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Wittgenstein and Anthropology

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Ludwig Wittgenstein’s views concerning anthropology emerge predominantly from his notes on Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. Brian Clack discusses elements of Wittgenstein’s work that might bear on anthropology.

Image courtesy of interviewee. April 25, 2024

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This video video discusses the philosophical journey of Ludwig Wittgenstein, highlighting his evolution from early to later philosophy. It begins by framing Wittgenstein as one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, particularly known for his work on language. His early work, the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus," published in 1922, argues that language functions to depict factual states of affairs in the world, asserting that meaningful statements correspond to reality, while those that do not must be silenced.

The later philosophy, reflected in "Philosophical Investigations," represents a significant shift. Wittgenstein rejects the idea of a general form of language, instead emphasizing the diversity of language use and the notion that meaning arises from context. He critiques traditional philosophy as resulting in confusions arising from misunderstandings of language's logic and aims to guide people out of these philosophical troubles by focusing on ordinary language usage.

This video video also explores themes of ritual and magic, referencing Wittgenstein's critique of James Frazer's anthropological work, "The Golden Bough." Wittgenstein argues against viewing magical and religious practices merely as errors or primitive attempts at science. Instead, he suggests that these practices have multifaceted meanings and should be understood in their own contexts.

The speaker acknowledges the influence of Freud on Wittgenstein's thought and advocates for interdisciplinary engagement between philosophy and anthropology. Overall, Wittgenstein's work encourages a meticulous attention to the particulars of language and human behavior, moving away from broad generalizations. The speaker concludes by highlighting Wittgenstein's style and the importance of reading his works for a deeper understanding of philosophy.

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Here are some key quotes from the video discussing the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein:

1. "It's, it's rooted in the work of the greatest philosopher of the 20th century... I think Wienstein in terms of originality and uh, importance is... I think the greatest."

2. "He has two philosophies in his life... in the early philosophy, in a later philosophy, which stand in market opposition to one another."

3. "The real emphasis, I think for Stein is on philosophical problems themselves."

4. "The central idea is this... language serves to picture factual states of affairs in the world."

5. "Hence the great last line of the Tractatus: 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.'"

6. "Philosophy is... an instance of being lost."

7. "He said, indeed, that the book itself is nonsensical... what I've said is meaningless."

8. "All these philosophical problems... are instances of confusions or misunderstandings."

9. "We must begin with the mistake and transform it into what is true... uncover the source of the error."

10. "A philosophical problem has the form, 'I don't know my way about.'"

11. "He loathes generalities."

12. "A patient attention to particulars... is to be preferred to any theory."

13. "The magical practices... are mistaken attempts to get things done... we kiss pictures of loved ones."

14. "There is a tendency for us to think in generalities about rituals... Instead just think about the multiplicity of reasons or no reasons why people do things."

15. "He is a master stylist and one of the most unique voices... within the subject of philosophy."

These quotes capture Wittgenstein's thoughts on language, philosophy, and the nature of philosophical problems, as well as the dichotomy between his early and later work. They also reflect the speaker's perspective on Wittgenstein's philosophy and its implications for understanding language and communication.

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Here are a few articles that may be similar in theme or content to the video about Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophical journey:

1. **The Evolution of Wittgenstein's Philosophy** - This article delves into the progression of Wittgenstein's thoughts from the "Tractatus" to the "Philosophical Investigations," highlighting the changes in his approach to language, meaning, and the problems of philosophical inquiry.

2. **Language Games and Meaning: Understanding Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy** - This piece focuses on Wittgenstein's concept of language games, exploring how meaning is derived from the convideo of language use rather than a correspondence to external reality, as he suggested in his earlier work.

3. **Rituals and Convideo: Wittgenstein's Critique of Frazer** - An analysis of Wittgenstein's critique of James Frazer’s anthropological perspectives, discussing how Wittgenstein offers a nuanced understanding of ritual and magic that goes beyond mere scientific misinterpretations.

