Medieval Philosophy
Augustine on Insight and Illumination
The dialogue is on language. But for Augustine, language cannot be enough to know things. But words and language in general is important for him, in particular from a hermeneutical perspective. He deals with the interpretation of the bible. You need to understand the rules of logic and grammar and rhetorics in order to understand the bible, because it is made of words.
We are now in a learning environment, there is a teacher and a learner. According to Augustine you cannot learn anything from this lecture. This is because learning is not the transfer of knowledge from the teacher to the student. This is because teaching takes place through words, and words are signs, and we can never learn by means of signs.
You can learn only thanks to a sudden insight. This is an illumination in the form of an inner episode of words that tie together the whole. The actual teacher of anyone is Christ himself. This means that you have an inner Christ within you, an illuminatory potential.
”Most of all I am trying to persuade you, if I’ll be able to, that we don’t learn anything by these signs called words.”
”Do teachers hold that it is their thoughts that are perceived and grasped rather than the very disciplines they take themselves to pass on by speaking? After all, who is so foolishly curious as to send his son to school to learn what the teacher things?”
The teacher can only teach their opinion, but no one cares of the teacher’s opinion, people care for the truth.
So knowledge consists on two parts.
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What I know is true. eg. 2+2=4
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And I know what I know to be true. eg. It is true that 2+2=4
The second clause is called the k-k principle.
”Yet anyone who can discern them is inwardly a student of Truth and outwardly a judge of the speaker, or rather of what he says”.
The position of the human teacher is not as high as that of God, because the human teacher can be judged as wrong, whilst Christ can never be so.
However, the teacher can prompt me to consult the inner light within myself, they can act as a midwife to come back to Christ.
”A sign is a thing that of itself cuases something else to enter into thought beyond the appearance it presents to the senses.”
He studies a kind of semiotics.
There are for him natural signs, like smoke.
And then there are intentional signs. These are given with a certain intention. Some of these are naturally given, like animal communication. Some are conventional, and these are agreed upon by a certain group of people as language.
There is also a differentiation between the thing itself and the sign which represents it. Even though a sign is also something.
”All doctrine is about either things or signs, but things are learned through signs. Now I strictly call those items ’things’ that are not employed for signifying anything, as for example a tree – but not the tree of which we read that Moses cast it into bitter waters to remove the bitterness for these are things in such a way that they are also signs of other things. Yet there are other signs whose whole use is in signifying, as for example words; nobody uses words except for the sake of signifying something. Thus every sign is also some thing, for what is no thing is nothing at all. But not every thing is also a sign.”
Sign are implied by things.
Sign – signifying – significate.
External sign – mental concept – thing signified in the world.
Augustine says that when we speak, what does it seem to you we want to accomplish? Either to teach or to learn.
The point is that we cannot acquire knowledge through language.
Some things can be shown by signs. And of things that are not signs,Some things can be shown without signs, whilst no thing can be shown by its sign.
Language is a closed system. What you learn by language is other signs. You need a language to know and understand the translation between different words.
Wittgenstein in the philosophical investigations argues that we can use the ostention. We can aim with our finger at something. And this is language, because we use a gesture, which is a sign.
So how can we reach the world?
Because reaching the world means to have knowledge. And you have knowledge if you reach the things themselves.
Some things are shown without signs, these are called self-exhibiting, like walking. Why is walking self-exhibiting? Because walking is something I can show to someone else, without meaning it as a sign. It can mean a lot of things, but there may be no intentional sign behind it. For him, first-hand knowledge is also self-exhibited. Things we experience purely without the medium of language does not require signs.
The role of Meno in Augustine.
”How will you look for it, Socrates, when you do not know at all what it is? How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, will you know that this is the thing that you did not know”. From Meno.
”I know what you want to say. You realise what a debater’s argument you are bringing up, that a man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know? He cannot search for what he knows – since he knows it, there is no need to search – nor for what he does not know what to look for.” Socrates’ answer.
Augustine presents a semantic version of the paradox.
”When a sign is goven to me, it can teach me nothing if it finds me ignorant of the thing of which it is a sign; but if I am not ignorant, what do I learn through a sign”.
”and their sarabarae were unchanged”
This word doesn’t show me the thing it signifies. If certain head coverings are denominated by this name, I have learned upon hearing it what the head is or what coverings are? I knew these things before; my conception of them wasn’t fashioned because they were named by others, but because I saw them.”
So how do we escape language for Augustine?
There is no Humboldtian idea that language and thought are more or less the same. There is no idea that thoughts are said by language. Thinking and expressing are two completely different things to Augustine. There is a proper interiority. The mind and your thoughts are something very specific, and the language that can express your mind is so also. In much phil of language there is the idea that German or greek is the language of philosophy, behind this idea is a strong connection between language and thought.
There seems to be no clear connection between reality and what I say. But when there is the referens, you have an image of eg. a person in your mind.
People can lie. This is one of the core problems of language, because one can hide their interiority. And so, there is this discrepency between word and thought. Same with slips of the tongue, language can imply some problem in communication, you mean something but say something else. Sometimes language is also ambiguous. In reading the bible there is always some ambiguity in the text.
The doctrine of illumination:
”When teachers have expalined by means of words all the disciplines they professs to teach, even the disciplines of virtue and wisdom, then those who are called studnets consider within themselves whether truths have been stated. They do so by looking upon the inner truth, according to their abilities. That is therefore the point at which they learn.”