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Inside you are two wolves. They are both totally depraved.
“Two wolves” is said in many ways
While for moderns, the literal belief that inside us there are two wolves might be impossible, as metaphor or symbol it remains true and helpful for human flourishing.
From the perspective of the poor and an action-reflection hermeneutic, we learn the two wolves inside us are in fact the wolf of capitalism and the wolf of revolution.
In seeking to understand the claim that there are two wolves inside us, rather than looking to external criteria to prove or falsify it we need instead to attend to the grammar of the claim itself.
Inside you are two wolves. They are in a non-competitive relation with each other, and also with you.
Once, we had selves which were porous, allowing wolves to enter. But now they are buffered and the wolves can't get in any more, for most of us.
There is no independently-existing 'self' which the wolves could be inside of; instead the self is articulated and expressed by the field of power relations of the wolves.
Truly, what is the end of the Christian life other than this: the birth of the two wolves in the soul?
The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each movement of an opponent with a countermove. ... Actually, two wolves sat inside and guided the puppet's hand by means of strings.
The heaviest weight. -- What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "Inside you are two wolves"
Once we could say "inside you are two wolves" and have it mean something. But we have lost the structure of practices within which this was intelligible; now it is little more than an assertion of desire.
When you hear "inside you are two wolves," you probably picture male wolves. But this is not required by the grammar of the sentence, and indeed it has always been asserted that the wolves are technically beyond gender. So might not we say: "inside you are two female wolves"?
It is true that there are two wolves inside us, but we have erred in believing that we could come to know the wolves by our own capacity, as if they were not themselves, in their freely choosing to be for us, the very condition of possibility of our knowledge of them.
Things went awry when we lost the ability to rightly describe the wolfness of the two wolves in us, seeing it simply as the name describing shared features of the wolves as a collection of individuals rather than a substantial identity which individual wolves participate in.
Before and with the two wolves inside us we live without the two wolves inside us.
When we say that there are two wolves inside us, what we are actually doing is describing our own all-too-human aspirations and highest attributes, blowing them up in wolfish form so that they stand and confront us as something other than us.
Now, when discussing how one of the wolves inside us generates the other, we must be careful to eliminate everything material and fleshly; the point is to name a relation, not peer into the mystery of that generation, which is forever closed to us.
You say that it makes no sense to say that there are two wolves inside you, that they're too big and couldn't fit. But this betrays your own captivity to prideful reason. As for us, we will just stick with the word given to us: inside you there are two wolves. "Are" means "are."
