1) St. Augustine’s understanding of the essence of language is rooted in the abstract connection of verbal utterances from their internal workings or “private essence.” St. Augustine describes an instance by which his elders, those who had a language before him, expressed body language and verbal utterances and “thus, as I heard words repeatedly in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires.” Wittgenstein views this as account of language as a system of signs that derives meaning via each sign’s being associated with the objects for which that sign stands when he says “every word has a meaning. The meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands.”

St. Augustine relates another account in which he describes humans as having a “private essence.” He states “I began to realize where I was and to want to make my wishes known to others, who might satisfy them…my wishes were inside me, while other people were outside, and they had no faculty which could penetrate my m

Wittgenstein, in PI 283, draws from this that the body is a thing seen more as belonging to an external world while pain is an internal or a psychological entity inside of the body, and thus we are unable to connect the inner notion of pain with the external body. Wittgenstein furthers his assertion with the example of the corpse by stating that at death the human body becomes a thing that no longer has access to an internal/psychological description. Wittgenstein says that what distinguishes our ideation of the movement of living things from the movement of physical objects is that we give them a meaning which enters into our description of them, thus delineating the living from the non-living in our language game. Wittgenstein’s understanding is of the descriptive grammatical role in language by which we make observations about internal/psychological concepts and our observation of external human movement. Thus pain doesn’t describe a thing inside of our physical body but makes a connection with our living body by describing the meaning of its movement, as expressed in PI 286. I am inclined to agree with Wittgenstein on these points because, even though we have more advanced means of making physical observations about pain and mental functioning, our linguistic ability to get at the nature of these internal notions is still lacking.

Wittgenstein wants us to see that we have a certain ideal of pain which cannot be attributed to the body at all. The problem for Wittgenstein is grammatical; he states: “only of what behaves like a human being can one say that it has pains. For one has to say it of a body, or, if you like of a soul, which some body has.” Here, Wittgenstein denies the retainer of pain is a thing by reiterating the observation “Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations. – One says for oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number. –Now look at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish and pain seems able to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it.”

ind.” Thus, we see that St. Augustine’s notion of the essence of language is a system of symbols designed to communicate wishes locked inside via the external being. St. Augustine claims that the “private essence” is what gives meaning to the link between sign and object, and comprehension entails the connection between a verbal utterance and the external object it signifies, i.e. when one can point to an object and correctly identify it with the appropriate symbol so that others may understand.

5) Wittgenstein’s critique of a private language begins with the problem of talking about private sensations. Wittgenstein’s problem with private language is that it att

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