4. **Wittgenstein and the Philosophy of Language: A Historical Convideo** - This article provides a historical overview of Wittgenstein's contributions to the philosophy of language, discussing his influence on contemporary debates and the ideological shifts he represented in 20th-century philosophy.

5. **Interdisciplinary Approaches in Philosophy: Wittgenstein and Anthropology** - This exploration emphasizes the intersections between philosophy and other disciplines, particularly anthropology, advocating for a holistic understanding of philosophical concepts as evidenced by Wittgenstein’s dialogues with figures like Freud.

6. **Philosophical Investigations: A Guide to Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy** - A comprehensive review of Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations," summarizing key themes such as ordinary language, the critique of philosophical confusions, and the importance of convideo in understanding meaning.

7. **Wittgenstein’s Influence on Psychology and Psychoanalysis** - This article examines the impact of Wittgenstein's philosophies on the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis, particularly focusing on how his ideas intersect with the works of Freud and the interpretation of human behavior.

These articles would provide insights into various aspects of Wittgenstein's philosophy, his critiques of language and meaning, and his engagements with anthropological themes.

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It's, it's rooted in the work of the greatest philosopher

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of the 20th century, who, who's, looked at wienstein.

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I mean, that's arguable, I suppose people might say Heger is

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the, is the greatest, or Russell,

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but I think Wienstein in terms of originality and

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and, importance is, is, I think the greatest,

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just a word about who he was.

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I mean, he was an Austrian philosopher, Viennese, who

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is typified or characterized by the strange thing

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that he has two philosophies in his life,

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in the early philosophy, in a later philosophy,

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which stand in market opposition too, one another.

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So his first book, you know, have a prop here.

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Even, there's this book, tri Logical Philosophical,

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which is a, a study I suppose of, of language.

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I mean, Stein thought of as a philosopher of language.

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The, the, the real emphasis, I think

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for Stein is on philosophical problems themselves.

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And the, the discussion of language is really there

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to throw light on what the nature

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of a philosophical problem is,

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and as we'll see how to get rid of philosophical problems

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to dissolve the subject and what the tractus does.

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And this book was published,

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in English translation in 1922.

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He wrote it during the First World War.

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Its central idea is this, this notion that,

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language serves

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to picture factual states of affairs in the world.

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And that is with a few qualifications,

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that's all that it can do.

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So it a, a paradigm example of a, of a statement would be,

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you know, the cat is sitting on the mat.

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That's perfectly acceptable.

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Because when I say that sentence to you,

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you can picture something which is associated with it.

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And the, the,

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the statement is true if the cat is sitting on the mat,

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it's false if the cat is not sitting on the map.

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And then there are other sentences which do not

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straightforwardly picture states of affairs in the world.

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And these for Wienstein, are now

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to be banished into the realm of silence.

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You can't talk about this stuff.

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Hence the, the great last line of the tractates,

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which is whereof one cannot speak thereof.

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One must be silent.

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So you must be silent about things

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that you can't talk about.

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And into that category

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of things you can't talk about are things like,

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theological discourse, values, ethics and aesthetics.

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Uh, plain nonsense, of course.

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Uh, and interestingly, philosophy itself, which given

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that language was, the parameters of language were

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to be the, the totality

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of the propositions of natural science.

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He says, philosophy is not one of the natural sciences,

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therefore, strictly speaking, philosophy is nonsensical.

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And he said, indeed, that the book itself is nonsensical.

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That when you finished under, when you finished reading it

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and you've understood it, you recognize that

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what I've said is, you know, meaningless.

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So you throw the book away.

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He then said, in this remarkable way

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that I'd solved all the problems of philosophy

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with this one book, all the problems

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of philosophy were, were solved there.

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So he, he gave up philosophy and did other things.

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Interestingly, in the 1920s, he became a,

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an elementary school teacher and then an architect,

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and built this remarkable house in,

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Vienna for his sister.

