Confessions 1.8.13 and the Inner Life of Language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2025
This chapter takes up the language-learning passage from Confessions 1.8.13, which Wittgenstein quoted at the beginning of his Philosophical Investigations. “Where Wittgenstein notices an impossible kind of foreignness in Augustine’s confessional account of first language-learning,” it observes, “Augustine negotiates the mystery of the soul’s alienation from God.” Here is another kind of foreignness, and that chapter aims at inducing a kind of perplexity in our consideration of Augustine’s superficially straightforward account of language-learning. Drawing on Augustine’s dialogue On the Teacher, it invites us to puzzle over Augustine’s insistence that language is for teaching – apparently to the exclusion of learning – only to find him concluding that no human being is ever a teacher. The only teacher is the Inner Teacher, the Word, who teaches not by signs but by the realities themselves, with an intimacy and interiority that the infant Augustine longed for but never captured. The Word’s teaching overcomes both the foreignness and the alienation with which Augustine began, though this resolution poses the temptation “to render the whole of the earth, indeed even creation itself, into a place of unlikeness.”
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