When Wittgenstein chose St Augustine’s account of how an infant learns to speak, he was surely signalling his intention to interrogate the whole western way of thinking (and feeling) about the relation of body and soul. He was engaging in the Philosophy of Psychology, as they say. The hard thing, as he noted (Culture and Value, p 48), is to get hold of the difficulty deep down: “Because if it is grasped near the surface it simply remains the difficulty it was. It has to be pulled out by the roots; and that involves our beginning to think about these things in a new way”. Merely to say that we no longer believe in the story of the soul’s exile in the body doesn’t mean that we have worked ourselves free of all the ramifications of that powerful ancient myth. On the contrary, quickly reached ‘results’ in philosophy, or easily ‘taught’ methods and theses, only leave the student more oblivious than ever to his or her own confusion. “The philosopher treats a question — like an illness” (Investigations, no 254). The sickness must run its natural course: “slow cure is all important” (Zettel, no 382). Wittgenstein held that the ‘solution’ to a problem in philosophy is no good unless it comes to you when you need it. The first step in philosophical work is thus to make us see that we really did need such an answer. In fact Wittgenstein “hoped to show that you had confusions you never thought you could have had”.
