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

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” (1922), that “a function cannot be its own argument”.
 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 (ξ) = – ξ (ξ)”. 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 figures of contradictions by St Augustine are the paradox in time. The figures of contradictions by L. Wittgenstein are the antinomy in space.