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But then sometime towards the end of the 1920s, he starts

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to detect what he calls grave mistakes in his work.

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And, you know, in a way, I think

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this may have come from his work in architecture, like the,

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the, the sense of how communication is more relational,

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between human beings.

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And in his work teaching, school children,

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he talks a lot in his later work about how

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when we wanna get clear about a word,

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we focus on the question of how that word was learned.

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And that's an educationist.

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Um, or, or someone involved in education would, would pose

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that question quite naturally.

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So he goes back to philosophy around 1929.

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And, and, and his later work is very, very different.

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Um, and it's ends up, it's this book, you know,

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philosophical investigations.

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His, his great posthumously published classic,

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which gives up the idea

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that there was any general form of language.

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You know, in the tract eight, he had said that

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that language was, had a general form,

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which is this is how things stand.

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He resists that and instead talks about the variety

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of discourse, different ways of talking, different ways

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of speaking, different uses of language.

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And then instead of thinking of language

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as fundamentally pictorial,

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he advances the familiar claim that, the meaning

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of a word is its use in, in the language.

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But even then, just to, just

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to close this a little bit down, even then

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that is qualified.

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He hates generalizations now.

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So he says, for a large class of cases, though, not

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for all the meaning of a word, is its use in the language.

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So he's keen now to stress particularities,

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varieties and so on.

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We have two things now

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that we're gonna be called philosophy.

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There is philosophy is he does it.

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And there's philosophy as it's traditionally done.

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And philosophy as it's traditionally done, he thinks,

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is itself an instance of being lost.

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And what he wants to do in his new type of philosophy is

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lead you out of being lost.

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So he says, in the later work,

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in philosophical investigations,

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a philosophical problem has the form,

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I don't know my way about.

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So someone, someone's got lost somewhere.

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And here you are, back to this idea that

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philosophy arises from what in the tract eight, seels,

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a misunderstanding of the logic of our language.

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So all of these philosophical problems which are occupied

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philosophers, you know, in the Western tradition for two

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and a half thousand years, they are instances of confusions

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or misunderstandings.

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And in the tract, there was this very easy way, of course,

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of, getting rid of philosophical problems, which was

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to say they violated the hard and fast boundaries of sense.

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Now, something different happens in the later philosophy,

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which we can, I think, approach by looking at the, you know,

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the very first line of this book

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that we are talking about here, which is his,

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he didn't intend this as a contribution to anthropology.

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But if you were an anthropologist interested in wienstein,

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one of the books that you would most wanna talk about would

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probably be this, which is the remarks on Fraser's Golden

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Bow, where Wienstein reads this classic work

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of anthropology, the Golden Bow by Fraser,

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and absolutely hates it

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and produces these notes against it.

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But the first line of these notes says this,

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I quote, we must begin with the mistake

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and transform it into what is true.

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That is, we must uncover the source of the error.

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Otherwise, hearing what is true won't help us

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to convince someone of what is true.

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It's not enough to state it.

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We must find the road from error to truth.

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And that is really what your question is about.

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You know, we've got this, this, this confused, mistaken,

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erroneous view, and we have to try to retrace the steps

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that led us to this.

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Now this is what he does in the case of this work about,

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anthropology.

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And he also does it about philosophical problems.

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What is, what's going on in a philosophical problem?

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Something's become tangled,

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it's produced a set of confusions.

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We have to unravel those confusions

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and get back to the source of the error.

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And then you're left with more

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or less ordinary usage of language,

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because ordinary people

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don't get enmeshed in philosophical problems.

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They go about their life perfectly.

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Well, you want to get back to that, instead of being

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what he calls tormented by philosophical problems,

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which in fact, in one of his books, in one

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of those preliminary studies

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for philosophical investigations,

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a a work called the Blue Book, he says,

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I don't even really like the word problem for this.

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I prefer the word troubles.

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And we have philosophical troubles,

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and he wants to resolve those.

