics could not invent such language by an act of novel creation. They had to begin with what was available, namely, the vocabulary and syntax of orally memorised speech, in particular the language of Homer and Hesiod. What they proceeded to do was to take the language of the mythos and manipulate it, forcing its terms into fresh syntactical relationships which had the constant effect of stretching and extending their application, giving them a cosmic rather than a particular reference.” [Havelock (1983), pp.13-14, 21. Bold emphases added; quotation marks altered to conform with the conventions adopted at this site. Spelling modified to agree with UK English. Links added; some paragraphs merged.]
Subsequently, in the work of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus, for example, language was transformed into a device that enabled the ‘soul’ to converse with itself (via “inner speech”), which prompted these and subsequent philosophers into concluding they had ready access to ‘divine’, eternal verities, derived from thought alone.1 As noted above, ‘languageless thought’ was regarded as the means by which the ‘select few’ could draw close to ‘Being’/‘God’ – an idea that helped motivate the ‘problem’ of the relation between the ‘Knower’ and the ‘Known’, which later re-surfaced as the main problematic of German Idealism – which subsequently reappeared in an ‘inverted’ form in ‘Materialist Dialectics’ as a key component in the alleged relationship between ‘Thought’ and ‘Being’.1a
In the work of early modern (and increasingly secular) theorists, ‘consciousness’ has come to refer to what supposedly goes on in an inner, private arena, where the bourgeois ‘Mind’/‘Soul’ – operating now as a socially-isolated ‘atom’ --, could represent to itself not just these ‘divine’ verities, but also any ‘information’ (‘impressions’, ‘images’, ‘ideas’) the senses sent its way – in many cases with the former shaping the latter. Peter Hacker fills in the details:
"Although the ancients raised questions about our own knowledge of our perceptions and thought, and introduced the idea of an inner sense, they had no word for consciousness and they did not characterize the mind as the domain of consciousness. Aristotelians conceived of the mind as the array of powers that distinguish humanity from the rest of animate nature… What is distinctive of humanity, and what characterizes the mind, are the powers of the intellect – of reason and of the rational will. Knowledge of these powers is not obtained by ‘consciousness’ or ‘introspection’, but by observing their exercise in our engagement with the world around us. The medievals followed suit. They too lacked a term for consciousness, but they likewise indulged in reflection upon ‘inner senses’, arguably – in the wake of Avicenna’s distinguishing five such senses – to excess.
"Descartes’s innovations with regard to the uses in philosophy of the Latin ‘conscientia’ (which had not hitherto signified consciousness at all) as well as the French ‘la conscience’, were of capital importance. For it was he who introduced the novel use of the term into the philosophical vocabulary. He invoked it in order to account for the indubitable and infallible knowledge which he held we have of our Thoughts (cogitationes) or Operations of the Mind. His reflections reshaped our conception of the mind and redrew the boundaries of the mental. Thenceforth consciousness, as opposed to intellect and sensitivity to reasons in thought, affection, intention and action, was treated as the mark of the mental and the characteristic of the mind.
"The expression ‘conscius’ and the French word ‘conscient’, and the attendant conception of consciousness, caught on among his correspondents and successors (Gassendi, Arnauld, La Forge, Malebranche). So too ‘consciousness’ and ‘conscious’ caught on among English philosophers, churchmen and scientists (Stanley, Tillotson, Cumberland, Cudworth and Boyle). But it is to Locke that we must turn to find the most influential, fully fledged, philosophical conception of consciousness that, with some variations, was to dominate reflection on the nature of the human mind thenceforth. This conception was to come to its baroque culmination in the writings of Kant. In the Lockean tradition, consciousness is an inner sense. Unlike outer sense, it is indubitable and infallible. It is limited in its objects to the operations of the mind. The objects of consciousness are private to each subject of experience and thought. What one is thus conscious of in inner sense constitutes the subjective foundation of empirical knowledge. Because consciousness is thus confined to one’s own mental operations, it was conceived to be equivalent to self-consciousness – understood as knowledge of how things are ‘subjectively’ (privately, in foro interno (‘inside the individual concerned’ – RL)) with one’s self.
“The ordinary use of the English noun ‘consciousness’ and its cognates originates in the early seventeenth century, a mere three or four decades prior to the Cartesian introduction of a novel sense of ‘conscius’ and ‘conscient’ into philosophy in the 1640s. So it evolved side by side with the philosophical use – but, on the whole, in fortunate independence of it. For the ordinary use developed, over the next three centuries, into a valuable if specialized instrument in our toolkit of cognitive concepts. By contrast, as we shall see, philosophical usage sank deeper and deeper into quagmires of confusion and incoherence from which it has not recovered to this day.” [Hacker (2013a), pp.11-12. (See also the more detailed comments on the history of this word: pp.15-19, as well as this paper by Hacker. (This links to a PDF.)) Italic emphases in the original; links added.]
