Anthropology as Ethics. T. M. S. (Terry) Evens
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“I think it is clear,” Wittgenstein says (1971: 38), “that what gives us a sinister impression is the inner nature of the practice as performed in recent times, and the facts of human sacrifice as we know them only indicate the direction in which we ought to see it.” By “inner nature of the practice,” he means (ibid.: 38), “all those circumstances in which it is carried out that are not included in the account of the festival, because they consist…in what we might call the spirit of the festival: which would be described by, for example, describing the sort of people that take part, their way of behaviour at other times, i.e. their character, and the other kinds of games that they play. And we should then see that what is sinister lies in the character of these people themselves.” Plainly, in this passage Wittgenstein is referring to ‘cultural context’, to the culturally certain foundations that distinguish and identify the people in question. The reason why we find something deep about this festival is, then, according to Wittgenstein, that the spirit of the festival, that is, its inner nature or existential meaning, smacks of the sinister. Put another way, the dark character in question is an aspect of who the rite's practitioners are, of their particular identity as cultural beings.
But Wittgenstein's key point looks beyond the cultural context of the people of the rite to embrace the observer's context. “What makes human sacrifice something deep and sinister anyway?” he asks. His answer is (1971: 40): “[T]his deep and sinister aspect is not obvious just from learning the history of the external action, but we impute it from an experience in ourselves.” The impression is given not only because something deep and sinister rests with the inner spirit of the rite and with the character of the rite's practitioners, but also because “there is something in us too that speaks in support of those observances” (ibid.: 34). Here, with this turn to the beholder's share, Wittgenstein, despite his conspicuous and philosophically central discomfort with the idea of universals (he regarded as pathological the philosophical craving for generality), insinuates the universal—though not in the received sense of the notion. This movement is unmistakable in the sentence that brings his essay to a close (ibid.: 41): what we see in ceremonies and stories evocative of human sacrifice “is something they acquire, after all, from the evidence, including such evidence as does not seem directly connected with them—from the thought of man and his past, from the strangeness of what I see in myself and in others, what I have seen and have heard.”
Thus, Wittgenstein argues that the context of meaning to which the impression at point must be referred includes the observer's experience and stock of knowledge. In effect, he sees the observer as participant of what she is observing, helping to define and construct it as it does her in return. This point reiterates Wittgenstein's rejection of both empiricism and intellectualism in favor of the understanding that although the perceiver and the perceived are relatively separate and distinct, there obtains between them a fundamental continuity. As partly a product of the character of the ‘outside’ observer, the impression of something deep and sinister directly ties the idea of the synthetic a priori to the idea of the universal. This is true despite the fact that by virtue of its syntheticism, this kind of a priori is essentially particularistic. The possibility of an a priori that is at once both particular and universal is a function of the fact that the implied universalism does not project a world of fixed things, but rather evokes a perceptual dynamic that continuously fires the possibility of a world in common. Although each and every synthetic a priori is culturally particular, insofar as it is a product of the human faculty for making meaning, it must be open to the active understanding of others. Thus, by not allowing our intellectualism to obstruct our vision, and by keeping a sharp eye out for the “connexions” and “intermediate links” (Wittgenstein 1971: 35) that make a gestalt, including especially the gestalt formed by the observer with the observed, we put ourselves in a position to see directly the deep nature of the festival and thus satisfy ourselves as to why it impresses us as sinister. The capacity to do this bespeaks a universalizing nature, but because this nature describes the observer as being in the picture he himself projects, it remains ever beyond the reach of logical determination. It is, however, distinctly manifest in human interaction and therefore in a sense can be shown.
I have argued that Wittgenstein's “Remarks on Frazer's ‘Golden Bough’” offers an account of the synthetic a priori that radically revises the Kantian understanding. For unlike Kant, who held fast to the immaculate distinction between subject and object, inside and outside, and form and content, Wittgenstein (to leave aside his polemical argument about the expressive and the instrumental) relativizes these distinctions, making them definitively incomplete. As a consequence, while the distinctions do not disappear, their opposing principles enjoy a certain continuity with each other, meaning that they must be less than identical to themselves. This paralogical condition, a state of nondualism or basic ambiguity, yields an a priori that both is and is not certain, universal, and a matter of choice. The possibility of such an a priori stands with the picture of the human world as, in the first place, a dynamic of becoming, in which the said, for all its imposing power to fix and decide things, can never quite catch up with the saying. The said enters into the saying and may represent itself as the superior power, but it can never wholly supercede the primacy of its counterforce. For the human world proceeds in terms of meanings imprisoned in action, and although these meanings can be let out into the light of consciousness, if that light is to shine at all, there must always be further meanings that remain implicit and, in this sense, in the dark, behind the epistemic bars of practice—behind the limits of the self and self-consciousness.
I have read a good deal into the “Remarks,” a brief text that has certainly not been regarded by the philosophical commentators as central in the corpus of Wittgenstein's work (cf., however, Zengotita 1989). Still, I believe that I can reinforce my interpretation by glancing quickly at another work by Wittgenstein, especially On Certainty (1972), in which he deals with the problem of the a priori rather directly.
Wittgenstein's friend and Cambridge colleague, G. E. Moore, in his attempt to refute philosophical skepticism, that is, the position that there is nothing about the world that can be known with certainty, offered as evidence to the contrary certain common-sense understandings. The most famous of these is his proof that his two hands exist, which he demonstrated by holding them up and saying “Here is one hand, and here is another.” According to Wittgenstein, Moore's demonstration could hardly refute skepticism, since showing one's hands in this way cannot provide knowledge that one's hands exist. What it can do, said Wittgenstein, is make clear that it would be nonsensical to doubt the existence of one's hands. Moore, says Wittgenstein (1972: § 151), “does not know what he asserts he knows, but it stands fast for him.”5
In other words, Wittgenstein drew a distinction between, on the one hand, the ordinary, everyday experience of not feeling any doubt and, on the other, the epistemological condition of having certain knowledge. Whereas the latter is a question of logic and rationality (“One says ‘I know’ when one is ready to give compelling grounds. ‘I know’ relates to a possibility of demonstrating the truth” [1972: § 243]), the former has to do simply with making sense or nonsense of anything at all. Were we to doubt the existence of our own two hands, as we hold them up for all to see, there would be nothing safe from doubt, including our being in the world and our senses: “Doesn't testing come to an end?” (ibid.: § 164). Wittgenstein was arguing neither that one's senses are perfectly reliable nor that different people cannot arrive at different existential certainties. Rather, he was pointing out that in order to make any sense at all, it is necessary that we take some propositions for granted, for these propositions (such as “here is my hand”) belong to the frame of reference by virtue of which we can make meaning of the world in the least. If we did not conduct ourselves as if our hands exist or the earth abides beneath our feet, our world would lack any integrity whatsoever, and we could take no meaningful direction from it for purposes of getting on with life (ibid.: § 150): “How does someone judge which is his right and which his left hand?. If I don't trust myself here, why should I trust anyone else's judgment? Is there a why? Must I not begin to trust somewhere? That is to say: somewhere I must begin with not-doubting; and that is not, so to speak, hasty but excusable: it is part of judging.”
Plainly, Wittgenstein is pointing to a synthetic a priori, which can be conceived of in terms of a taken-for-granted world or, as