ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that a certain feature of the phenomenology of language—the prereflective presumption that words refer to pictures and that the pictures depict metaphysical entities—plays a constitutive role in such illusory transformations. Wittgenstein's account of how language bewitches one's intelligence is a singular achievement in the phenomenology of language. The picture of the mind as an entity located in artesian space—a picture institutionalized in the experience of everyday language—reifies what Zahavi calls experiential selfhood, the "mineness" of one's experiences. Such a picture prereflectively transforms the vulnerable, context-dependent, and evanescent experience of mineness into the stability and clarity of geometric space. In actual language use, the pictures accompanying the use of this word fluctuate, in a kind of dance of variations in which what is denoted and connoted, shifts from moment to moment in synchrony with changes in its context. When the illusory picture is then imagined as ultimately real, the word has become transformed into a metaphysical entity.
