Private talk:Task: "About Wittgenstein" page/Bemerkungen über Frazers “The Golden Bough”
Edit/comments by Josh Eisenthal, 7 Nov 2023:
According to Rush Rhees, in 1929 [1930? That's what I see in Rhees' intro in my copy of Remarks on Frazer. JE.] Wittgenstein’s disciple Maurice O’Connor Drury (1907-1976) procured and read to his mentor passages from the English anthropologist Sir James George Frazer’s (1854-1941) The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (in the 12-volume edition of 1906-1915). In 1931, Wittgenstein wrote down a series of remarks inspired by Frazer's text. He later revised and expanded them some time after 1936, and more likely after 1948. [Again I am simply looking at Rhees' introduction, but assuming that's what we're going off of, I think we should stick closely to that evidence. Rhees writes: "[Wittgenstein] wrote the second set of remarks - and they are only rough notes - years later"; this is referring to a second section of remarks, not a revision of earlier remarks. JE.] Rhees edited the notes on Frazer for publication and they first appeared in 1967 in the journal Synthese. [Should we also note their later publication as a book? I think we should. JE.] The published text brings together extracts of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass Ms-110, Ts-211 and Ms-143.
In his Remarks on Frazer’s “Golden Bough”, Wittgenstein openly opposes the tendency in anthropology to rationalize apparently irrational practices and behaviours belonging to the sphere of magic and the sacred in non-western societies. To this type of reduction Wittgenstein opposes an account based on the cultural-relative validity of linguistic practices, significantly accusing Frazer of being “far more savage than most of his savages, for these savages will not be as far removed from an understanding of spiritual matters as an Englishman of the twentieth century”. The understanding of anthropological phenomena, Wittgenstein argues, must therefore be relative to the context in which they take place, and in which, for example, a sacrificial or ritual practice is not traceable to the modern scientific explanation, because it arises in an entirely different form of life. Such forms of life are manifest in the language games in which they are embodied, so that, quoting another famous statement from the book, “a whole mythology is deposited in our language”. [I'm a little skeptical of a "cultural relativist" reading of Remarks on Frazer, but I'd want to think about it more. Might be worth discussing this amongst a couple of interested editors? JE.]
In bringing an explicit content to contemporary anthropology [I don't know what this clause means. JE.], Wittgenstein's philosophy thus takes on here some epistemological questions [examples? JE], which will be called up on several occasions in the Philosophical Investigations and in On Certainty.