Contemplating Religious Forms of Life: Wittgenstein and D.Z. Phillips

Mikel Burley

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781441192103
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) made profound contributions to many areas of philosophy and cultural understanding, and his thought and methods have inspired numerous inquirers into the forms of our religious life. D. Z. Phillips (1934-2006) pioneered the application of Wittgenstein-influenced approaches to the philosophy of religion, and emphasized the contemplative, non-dogmatic nature of the philosophical task. In Contemplating Religious Forms of Life, Mikel Burley elucidates and critically examines the work of these two philosophers in relation to various aspects of religion, including ritual, mystical experience, faith and reason, realism and non-realism, conceptions of eternal life, and the use of literature as a resource for the contemplation of religious and non-religious beliefs. The book will be of significant value to academics, students and general readers interested in philosophy, religious studies, theology, and the interrelations between these disciplines.

PART ONE

Wittgenstein

1

Primitive religiosity

All religions are wonderful, even those of the most primitive tribes. The ways in which people express their religious feelings differ enormously.

WITTGENSTEIN¹

The views of natural causation embraced by the savage magician no doubt appear to us manifestly false and absurd; yet in their day they were legitimate hypotheses, though they have not stood the test of experience.

SIR J. G. FRAZER²

What narrowness of spiritual life we find in Frazer!

WITTGENSTEIN³

Despite confessing that he was ‘not a religious man’, Wittgenstein exhibited ceaseless fascination with religious phenomena of various kinds throughout his life.⁴ Although, following the anthropological vocabulary of his day, he referred to ‘primitive tribes’, it would be a mistake to presume that ‘primitive’ is used disparagingly here, just as it would be mistaken to suppose there was anything disparaging in, for example, the title of Peter Winch’s well-known essay ‘Understanding a Primitive Society’.⁵ ‘Primitive’ in these contexts may reasonably be assumed to constitute a shorthand expression denoting peoples who are technologically unsophisticated in comparison with industrialized western nations. From the absence of advanced technology, there is little that can be inferred concerning the sophistication or depth of other features of a culture, such as its moral norms and religious practices. These days, terms such as ‘small-scale’, ‘indigenous’ and ‘traditional’ have come to replace ‘primitive’ and ‘savage’ in the vocabulary of social anthropology and religious studies.⁶

Upon reading and discussing with his friend Drury the pioneering work by Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough, Wittgenstein was struck by what he saw as some crude assumptions on Frazer’s part. Chief among these was the assumption that the religious activities of ancient and tribal peoples were best interpreted as primitive forms of scientific endeavour – misguided attempts to influence the outcome of natural events. Following earlier theorists such as Turgot, Condorcet, Comte, and especially his older British contemporary, Herbert Spencer,⁷ Frazer subscribed to a progressive conception of history, according to which the human intellect evolves from a magical stage, through increasingly monotheistic forms of religious belief, to arrive eventually at a full-fledged scientific comprehension of the world.⁸ On this progressive model, magic is viewed as a kind of proto-science: not irrational, but certainly mistaken, based on false beliefs about the causal connections of nature. As Frazer avers in discussing the ‘principles of association’ typical of scientific thought: ‘Legitimately applied they yield science; illegitimately applied they yield magic, the bastard sister of science.’⁹ Usefully summarizing this conception of human development, Brian Clack writes: ‘Progressive and optimistic to the core, Frazer sees the history of culture as the story of humankind’s scientific liberation from superstitious ignorance.’¹⁰

Wittgenstein regarded Frazer’s interpretations and purported explanations of magical rites and ceremonies as distortions of the phenomena, and he expressed this assessment in notes and jottings that were published posthumously, first in German in 1967 and subsequently in two English translations.¹¹ These notes contain much of interest to anyone who shares even a smidgen of Wittgenstein’s own fascination with religion, for it is, in large part, the nature of this fascination itself that is their pervasive theme. Wittgenstein’s undisguised annoyance with Frazer derives much of its motivation from his perception that Frazer’s categorization of magical rites as instances of proto-science distracts us from an important recognition. What needs to be recognized, in Wittgenstein’s view, is the fact that these practices manifest something of tremendous significance concerning the relation between human beings – that is, human beings in general, not just ‘primitive’ ones – and the world we inhabit; they manifest deep-rooted impulses, disclosing a wellspring of religiosity that almost certainly abides in the primitive depths of us all.

This notion of primitive impulses or instinctual reactions that are not based on prior beliefs, but rather underlie and give rise to or merely accompany those beliefs, is one that reverberates throughout Wittgenstein’s philosophical thinking from the 1930s up to and including his very last writings. Just twenty-four days before his death in 1951, for example, he wrote:

I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination. As a creature in a primitive state. Any logic good enough for a primitive means of communication needs no apology from us. Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination. (OC §475)

The above remark thematically echoes one written nearly fourteen years earlier:

The origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop.

Language – I want to say – is a refinement. “In the beginning was the deed.” (CE 395; cf. CV_R 36e)¹²

There is, for Wittgenstein, no sharp division between linguistic activity and other modes of human behaviour. Language and articulate thought grow out of the ways of responding to the world that we share with one another. The primitive reaction ‘is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought’ (Z §541; cf. RPP1 §916). When stated like that, perhaps there is nothing very controversial in the claim, so pervasive have Darwinian narratives of human evolution become in our culture. Yet what Wittgenstein urges us not to lose sight of is the continuing presence of primitive reactions in our own everyday activities. In the rites and customs of ancient or indigenous peoples, we may witness certain reactions in relatively unrefined forms, yet those reactions are not ones that modernization has obliterated from our lives. If one’s aim is to understand the significance – the force and depth – of such practices, it is unlikely that the devising of theories concerning their historical or prehistorical development will satisfy this aim; and speculating upon the effects that they were intended to instigate presupposes underlying instrumental motivations that may be absent entirely. On Wittgenstein’s view, intellectual satisfaction is more likely to be achieved by contemplating our responses to the practices, and looking for analogues of them in our own lives and behaviour.

