rushthatspeaks (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks) wrote2011-03-22 04:54 pm
rushthatspeaks) wrote2011-03-22 04:54 pm
Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, Ludwig Wittgenstein (365 Books, Day 203)
Day before yesterday's review.
I was in fact looking for Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour in the card catalog when I happened to see this listed. I had no notion it existed. Then after I jumped up and down grinning for a while, I think I kind of levitated to the relevant section of the stacks, and settled in for one of the most delightful hours I have ever had, consisting of Ludwig Wittgenstein telling me that Sir James George Frazer was a total idiot, for many original and awesome reasons. Oh little book where were you in my mythography classes. We always need more good reasons why Frazer was an idiot! It is an entire sub-field!
Anyway, for those of you who don't care about the history of the ongoing scholarly debates about the anthropology of myth (WHY DON'T YOU), this is also a really good book if you are, let us say, a fantasy writer and you would like to think more about the whys and wherefores of mythology and magic, because in completely debunking Frazer's explanations Wittgenstein also comes up with some good things I don't think anyone's said before.
So. The Golden Bough. It is best known nowadays I think as a collection of theoretically ancient rituals from ancient Greece, as with year-kings and so on, and the stories and rituals are indeed very compelling, although not so much based on archaeological evidence. Frazer, the author/compiler, says that mythology is a method of explaining the world by 'primitive societies' when they don't have thecurrently accepted real explanation. So the sun is carried across the sky by a chariot because chariots carry things and no one knows how else the sun could move, and people keep doing rituals to bring rain because they always work eventually, i.e. it always does rain again sometime. And the rituals of blood, human sacrifice etc., exist because the people who do them believe very hard that otherwise the year will not turn and the sun will not rise and therefore we can make some vague moral excuse for these poor ignorant savages I'M SORRY I DON'T LIKE FRAZER VERY MUCH OKAY. Especially since the logical corollary of his argument is that cultures 'grow out' of mythology and into science.
Wittgenstein says that the odd thing about Frazer is that he keeps representing people as doing these things out of stupidity, and it is just not that plausible that no one for thousands of years would notice that it rains sooner or later sometime. Frazer's error is in trying to explain ritual and mythology by saying that it depends on people's opinions about the world. But it does not depend on people's opinions, because if you change a person's beliefs about the reason the sun moves, it does not mean he automatically stops sacrificing to the sun god. The reasons for myth and ritual are found in the emotions we experience when we hear about/experience the myth and ritual, the very deep emotions. And something else:
For Wittgenstein, an expressed desire contains within itself the means of its satisfaction: if you are thirsty, your thirst contains the concept of water, which you know you need. And magic, ritual, these are expressed desires (as indeed most fantasy writers agree-- how many books in which the efficacy of magic is based on how badly you want something). But for Wittgenstein, and this is where I think his theory becomes original, magic is like any other expressed desire, in that it contains its own fulfillment. If you do the ritual, and the sun comes back, the cause and effect of things is immaterial. You are just as happy as if you made the sun come back, even though you know perfectly well on some level that you didn't, and on some other level that you did. The ritual was its own sufficiency. Hell, the sun doesn't even have to come back for you to know that at least you did the ritual right. This is the state of mind of someone who performs a curse, only to see their enemy become happier and luckier: well, I did everything I could.
Wittgenstein also points out that many separate ritual gestures may express exactly the same semantic content-- after Schubert's death his brother cut his remaining music into small pieces and distributed the pieces among his students, but we would equally take it as an act of pious memory, and of the same kind of pious memory, if the brother had burned the music, or locked it up in a cabinet where no one could ever see it again, or published it and insisted that copies be given free to everyone who wanted one. The point is that the gesture gravitates towards meaning, the rituals survive that contain the solution of expressed desire: the more effectively your myth tells this, your rite does this, the more likely it is to become widely adopted and survive.
Oh, this book is so good. I haven't even gone into what he thinks we ought to be doing with the anthropology of myth, partly because I am not sure I understand it, but the vague lineaments I can get are awesome. And I haven't gone into the way he thinks that ritual back-dates itself, that the sense that a given set of rituals must be incomparably ancient is part of the set of emotional responses that make that set of rituals compelling enough to survive.
And further demonstration of this book's sheer shininess: it was never published during Wittgenstein's lifetime; it was collected from a set of slips of paper tucked into his copy of The Golden Bough after he died and it holds together as an essay. Oh, Ludwig. It is no wonder people try to index, collate, and discuss his grocery lists.
