Wittgenstein as anthropologist: The concept of ritual instinct

Philosophical Investigations

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 109-124

  De Lara, Philippe ^a  

^a Universite Paris Est   (France)

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EID: 60949196161     PISSN: 01900536     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9205.00190     Document Type: Article

References (11)

1. Quoted hereafter from the most recent German-English edition, in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991)
2. Wittgenstein's Lectures, Cambridge 1932-1935, edited by Alice Ambrose (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), p. 33
3. There is an analogy between this point and the way Wittgenstein deals with the idea of limits of language in the private language arguments in Philosophical Investigations, as opposed to the view of a sharp boundary between what can and what cannot be said in the Tractatus. See Oswald Hanfling, Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy (London: 1989), ch. V
4. and "What Does the Private Language Argument Prove?", Philosophical Quarterly, 1984
5. and my Le Rite et la raison, Wittgenstein et les sciences de l'homme, forthcoming
6. One might think of basic actions or states, like going to sleep or being hungry as not being ritual at all. But even in those cases, our acting, our responding to our feelings take definite forms which are woven in some social and historical form of life: going to sleep may be either going to bed, or lying down on the ground, etc
7. This is in fact an intermediate case between private impulse and social ceremony. It is remarquable in that expressive and instrumental accounts are prima facie equally plausible: this kind of magic can be performed against a personal enemy and therefore connected with feelings (anger, hatred), but it can also belong to a more formal ritual, performed by a professional sorcerer, without any specific emotion towards the object of the ritual
8. On this intransitive feature of expressions in that sense, see the entry "Aesthetics" in Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995)
9. and Charles Taylor, "Action as Expression", in Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995)
10. Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness, in Philosophical Occasions, quoted above
11. I am indebted to Hans-Johann Glock, Peter Hacker, Oswald Hanfling and John Hyman for their comments on a draft of this paper