Project:About Wittgenstein: Difference between revisions

According to Rush Rhees, in 1929 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). Wittgenstein drew from the reading a series of notes in German during 1931, and then revised and expanded them later, later then 1936 and probably after 1948. Rhees incorporated the set of notes on Frazer for publication in 1967 in the German journal ''Synthese''. 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 behaviors belonging to the sphere of magic and the sacred in archaic societies. To this type of Westernizing 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 must therefore be relative to the context in which they take place, and in which, for example, a sacrificial or ritual practice represents a form of "explanation" that is not traceable to the modern scientific explanation, because it arises in an entirely different form of life. Such forms of life can are manifest in the language games to which they give rise, so that, quoting another famous statement from the book, "a whole mythology is deposited in our language".