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And the model then seems to be the kind

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of thing you do when you go and see a doctor,

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or more specifically given lichtenstein's interest.

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When you go and see a therapist, I'm struggling

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with this issue, you know,

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Vichtenstein iss very influenced by Freud.

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It has to be said, he's described himself

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as a disciple of Freud.

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That's a comment which hasn't had the attention

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that it deserves, I have to say partly

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'cause Freud is so absolutely out of favor at the moment

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that people don't wanna explore this, this avenue.

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Stein is not uncritical of Freud, by the way.

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But the idea, just as in, in Freudian analysis,

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particularly in his earliest form in the studies on

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hysteria, which I think is the, the work that that Stein

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that was very interested in along with the work on dreams,

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is that the patient comes with a problem,

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and Freud sort of unravels that to take it back

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to the originating cause.

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And once you've got back to the, cause, the origin,

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the genesis of the psychological problem,

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the person's free to go about their life again.

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I mean, that was the promise of it.

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I mean, it didn't quite work out that way,

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but that's another conversation.

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Um, but Wienstein think is interested in this method

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and then applies that to philosophical problems.

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It's, it's therefore very telling that at the beginning

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of philosophical investigations, he starts

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with this extended quotation from St.

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Augustine's confessions,

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which is about the learning of language.

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And he sees in this

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what he himself had done in the tract words, name, objects,

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sentences, a combination of words,

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sentences are always attempts to depict reality in some way,

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factual situations in the world.

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And then he tries to undermine that idea

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by presenting other examples of language use,

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which aren't just depictions of reality

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or words, naming objects.

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And that loosens the hold on us then of this picture,

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this very general universal picture about

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what language does.

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So that's, again, I think the, the model

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of philosophy therapy here is an important one.

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So to get back to your question

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and be, forgive me for, for going all around the thing,

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when Stein says an interesting thing somewhere about

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philosophy, which is, you know, always go

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with a bloody long way round, and I love this thing.

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Like, you, you are not gonna, you've always gotta be going

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around the sort of byways

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and alleyways to see different aspects of things.

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So forgive me for, for, for this.

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Um, so in, in the remarks on phrases,

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golden ba you start with the same thing.

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You've now got a, an erroneous picture.

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He thinks of what ritual life in

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quote unquote primitive societies is like,

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he thinks phrase has given us this erroneous picture

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of why people engage in magical rituals, for example.

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So you're gonna look at that and try

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and unravel what's gone wrong,

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and hopefully then arrive at a correct view of what ri

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what the life, the ritual life of humanity is like.

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Hence why this book is, is so interesting, I think,

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and should be so interesting for anthropologists.

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But I think the way to do this is, I mean, there's a number

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of things that anthropologists might wanna do,

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and there have been anthropologists

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who have been very interested in stein's work.

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I'm thinking of Rodney Needham, Wendy James,

12:06.245 --> 12:07.905
you know, I would, it would be a great thing if people

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across disciplines would read Wienstein more.

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And, and the, and the philosophers would read

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anthropologists more.

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You know, we, this, the siloing

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of these disciplines is not helpful for anybody.

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I was just think then perhaps about

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what an anthropologist might take from the remarks on

12:25.115 --> 12:29.465
phrases golden bow, you know,

12:29.665 --> 12:33.065
Fraser's book, the Golden Bow, which I find fascinating.

12:33.185 --> 12:34.505
I think Vien Stein's wrong about this,

12:34.775 --> 12:37.305
mean he really hates phrase and says he's unspiritual

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and an awful person, and petty and, shallow superficial.

12:42.765 --> 12:44.245
I, I, I think that's unfair.

12:44.915 --> 12:46.125
It's a, the golden bow,

12:46.215 --> 12:48.885
which was first published in 1890 went through many,

12:49.275 --> 12:50.965
many variations until it

12:52.865 --> 12:57.205
landed on its massive sort of encyclopedic final version

12:57.225 --> 13:00.085
of 13 volumes of, of, of a study

13:00.105 --> 13:01.445
of the ritual, life of humanity.