The version I have is German/English facing pages, translated by A.C. Miles. I am considering buying a copy and sending it to one of my old college professors because there really was a gap shaped just like this in the syllabus of the best course I took on the history of mythography.
IN CONCLUSION: WITTGENSTEIN IS AWESOMESAUCE.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are
comments over there.
I was in fact looking for Wittgenstein's Remarks on Colour in the card catalog when I happened to see this listed. I had no notion it existed. Then after I jumped up and down grinning for a while, I think I kind of levitated to the relevant section of the stacks, and settled in for one of the most delightful hours I have ever had, consisting of Ludwig Wittgenstein telling me that Sir James George Frazer was a total idiot, for many original and awesome reasons. Oh little book where were you in my mythography classes. We always need more good reasons why Frazer was an idiot! It is an entire sub-field!
Anyway, for those of you who don't care about the history of the ongoing scholarly debates about the anthropology of myth (WHY DON'T YOU), this is also a really good book if you are, let us say, a fantasy writer and you would like to think more about the whys and wherefores of mythology and magic, because in completely debunking Frazer's explanations Wittgenstein also comes up with some good things I don't think anyone's said before.
So. The Golden Bough. It is best known nowadays I think as a collection of theoretically ancient rituals from ancient Greece, as with year-kings and so on, and the stories and rituals are indeed very compelling, although not so much based on archaeological evidence. Frazer, the author/compiler, says that mythology is a method of explaining the world by 'primitive societies' when they don't have the
Wittgenstein says that the odd thing about Frazer is that he keeps representing people as doing these things out of stupidity, and it is just not that plausible that no one for thousands of years would notice that it rains sooner or later sometime. Frazer's error is in trying to explain ritual and mythology by saying that it depends on people's opinions about the world. But it does not depend on people's opinions, because if you change a person's beliefs about the reason the sun moves, it does not mean he automatically stops sacrificing to the sun god. The reasons for myth and ritual are found in the emotions we experience when we hear about/experience the myth and ritual, the very deep emotions. And something else:
Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of a loved one. This is obviously not based on a belief that it will have a definite effect on the object which the picture represents. It aims at some satisfaction and it achieves it. Or rather, it does not aim at anything; we act in this way and then feel satisfied.
For Wittgenstein, an expressed desire contains within itself the means of its satisfaction: if you are thirsty, your thirst contains the concept of water, which you know you need. And magic, ritual, these are expressed desires (as indeed most fantasy writers agree-- how many books in which the efficacy of magic is based on how badly you want something). But for Wittgenstein, and this is where I think his theory becomes original, magic is like any other expressed desire, in that it contains its own fulfillment. If you do the ritual, and the sun comes back, the cause and effect of things is immaterial. You are just as happy as if you made the sun come back, even though you know perfectly well on some level that you didn't, and on some other level that you did. The ritual was its own sufficiency. Hell, the sun doesn't even have to come back for you to know that at least you did the ritual right. This is the state of mind of someone who performs a curse, only to see their enemy become happier and luckier: well, I did everything I could.
Wittgenstein also points out that many separate ritual gestures may express exactly the same semantic content-- after Schubert's death his brother cut his remaining music into small pieces and distributed the pieces among his students, but we would equally take it as an act of pious memory, and of the same kind of pious memory, if the brother had burned the music, or locked it up in a cabinet where no one could ever see it again, or published it and insisted that copies be given free to everyone who wanted one. The point is that the gesture gravitates towards meaning, the rituals survive that contain the solution of expressed desire: the more effectively your myth tells this, your rite does this, the more likely it is to become widely adopted and survive.
Oh, this book is so good. I haven't even gone into what he thinks we ought to be doing with the anthropology of myth, partly because I am not sure I understand it, but the vague lineaments I can get are awesome. And I haven't gone into the way he thinks that ritual back-dates itself, that the sense that a given set of rituals must be incomparably ancient is part of the set of emotional responses that make that set of rituals compelling enough to survive.
And further demonstration of this book's sheer shininess: it was never published during Wittgenstein's lifetime; it was collected from a set of slips of paper tucked into his copy of The Golden Bough after he died and it holds together as an essay. Oh, Ludwig. It is no wonder people try to index, collate, and discuss his grocery lists.
The version I have is German/English facing pages, translated by A.C. Miles. I am considering buying a copy and sending it to one of my old college professors because there really was a gap shaped just like this in the syllabus of the best course I took on the history of mythography.
IN CONCLUSION: WITTGENSTEIN IS AWESOMESAUCE.
You can comment here or at the Dreamwidth crosspost. There are