In many ways, Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’ take us to the very heart of his later philosophical approach, and there is much to be gained from reflecting upon their implications. In this chapter, my focus will be on three main issues that emerge from the remarks. First I will say something about the sense in which the remarks can be, and have been, construed by commentators as exemplifying a so-called ‘non-cognitivist’ interpretation of magical and ritual activities. Secondly I will offer some thoughts on the use that Wittgenstein makes of analogies, and how this method seems designed to facilitate a form of understanding that he explicitly contrasts with the devising of explanations. Thirdly I will introduce two difficulties with Wittgenstein’s method that have been highlighted by Frank Cioffi, namely: (a) that many investigators of indigenous cultures will be unimpressed by Wittgenstein’s emphasis on self-reflection and are liable to continue pursuing instrumental or historical accounts of indigenous religious practices, and (b) that even among those who find an analogical approach appealing there will arise irresolvable disputes over which analogies are most apt. While not contesting the first of these suggestions, I will argue in response to the second that there may, in certain cases, be more room for rational resolution of disputes than Cioffi’s proposal allows. In arguing this latter point, I will make reference to a relevant disagreement between Peter Winch and Howard Mounce.

Cognitivism and non-cognitivism

When commenting upon Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer it is common among philosophers and social anthropologists to set up a contrast between the theoretical approach pioneered by Frazer and an alternative theoretical approach allegedly advocated by Wittgenstein. Frazer’s approach to the study of rituals and magic is typically characterized as ‘intellectualist’, ‘rationalistic’ or ‘scientistic’¹³, whereas Wittgenstein’s is claimed to stress the emotive or otherwise expressive power of the practices concerned. Anthony O’Hear makes the point by asserting that Wittgenstein’s ‘whole emphasis is [on] the expressive and symbolic aspects of primitive magic and religion … Primitive rituals and their accompanying beliefs do for those who participate in them what the symbolic acts we have do for us, expressing and evoking deep needs and emotions.’¹⁴ This way of interpreting Wittgenstein’s remarks tends to press them into a preformed mould labelled ‘non-cognitivism’ or ‘expressivism’ – or ‘emotivism’, as John Cook prefers¹⁵ – to be contrasted with Frazer’s alleged ‘cognitivism’. The question at the heart of the disagreement between Frazer and Wittgenstein then becomes, as Michael Banner observes, whether religious discourse is ‘concerned primarily with describing and explaining’ (and hence with making statements that can be judged true or false) or ‘with expressing and commending a particular attitude towards the world’. ‘For shorthand,’ Banner adds, ‘we call these the “intellectualist” and “expressive” (or non-cognitivist) accounts respectively.’¹⁶

The terms ‘cognitivism’ and ‘non-cognitivism’ are far from pellucid, and their implications are liable to vary from one context to another. In the context of interpreting Wittgenstein, the following remarks of his are among those frequently cited in support of non-cognitivist readings:

Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one’s beloved. That is obviously not based on the belief that it will have some specific effect on the object which the picture represents. It aims at satisfaction and achieves it. Or rather: it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then feel satisfied. (GB_B 123)

I believe that the characteristic feature of primitive man is that he does not act from opinions (contrary to Frazer). (GB_B 137)

[When I am furious about something, I sometimes beat the ground or a tree with my walking stick. But I certainly do not believe that the ground is to blame or that my beating can help anything. “I am venting my anger.” And all rites are of this kind. Such actions may be called Instinct-actions. …] (ibid.)

It will be useful to say something about each of these excerpts and its surrounding context. I will do so in reverse order.

The third excerpt is from a passage that was included in the first version of the remarks, edited by Rush Rhees and published in the journal Synthese in 1967, but was excluded from the Brynmill edition of 1979 despite this latter editions having been compiled by the same editor. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, who jointly edited the volume from which I have quoted the remarks above, opted to enclose the passage within square brackets to indicate its suspect status. In the absence of any explicit statement of Rhees’s reasons for the exclusion, it may reasonably be assumed to have been due to the passage’s incautious and over-generalizing tone, especially its glib assertion that all rites are of one particular kind. Having been made public, this assertion of Wittgenstein’s has certainly attracted some severe criticism. Frank Cioffi, for example, condemns it as

a dismally opinionated utterance and a profoundly un-Wittgensteinian one. All rites are not of ‘this kind’ nor of any other kind, and Wittgenstein himself knows that they are not since the statement that they are is contradicted by remarks he makes elsewhere as well as in the Frazer notes themselves.¹⁷

Being charitable to Wittgenstein, we might remind ourselves that none of the notes that have come down to us as the Remarks on Frazer were designed for publication as they stood; and thus (being charitable to Rhees) we might suppose that Rhees took himself to be acting in the spirit of Wittgenstein when omitting remarks that seemed incongruous with the overall trajectory of Wittgenstein’s thinking. In a conversation with Drury, Wittgenstein cited as a possible motto for the work that became the Philosophical Investigations a phrase from Shakespeare’s King Lear: ‘I’ll teach you differences.’¹⁸ Contrasting his own approach with Hegel’s, Wittgenstein is reported to have said: ‘Hegel seems … to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different.’¹⁹ It is in the light of utterances such as these that the comment that all rites are of a certain kind appears ‘dismally opinionated’ and ‘profoundly un-Wittgensteinian’.

If ascribed an appropriately provisional status, however, the opinionated r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part one: Wittgenstein
• Part two: D. Z. Phillips
• Bibliography
• Index