The word consciousness, from scio, = I know, or its German cognate Bewusstsein, from wissen = to know is heavily freighted with analogies to a knowing, or knowingness. But the roots of consciousness are deep in feeling and emotion while these, lacking any detachment from their objects, and inner distance, are an embarrassment to the theoretic or speculative self understanding of consciousness. Feeling and emotion however are not the end of the story, they are not self-contained, auto-affective, but arise and exist within vast currents that we can point to only with mythological terms - the most powerful of which are eros and its natural opponent. And as these forces come into sharper conflict the times themselves grow mythic.