Anthropology as Ethics. T. M. S. (Terry) Evens
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it is, one can only say (as the Hebrew scriptures say about the godhead), saying everything and nothing at once, that it is what it is. This is why I think that instead of saying “We could say, man is a ceremonious animal,” Wittgenstein says “We could almost say” this, and goes on to say that it is in any case a partly false and nonsensical proposition. Because man's “ceremonious” faculty, his capacity to make meaning, is precisely neither theoretical nor empirical, it is basically inexplicable. Any explanation of this faculty—that is, any attempt to rigidly designate it as either this or that—will in the very (creative and processive) endeavor of trying to do so necessarily go beyond itself and thus belie itself. As a result, although this faculty can be shown, or can show itself, it cannot be said as a truth-functional proposition, at least not without making a partial nonsense logically.
One provocative way of capturing such basic ambiguity is by reference to the so-called gestalt switch. About the famous ambiguous figure that can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit, Wittgenstein had this to say (in Monk 1990: 507–8): “Suppose I show it to a child. It says ‘It's a duck’ and then suddenly ‘Oh, it's a rabbit.’ So it recognises it as a rabbit.—This is an experience of recognition. So if you see me in the street and say ‘Ah, Wittgenstein.’ But you haven't an experience of recognition all the time.—The experience only comes at the moment of change from duck to rabbit and back. In between, the aspect is as it were dispositional.” What is important here is Wittgenstein's claim that insofar as the ambiguity is basic, the experience of recognition is dispositional and depends on a change of aspect. The moment of change is immediate and therefore inexplicable. Moreover, it describes perception in terms of an irreducible relationship between the perceiver and what is perceived. That is to say, the question to ask is not what the figure really is or if its determination as anything at all is simply a function of something that goes on inside the head of the perceiver. Rather, the only useful or sensible question that can be asked is, what difference does the change of aspect make? The other questions do not admit of clear answers as long as the ambiguity, as between the figure and itself as well as between the perceiver and the perceived, proves basic. The attempt to see the gestalt switch in terms of such questions always leads down the futile path of having to decide between materialism and idealism, as if the thing had to be either object or idea. What Wittgenstein is trying to show by reference to such gestalten is that although idea and experience or thinking and seeing or, more comprehensively, the internal and the external are not the same thing, neither does it make sense to understand them as perfectly separate and distinct from each other.
The immediacy of the change of aspect implicates a creative process. That is to say, at some point in looking in to it, the synthetic a priori lacks an empirical genesis or even an origin through learning. Wittgenstein (1971: 36) alludes to this creative process in terms of what we ordinarily construe as the conduct of choice: “If a human being could choose to be born in a tree in a forest, then there would be some who would seek out the most beautiful or the highest tree for themselves, some who would choose the smallest and some who would choose an average or below-average tree, and I do not mean out of philistinism, but for just the reason, or kind of reason, for which the other man chose the highest. That the feeling we have for our life is comparable to that of a being who could choose his own standpoint in the world, is, I believe, the basis of the myth—or belief—that we choose our body before birth.” Here Wittgenstein is pointing out that humans are given to experience their “standpoint in the world” as somehow their own choice, and he seems to imply that this experience provides a basis on which humans come to believe that the mind is one thing and the body another (“the basis of the myth—or belief—that we choose our body before birth”). But he also suggests that in a (logically impossible) sense, one's “standpoint in the world” is in fact a matter of ‘choice’. Hence, if one could choose to be born “in a tree in a forest,” one might choose to identify oneself with the most “beautiful” or “highest” or “smallest” or “average” or “below-average” tree, and whatever the choice, it is taken for “just the reason, or kind of reason”—that is, I think, the ‘reason’ of self-fashioning—for which other persons choose the other trees to house their particular identities.
These choices, though, arising as they do somehow between thought and perception, cannot be altogether witting and free. Hence, Wittgenstein calls the proposition that our minds somehow obtain prior to our bodies—and, it must follow, as against Kant, the proposition that our conduct of choice can be perfectly autonomous—a “myth.” It is for this reason—the reason that the conduct he is describing both does and does not amount to choice—that he qualifies by the conditional (“If one could choose”) his picture of choice throughout. Nevertheless, this conduct is, I believe, a question of ethics for him (1971: 36): “We might say ‘every view has its charm, but this would be wrong. What is true is that every view is significant for him who sees it so (but that does not mean ‘sees it as something other than it is’). And in this sense every view is equally significant. It is important also that the contempt each person feels for me is something I must make my own, an essential and significant part of the world seen from the place where I am.” Wittgenstein seems to be saying here that from the perspective of our faculty to make meaning of the world, no standpoint is more (or less) significant than any other. That is to say, synthetic a priori or foundations of human worlds, the standpoints of the highest tree and of the lowest, though different, are equal. If you live in the highest tree and your other in the lowest, that does not mean that the latter has got the world wrong—your other is not seeing it, as Frazer seems to think, “as something other than it is.” And precisely in order to see this, Wittgenstein finds that it is “important” to make the other's “contempt” for us (a contempt issuing from the other's particular standpoint in the world), “an essential and significant part” of our own standpoint. By doing so, of course, by learning the other's language (another way, according to Wittgenstein [1971: 36, third footnote] to understand what it means to incorporate into our own view the other's outlook on us), we position ourselves to see the ‘truth’ in the other's standpoint as well as the relativity of our own.
Such an exercise, one that Wittgenstein practiced with incomparable rigor over the course of his life (indeed, in a sense it is this exercise that defines his philosophy), is by any other name ethics. For it is an exercise in self-liberation and self-creation by means of, paradoxically, the respectful acknowledgment of the other as other. As such, it also implies the understanding, which I believe Wittgenstein held, that the synthetic a priori, the certainties in terms of which we define ourselves and take our existential bearings, remain open to human judgment despite the fact that ordinarily nothing seems to speak against them. By the same token, it implies that although all such standpoints may be equally meaningful as ciphers of ‘reality’, and therefore immune to theoretical judgments of right and wrong, they are not necessarily off-limits to judgments of good and bad. That is, their nature as existential attitudes toward the world may render theoretical assessments of them misplaced, but it cannot save them from ethical evaluations. It is for this reason that I speak of these attitudes, these a priori, as primordial choices. However much they may be taken for granted and acted on in terms of certainty, they are also auto-constructed in terms of a good. Wittgenstein saw that such standpoints are subject to evaluations of use, but I cannot say whether he formally entertained the point I am making about ethical evaluations. The point, though, is certainly implicit in his argumentation and also, I should think, his conduct: he had a strong sense of the good and was not shy about judging others according to it (cf. Monk 1990: 278).
In view of this understanding of the synthetic a priori, it is no wonder that Wittgenstein concluded that Frazer's evolutionary account of the Beltane May Day or fire festival fails to furnish satisfaction. This festival, which took place in certain parts of Great Britain and Northern Europe up to the nineteenth century, centered on a cake, ritually prepared and divided into lots (one of which could serve as a selector), which were then distributed for purposes of determining a victim to be thrown symbolically into the fire. Impressed with the sinister aura of this festival, Frazer explained it in terms of the hypothesis that the festival found its ultimate origin in ancient rites of human sacrifice. But Wittgenstein points out that even if Frazer's evolutionary hypothesis proved wrong, we would still be impressed with the sinister character of the Beltane festival. In other words, although the genetic explanation may throw a certain