Description

Wittgenstein observes that certain imaginative pictures can seem so obvious, so self-evident, that they "force" themselves on us. The picture that "held us captive" here was a conception of the isolated ego, the contents of whose mind are transparent to its knowing, while contact with the world is mediated by some kind of "representation." This mind-world dualism, which pictures a contrast between "inner" and "outer," has exercised a "powerful imaginative hold" in theology.2 Indeed, by opening the Philosophical Investigations with a passage from Augustine's Confessions, Wittgenstein touched a nerve in theological anthropology. He thus "plac ed] his explorations of the epistemological predicament of the self in the context of a narrative which, as it interweaves biblical language with metaphysical dualism, autobiography with doxology, establishes the sense of the 'I' in the sight of God which remains the paradigm for the self even where the theology has been abandoned."3