13:03.795 --> 13:05.135
Nobody reads this book anymore.

13:05.455 --> 13:06.575
I think it's so outta fashion.

13:06.755 --> 13:09.455
I'm, I'm, I'm not sure I, I have to ask people in,

13:09.455 --> 13:10.735
in anthropology departments,

13:10.855 --> 13:12.295
whether they're interested in Fraser.

13:12.455 --> 13:15.335
I think he'd be an embarrassment to most people,

13:15.555 --> 13:16.935
partly 'cause he didn't do field work.

13:17.055 --> 13:19.255
I mean, anthropologists now will, I mean,

13:19.415 --> 13:20.695
Fraser stayed in his library

13:21.475 --> 13:25.725
and, rarely ventured outside of Cambridge.

13:26.345 --> 13:27.765
Uh, that's unfair,

13:27.825 --> 13:30.765
but, you know, he was not, he wasn't going into the field.

13:31.875 --> 13:36.655
And so he has this view, which is layers of a kind

13:36.655 --> 13:40.495
of scientific progressivism that the, the history

13:40.495 --> 13:42.575
of humanity for Fraser is the, the story

13:42.575 --> 13:46.015
of the scientific liberation from superstitious ignorance.

13:46.155 --> 13:50.895
So you have magic religion, both systems of, of, of, of

13:51.895 --> 13:53.785
what has been called primitive stupidity.

13:54.685 --> 13:56.505
And then you'll ultimately arrive at science,

13:56.505 --> 13:57.825
which is where we are in the West.

13:58.125 --> 13:59.865
And, you know, isn't this so great that we've,

13:59.865 --> 14:02.705
we've liberated ourself from, you know, entanglement

14:02.705 --> 14:04.465
with these, with these superstitious practices?

14:05.615 --> 14:07.325
Think Stein's gonna hate that, first of all.

14:07.685 --> 14:09.325
'cause he hates a progressive view of history.

14:09.945 --> 14:13.485
He, he, he kind of thinks we're in a state of decline.

14:13.505 --> 14:15.605
Now, that's another, that's another story that you

14:15.605 --> 14:17.485
and I won't get to today,

14:17.825 --> 14:21.035
but Fraser's idea is this, magic is a kind

14:21.035 --> 14:22.195
of false system of science.

14:22.305 --> 14:24.235
It's an attempt to do what science now does.

14:24.615 --> 14:29.585
So the magician, who is someone who is ignorant of the way

14:29.585 --> 14:31.385
that things actually work in the world, they try

14:31.385 --> 14:33.945
to influence things by imitating what they want.

14:34.285 --> 14:36.225
So if you want rain to come, if you're in the middle

14:36.225 --> 14:38.345
of a drought, you sprinkle water on the ground

14:38.615 --> 14:40.665
because the imitation will produce the,

14:40.925 --> 14:42.265
the correspondence in reality.

14:42.645 --> 14:45.145
And the most famous example, of course, is that,

14:45.765 --> 14:48.825
if you want to kill your enemy, you make a little effigy

14:48.825 --> 14:50.265
of them and then stick pins in there.

14:50.455 --> 14:51.725
This is familiar, of course,

14:51.985 --> 14:55.205
but the, the, you know, the, the voodoo doll or whatever,

14:57.105 --> 15:01.285
and Fraser says, this is an attempt to get what you want,

15:01.285 --> 15:03.125
but obviously it's a mistake, it's an error.

15:06.155 --> 15:08.775
So ultimately, after many, many centuries,

15:08.775 --> 15:10.855
people realize they got it wrong, they go to religion.

15:11.365 --> 15:13.975
Instead of there being these, laws of,

15:14.115 --> 15:17.055
of supernatural laws that you can manipulate, you appeal

15:17.055 --> 15:19.495
to gods by prayer and so on.

