and my point is most easily made by reference to well-known passages in the Philosophical Investigations. In these passages Wittgenstein seems to put in question the very possibility of a distinction between the knowing subject and the contents of its experience. What I find most striking about the experiential contents, which he describes, is that they all seem to be unitary – there is, so to speak, “only one thing about them”, as can be seen most clearly from his discussion of the famous sensation S (Wittgenstein, 1958: 92-95). Any sensation, from a tickle to a sharp pain, would serve his purpose equally well, and the unitary nature of such a sensation seems obvious, since there is nothing else to it but how it feels.
Now, it seems perfectly feasible to have such a sensation once, remember it, and be able to identify a future sensation as the same as the first, but Wittgenstein challenges the possibility of doing this. There is much disagreement about what he means, but I think that his point is as follows: if a new sensation occurs and I recognise it as another S, there must be an initial moment when I am aware of the new sensation before I recognise it as another S. My “inner eye” must first settle on the new experiential content and only in the next moment do I judge it to be the same as a previous content. Without this division into two moments, the phenomenon of recognition does not occur and each new sensation would appear to be unique of its kind. A continuity that is essential to subjectivity – nothing less than the faculty of memory – is then lost: the experiencing subject is reduced to a series of mirrors attached to the series of contents and may as well be dispensed with altogether.9 ((This can be connected with the mirroring theory in the Tractatus.))Wittgenstein, I think, really does believe that this problem applies. He believes it because he is sure that every new experiential content is, as I said above, “unitary”, that “there is only one thing about it” and, that being the case, the two distinct moments, which are necessary in order for recognition to occur, are unobtainable – to become aware of a content is already to become aware of everything about it (because there is only one thing about it).
So Wittgenstein lacks a firm grasp on the separation between self and everything other than self just because he cannot accept Freud’s insistence that experiential contents are never unitary – that “perceptual cathexes are never cathexes of single neurones