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Understanding the Fire-Festivals: Wittgenstein and Theories in Religion1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Richard H. Bell
Richard H. Bell
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Philosophy, The College of Wooster
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Extract

The riddle Frazer confronts us with in The Golden Bough is posed in the form of a question. ‘Why is this happening?’ - this life and death of the King of the Wood at Nemi? In the related context of his accounts of the fire-festivals in Europe, Frazer refines the question in a more dramatic form: ‘What is the meaning of such sacrifices? Why were men and animals burnt to death at these festivals?’ Frazer recognizes something serious in all this. The practice of human sacrifice is puzzling; it does leave us disquieted! But Frazer's search for what he calls ‘a fairly probable explanation’ of the motives which gave rise to the priesthood of Nemi and its embodiment of the practice of human sacrifice, Wittgenstein in his ‘Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough’ feels, does not help us to understand a practice like the burning of a man! With all the additional data, numerous theories, and the historical tracing of origins we are no closer to resolving the perplexities of the riddle than the riddle itself presents to us daily.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , March 1978 , pp. 113 - 124
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

page 113 note 2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ‘Remarks on Frazer's “Golden Bough”’, trans. Miles, A. C. and Rhees, Rush, with introduction by Rhees, The Human World, no. 3 (May 1971), pp. 18–41. Henceforth cited in the text as (RF, page).Google Scholar

page 113 note 3 Sir Frazer, James G., The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic and Religion, one-volume abridged edition (New York: Macmillan, 1922; Macmillan paperback edition, 1963), p. 761Google Scholar, cf. also pp. 754 ff. Henceforth cited in the text as (GB, page). Some references will be from the ‘Preface to the Second Edition’, written in 1900, found in two volumes, Macmillan, 1935, and cited (GB, preface 2, page). For a critical account of the myriad flaws in the internal logic and the evidence used by Frazer in The Golden Bough, see Smith, Jonathan Z., ‘When the Bough Breaks’, History of Religions, XII (May 1973), 342–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Smith concludes that Frazer gave us no answers because he had no questions, and that any would-be questions were largely the creation of Frazer's Victorian imagination and frayed strands of logic weaving together larger unrelated and mostly irrelevant (or inaccurate) myths and stories.

page 116 note 1 This section presents only a sketch of an argument. An expanded critique of the various positions cited would be the subject for another essay. Here, however, it is useful in placing Frazer and also in sharpening the edge of Wittgenstein's criticisms.

page 116 note 2 Drury, M. O'C., The Danger of Words (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), pp. 2 f.Google Scholar

page 116 note 3 Here the literature is massive. In addition to the well-known ‘intellectualists’ views of Tylor and Frazer, there are the psychologically based theories of Freud and Jung, the biologically based theory of Levi-Strauss, and the ontologically based theories of Cassirer and Tillich. Within Religious Studies, the critical heritage is still being traced, but Capps, Walter H. has given us some useful models for looking at various hypotheses and theories which bear on the notion of ‘single-principle hypotheses’. See his Ways of Understanding Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1971).Google Scholar

page 117 note 1 Here I would place Cassirer's view as most prominent and influential among religious thinkers in our generation. The early writings of Heidegger place great emphasis on the rediscovery of the essential ‘word’ through the ontological structures of language and ‘dasein’. Paul Tillich bases his entire theory of religious symbolism on giving a reductive account of levels of meaning and being to a primordial or ontological ‘ground’.

page 117 note 2 Cassirer, Ernst, Language and Myth, trans. by Langer, S. K. (New York: Dover, 1946), pp. 36 f.Google Scholar

page 117 note 3 Ibid.

page 118 note 1 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 121.Google Scholar

page 118 note 2 Ibid., my italics. Frazer is particularly vulnerable on this point. He feels that all the ‘Golden Boughs’ mask a different kind of reality which are ‘mantled over with the ivy and mosses and wild flowers of a thousand tender and sacred associations’ (GB, preface 2, p. xxvi); they are ‘inevitable slips made in the search for truth’ (GB, p. 307); and finally, that the comparative study of such ‘savage’ beliefs and practices will show ‘that much which we are want to regard as solid rests on the sands of superstition rather than on the rock of nature’ (GB, preface 2, pp. xxv f.). Wittgenstein, some thirty years before Evans-Pritchard summarized this particular criticism in the work cited, had said of Frazer's methodology: ‘Frazer’s account of the magical and religious notions of men… makes these notions appear as mistakes’ (RF, p. 28). ‘It is very queer that all these practices are finally presented, so to speak, as stupid actions’ (RF, p. 29).

page 118 note 3 Ibid. Error, noted Wittgenstein, belongs only to opinion and ‘a religions symbol does not rest on any opinion’ (RF, p. 30). And ‘The characteristic feature of primitive man, I believe, is that he does not act from opinions (as Frazer thinks)’ (RF, p. 37, partly my emphasis).

page 119 note 1 This point is not only one that could be argued from Wittgenstein's texts; it has recently been made in an unpublished paper, ‘The Symbology of Congregational Religion’, by Malcolm Ruel, Cambridge University. Ruel's work among the Kuria people of Africa has convinced him that there is a way of talking about ‘truths’ conveyed in their ceremonial acts.

page 119 note 2 Philosophers know this as the ‘Winch-McIntyre debate’, but it has much broader implications for social anthropologists (see Finnegan, R. and Horton, R. (ed.), Modes of Thought: Essays on Thinking in Western and Non-Western societies (London: Faber, 1973)Google Scholar, cf. especially may by Tambiah, S. J.). The quotation that follows of Wittgenstein is from his Philosophical Investigations, trans. Anscombe, G. E. M., ed. Anscombe, and Rhees, Rush (New York: MacMillan, 1953), part II, page 223e, abbreviated as Inv.Google Scholar

page 120 note 1 In his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, trans. Anscombe, , ed. von Wright, G., Anscombe, and Rhees, (New York: Macmillan, 1956), cited in text as (RFM, part, section, page), written largely during the 1930s, Wittgenstein makes this comment reflecting one of his principle intentions and interests as a philosopher: ‘I am asking: what is the characteristic demeanour of human beings who “realize” something “immediately”, whatever the practical results of this realizing is? What interests me is not the immediate realization of a truth, but the phenomenon of immediate realization. Not indeed as a special mental phenomenon, but as one of human actions’ (RFM, III, 32, p. 123 e). The ‘phenomenon of immediate realization’ or the process of ‘realizing’ can be translated into how we come to understanding. This process is foundational to what we say and do - it shapes and is shaped by the fields or ‘forms of life’ from which our certainty and confidence in living arises. It is a phenomenon common to all human beings.Google Scholar

page 121 note 1 Geertz, says in his may ‘Religion as Cultural System’, in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 101: ‘They [Tylorians] seemed to be constantly using their beliefs to “ex-plain” phenomena: or, more accurately, to convince themselves that the phenomena were explain-able within the accepted scheme of things, for they commonly had only a minimal attachment to the particular soul possession, emotional disequilibrium, taboo infringement, or bewitchment hypothesis they advanced and were all too ready to abandon it for some other, in the same genre, which struck them as more plausible given the facts of the case. What they were not ready to do was abandon it for no other hypothesis at all; to leave events to themselves.’ Geertz acknowledges debts to Wittgenstein and Ryle (among others) a number of times in his critical essays. His essays liberally utilize metaphors and critical insights from these philosophers. He is aware that what he says is not necessarily novel, but sees his approach (in part) as a corrective to certain deficiencies in methodology among social scientists.Google Scholar