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Ludwig Wittgenstein - "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough"

19.01.13

 

 

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 we feel satisfied.


One could also kiss the name of one’s beloved, and here it would be clear that the name was being used as a substitutes.


The same savage, who stabs the picture of his enemy apparently in order to kill him, really builds his hut out of wood and carves his arrow skillfully and not in effigy.

(...)
How could fire or the similarity of fire to the sun have failed to make an impression on the awakening mind of man? But perhaps not “because he can’t explain it” (the foolish superstition of our time)--for will an explanation make it less impressive?
(...)
Nothing is so difficult as doing justice to the facts.
(...)

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

I read, among many similar examples, of a Rain-King in Africa to whom the people pray for rain when the rainy period comes. But surely that means that they do not really believe that he can make it rain, otherwise they would do it in the dry periods of the year in which the land is “a parched and arid desert”. For if one assumes that the people formerly instituted this office of Rain-King out of stupidity, it is nevertheless certainly clear that they had previously experienced that the rains begin in March, and then they would have had the Rain-King function for the other part of the year. Or again: toward morning, when the sun is about to rise, rites of daybreak are celebrated by the people, but not during the night, when they simply burn lamps.
(...)

It was not a trivial reason, for really there can have been no reason, that prompted certain races of mankind to venerate the oak tree, but only the fact that they and the oak were united in a community of life, and thus that they arose together not by choice, but rather like the flea and the dog. (If fleas developed a rite, it would be based on the dog.)



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