"The term ‘consciousness’ is a latecomer upon the stage of Western philosophy. The ancients had no such term. Sunoida, like its Latin equivalent conscio, meant the same as ‘I know together with’ or ‘I am privy, with another, to the knowledge that’. If the prefixes sun and cum functioned merely as intensifiers, then the verbs meant simply ‘I know well’ or ‘I am well aware that’. Although the ancients did indeed raise questions about the nature of our knowledge of our own perceptions and thought, and introduced the idea of an inner sense, they did not characterize the mind as the domain of consciousness. Aristotelians conceived of the mind as the array of powers that distinguish humanity from the rest of animate nature. The powers of self-movement, of perception and sensation, and of appetite, are shared with other animals. What is distinctive of humanity, and what characterizes the mind, are the powers of the intellect – of reason, and of the rational will. Knowledge of these powers is not obtained by consciousness or introspection, but by observation of their exercise in our engagement with the world around us. The mediaevals followed suit. They likewise lacked any term for consciousness, although they too indulged in reflections upon ‘inner senses’ – in the wake of Avicenna’s distinguishing five such senses, arguably to excess…
"The English word ‘conscious’ is recorded by the OED [Oxford English Dictionary – RL] as first occurring at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when, like the Latin ‘conscius’, it signified sharing knowledge with another or being witness to something. In its early forms, it occurred in phrases such as ‘being conscious to another’ and ‘being conscious to something’. But sharing knowledge rapidly evolved into being privy to unshared knowledge, either about others or about oneself. So ‘to be conscious to’ quickly became a cousin to the much older expression ‘to be aware of’. The form ‘to be conscious to’ was slowly displaced by ‘to be conscious of’. ‘To be conscious of something’, of course, signified a form of knowledge. So like ‘to know’, ‘to be conscious of something’ is a factive verb – one cannot be conscious of something that does not exist or is not the case. Outside philosophy, there was no suggestion whatsoever that the objects of consciousness, i.e. that of which one can be said to be conscious, are restricted to one’s own mental operations. One could be said to be conscious of what one perceived, or of some feature of what one perceived, of one’s own or another’s deeds – both good and evil, of a pertinent fact (the lateness of the hour, the merits of a case) and of one’s own or another’s virtues or vices, and so forth. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that ‘consciousness’ came to be used to signify wakefulness as opposed to being unconscious. Thenceforth one could speak of losing and regaining consciousness. The common or garden notions of self-consciousness, i.e. either being excessively aware of one’s appearance (a usage now lapsed) or being embarrassingly aware that others are looking at one, is nineteenth-century vintage. Being class conscious, money-conscious, or safety-conscious are twentieth century coinage…
"The expression ‘conscious’ was introduced into philosophy, almost inadvertently, by Descartes. It does not appear in his work prior to the Meditations (1641), and even there it occurs just once. In the Third Meditation, it occurs not in relation to knowledge of one’s ‘thoughts’ or ‘operations of the mind’, but in relation to awareness of the power to perpetuate one’s own existence (AT VII, 49; CSM II, 34). It was only under pressure from objectors to this single remark that Descartes was forced, in his ‘Replies to Objections’, to elaborate his ideas on knowing our own ‘thoughts’. His developed position in the Principles and late correspondence was unstable. The expression and attendant conception, caught on among Descartes’ contemporaries and successors (Gassendi, Arnauld, La Forge) and among English philosophers (Stanley, Tillotson, Cumberland and Cudworth). But it is to Locke, almost fifty years later, that we must turn to find the most influential, fully fledged, philosophical concept of consciousness that was to dominate reflection on the nature of the human mind thenceforth. The attendant conception was to come to its baroque culmination (or perhaps nadir of confusion) in the writings of Kant and the post-Kantian German idealists.
“Descartes used the terms conscientia, conscius, and conscio to signify a form of knowledge, namely the alleged direct knowledge we have of what is passing in our minds. What we are conscious of (which I shall call the ‘objects of consciousness’) are Thoughts, a term which Descartes stretched to include thinking (as ordinarily understood), sensing or perceiving (shorn of their factive force), understanding, wanting, and imagining. Because he held thinking to be the sole essential attribute of immaterial substances, he claimed that we are thinking all the time, waking or sleeping. He also held that consciousness of operations of the mind is indubitable and infallible. He argued that the mind is, as it were, transparent. For, he wrote (AT VII, 214; CSM II, 150), it is self-evident that one cannot have a thought and not be conscious of it – although the thoughts we have in sleep are immediately forgotten.” [Hacker (2012), pp.1-3. (This links to a PDF.) Italic emphases in the original, links added. “AT” refers to one of the standard collections of Descartes’s work, edited by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery; “CSM” refers to the more recent edition by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny. Even though the second passage of Hacker’s repeats parts of the first, I have quoted it since it adds significant extra details.]
[I have said much more about the Christian-Platonic-Cartesian Paradigm, making slightly different points in Note 1.]
In general, this family of theories held that this ‘information’ was processed by ‘the mind’ employing one or more of the following principles: (a) A set of ‘innate’ ideas, b) Privately applied rules or habits of ‘the mind’, (c) A collection of (arbitrarily chosen) ‘categories’ or ‘concepts’, which were supposedly implanted in us by ‘god’, or the presence of which was necessitated by our psychological, ‘logical’, or, more recently, our genetic and evolutionary make-up.