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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
AUGUSTINE ON LANGUAGE LEARNING: §1
Most interpreters take the opening remarks of the Philosophical Investigations as an outline of Wittgenstein's answers to questions about the nature of language. However, the opening of the Philosophical Investigations invites a multiplicity of readings, readings of the words Wittgenstein quotes at the beginning of the book, and of his opening words. As we shall see, Wittgenstein's opening is best understood as raising questions and introducing us to a number of voices in the discussion that follows.
ACCORDING TO MALCOLM, WITTGENSTEIN
revered the writings of St Augustine. He told me he decided to begin his Investigations with a quotation from the latter's Confessions, not because he could not find the conception expressed in that quotation stated as well by other philosophers, but because the conception must be important if so great a mind held it.
The oldest known source of the Philosophical Investigations' discussion of Augustine on language learning gives a similar explanation for the choice of Augustine. There, Wittgenstein parenthetically stresses the significance of the distance between our time and Augustine's:
(And what Augustine says is important for us because it is the conception of a naturally clear thinking man who, being far away from us in time, certainly doesn't belong to our particular intellectual milieu.)
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