Basically, Wittgenstein argues that Frazer's understanding of magic and religion as a kind of foolishness is itself foolish, as it attributes to such practices a rational and instrumental objective that they do not entertain and fails to grasp their essentially expressive nature. In effect, Wittgenstein sets up a dualism of the instrumental and the expressive. However, in the course of his argumentation he makes points that are critically inconsistent with and transcend this dualism.
As Wittgenstein sees it, Frazer grasps magical and religious acts as mistakes, since such acts have no basis in the world of empirical fact. Wittgenstein objects (1971: 31): “There is a mistake only if magic is presented as science.” “If the adoption of a child is carried out by the mother pulling the child from beneath her clothes,” Wittgenstein goes on (ibid.), “then it is crazy to think there is an error in this and that she believes she has borne the child.” Such acts, he holds, are not intended instrumentally, and we therefore need to “distinguish between magical operations and those operations which rest on a false over-simplified notion of things and processes” (ibid.). “The same savage who, apparently in order to kill his enemy, sticks his knife through a picture of him, really does build his hut of wood and cuts his arrow with skill and not in effigy,” observes Wittgenstein (ibid.), as Malinowski similarly observed in his studies of magical usage among the Trobrianders.
How, then, as Wittgenstein sees it, should we understand magical acts? As essentially expressive (1971: 31):
And magic always rests on the idea of symbolism and of language.
The description of a wish is, eo ipso, the description of its fulfilment. And magic does give representation to a wish; it expresses a wish.
Thus far, the argument works as a dualism of the instrumental and the expressive, and I think that in the “Remarks,” Wittgenstein does indeed incline toward just such a dualism. However, when exemplifying and explicating what he means by the expressive, he plainly and importantly transcends the dualism (1971: 33):
The magic in Alice in Wonderland, trying to dry out by reading the driest thing there is.
In magical healing one indicates to an illness that it should leave the patient. After the description of any such magical cure we'd like to add: If the illness doesn't understand that, then I don't know how one ought to say it.
…[N]o phenomenon is particularly mysterious in itself, but any of them can become so to us, and it is precisely the characteristic feature of the awakening human spirit that a phenomenon has meaning for it. We could almost say, man is a ceremonious animal. This is partly false, partly nonsensical, but there is also something in it.
In other words, one might begin a book on anthropology in this way: When we watch the life and behaviour of men all over the earth we see that apart from what we might call animal activities, taking food etc., etc., men also carry out actions that bear a peculiar character and might be called ritualistic.
In these passages, Wittgenstein seems to be suggesting that what he sees as the ceremonious or ritualistic actions carried out by human beings is not simply expressive but in some sense true to the world as we find it. Hence, he concludes that when an illness is told to go away, if it fails to take heed, then he “doesn't know how one ought to say it”—as if such magical practices really do conform to nature. Or again, he finds that in arriving at his (misguided) conclusions about magic as misguided science, Frazer might just as well have believed “that when a savage dies he is in error” (ibid.: 34). In other words, the magical observances in question are, like death (and taxes), in some sense, necessary, certain, and natural. The sense in which this is so is, as Wittgenstein says, “partly false, partly nonsensical, but there is also something in it.” What he means exactly by this reserved affirmation bears sharply on the notion of the a priori and can be plumbed by looking more closely at his account of ceremonious conduct.4
According to Wittgenstein, the reason why Frazer sees the magical and religious notions of humans as mistakes is because he pictured them, rationalistically, as attempts to explain the world, that is, as theoretical endeavors. By doing so, Frazer put himself in a position to offer an explanation of magical practices, for he was then able to see the practices as the forlorn products of the mistaken notions. As an upshot, or so Wittgenstein (1971: 29) concludes (providing in the process a concise description of what Evans-Pritchard called the “if I were a horse” fallacy): “All that Frazer does is to make [these practices] plausible to people who think as he does.”
But Wittgenstein points out that where a theory is not put forward, there can be no mistake, since ordinarily we use ‘mistake’ to characterize an incorrect explanation of things. If, then, the magical and religious notions at point are not intended as theories, they cannot be mistaken. “Was Augustine mistaken…when he called on God on every page of the Confessions?” Wittgenstein asks, rhetorically (1971: 29). Moreover, Wittgenstein finds it utterly implausible (as did Durkheim) that people construct and continue to deploy all these notions and practices “out of sheer stupidity” (ibid.).
If these notions are not attempts at explaining the world, then what are they? We have already seen that Wittgenstein was prone to regard them as expressive, but his descriptions are far richer than that. The notions are, to gather together his allusive and aphoristic remarks, strongly affective (“The crush of thoughts that do not get out because they all try to push forward and are wedged in the door”; 1971: 30); spiritual (“What narrowness of spiritual life we find in Frazer!” ibid.: 31); ceremonious or ritualistic (“The ceremonial [hot or cold] as opposed to the haphazard [lukewarm]”; ibid.: 32); highly relevant to our everyday lives and what makes an impression on us (“That a man's shadow, which looks like a man, or that his mirror image, or that rain, thunderstorms, the phases of the moon, the change of seasons, the likenesses and differences of animals to one another and to human beings, the phenomena of death, of birth and of sexual life, in short everything a man perceives year in, year out around him, should play a part in his thinking [his philosophy] and his practices, is obvious, or in other words it is what we really know and find interesting”; ibid.: 33); mythological (“A whole mythology is deposited in our language”; ibid.: 35); gesticulatory (“We have in the ancient rites the use of a very highly developed gesture-language”; ibid.: 36); and, finally, universalistic (“[T]here is something in us too that speaks in support of those observances by the savages”; ibid.: 34).
From this emphasis on affect, existential relevance, and gesticulation or bodily language, it is tempting to conclude that all Wittgenstein is doing is juxtaposing practice to theory. He is certainly doing this, but it is not all he is doing. It is crucial to see, especially in view of the evidently dichotomous way in which he divides the expressive from the instrumental, that the juxtaposition does not constitute a dualism. For when one adds up the content of all these remarks, one sees that what Wittgenstein is opposing to theory (and opinion and explanation and belief) is no simple counterweight, no opposing but equal principle. On the contrary, what he has in mind enjoys a certain fundamental primacy with respect to theory. As pre-eminently affective and bodily, spiritual and mythological, existentially relevant and universalistic, such magical and religious notions bespeak the bedrock dynamic on which theory, opinions, explanations, and beliefs necessarily rest.
If this is so, then these notions cannot themselves be matters of opinion: “The characteristic feature of primitive man…is that he does not act from opinions” (Wittgenstein 1971: 37). Nor can they be open ultimately to explanation: “Even the idea of trying to explain [such practices]…seems to me wrong-headed” (ibid.: 29). Rather, the sole form of accounting they are open to is description: “We can only describe and say, human life is like that” (ibid.: 30). In effect, they constitute existential certainties or, to use the technical philosophical term, the synthetic a priori.
Precisely because this kind of a priori is neither theoretical nor empirical, it obtains in a logical and ontological nowhere, between necessity and contingency. For this reason, it confounds explanation, the representational demands of which leave no room to maneuver in the face of ambiguity that is basic. When confronted with ambiguity of this kind, all one can do is show it. That