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RHETORIC OF LOVE IN ST. AUGUSTINE’S “CONFESSIONS” AND THE “SHIMMERING CONCEPT” OF L. WITTGENSTEIN

Vladimir Vinokurov, M. Vorontsova

Abstract

The aim is to show the disintegration of a personality by analyzing the fragment of “Confession” by St Augustine. It allows us to come from the phenomenological description of personality transformation process to means of psychological defense. By solving the questions of love St Augustine uses hidden rhetorical constructions, which reflect his emotional processes in the most adequate way. They should be analyzed and clarified. The rhetorical aspect of this transformation can be reconstructed from that part of “Confession” where Augustine describes his Carthage impressions. He suffers psychological chaos: he “ran into love”, “loving love”. Augustine finally summarizes these impressions by saying “I loved not yet, yet I loved to love”. Thesis becomes antithesis and that is the circle. Wittgenstein wrote in “Tractatus Logico-philosophicus” (in German 1921, in English 1922; revised 1933, 1961): “3.333. A function cannot be its own argument, because the functional sign already contains the prototype of its own argument and it cannot contain itself” – F (f). In “Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics” (1942) Wittgenstein returns to this topic. For the description of this contradiction Wittgenstein proposes a kind of function: ”F (F), where F (?) = – ? (?)”. It is “a shimmering concept”. Contradiction is part of logical symbolism, but topologically, the figures of contradictions, which use Augustine and Wittgenstein, are different. They describe a variety of psychological processes. The figure of contradictions by St Augustine is the paradox in time. The figure of contradictions by L. Wittgenstein is the antinomy in space.

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