15:19.555 --> 15:21.775
But prayer doesn't work either. Fred Razor thinks.

15:22.035 --> 15:23.455
So you get rid of that too, ultimately.

15:23.455 --> 15:25.015
And then you arrive at science and hey, presto,

15:26.615 --> 15:27.925
thank the thank the Lord.

15:27.985 --> 15:31.085
Now science works. This is the picture of the Wienstein

15:31.725 --> 15:34.725
binds in, in Fraser's work, great work of anthropology

15:35.225 --> 15:37.445
and really wants to attack.

15:37.785 --> 15:40.325
And he attacks it in an interesting way by

15:41.045 --> 15:44.285
focusing on everything that Fraser has written about,

15:44.945 --> 15:47.725
the, the destruction of effigies in, you know,

15:47.735 --> 15:49.085
quote primitive societies.

15:50.345 --> 15:52.725
And Vien Stein produces one observation about this,

15:53.865 --> 15:57.215
which he thinks will undermine everything

15:57.245 --> 15:59.895
that Fraser has written about magic as error.

16:00.315 --> 16:04.825
And he just says, we, we, we kiss pictures

16:04.825 --> 16:07.955
of loved ones, and that's it, right?

16:08.055 --> 16:10.715
And the observation, of course is meant

16:10.715 --> 16:15.055
to loosen the hold on you of the idea that,

16:15.525 --> 16:17.775
this is an attempt or the, the, the destruction

16:17.775 --> 16:19.215
of an average is the attempt to kill someone.

16:20.155 --> 16:23.525
Because, you know, when I kiss a picture of my wife,

16:23.525 --> 16:24.565
for example, when she's not here,

16:25.815 --> 16:27.515
I'm not expecting her to feel anything.

16:28.345 --> 16:29.905
I don't expect any result to follow.

16:30.405 --> 16:32.905
It is in some sense an expression of my love

16:32.905 --> 16:34.265
or an expression of a longing

16:34.455 --> 16:37.705
that she would be here rather than, you know, in Australia

16:37.965 --> 16:39.305
or, or, or wherever.

16:41.265 --> 16:43.245
So once you've got that idea in your head,

16:43.245 --> 16:45.245
and this is to do with that unraveling, you know, beginning

16:45.245 --> 16:48.565
with the error and transforming it into what is true,

16:49.145 --> 16:53.765
you stop thinking, all these religious practices are,

16:54.065 --> 16:56.605
mistaken attempts to get things done.

16:56.835 --> 16:58.805
Instead, you've opened up a set of vista

16:59.145 --> 17:03.365
or a vista of, of a number of ways of other possibilities of

17:03.365 --> 17:04.445
what ritual life could be.

17:05.885 --> 17:07.345
You know, it's of course a problem here.

17:07.965 --> 17:09.065
And I think I fell into

17:09.065 --> 17:11.465
that problem 25 years ago when I wrote the book,

17:11.465 --> 17:13.185
which I wouldn't have written the same way now,

17:13.205 --> 17:16.745
but that's, that's aging for you, of thinking

17:16.745 --> 17:20.425
that vien stein's replacing this Fraser's theory with his,

17:20.535 --> 17:22.505
with an alternative theory of magic.

17:22.805 --> 17:26.315
So people for many years had thought that

17:26.955 --> 17:29.675
was offering an expressivism theory of magic,

17:30.215 --> 17:31.595
the magical practices,

17:31.595 --> 17:33.555
and by extension also religious practices.

17:34.335 --> 17:37.635
Prayer, is, you know, we are expressing things.

17:37.815 --> 17:39.275
That's all, that's all that it is.

17:39.385 --> 17:40.755
It's not anything mistaken.

17:41.855 --> 17:43.675
Um, I, I never thought that was true.

17:44.175 --> 17:47.035
Um, but I did think that there was some, Stein was trying

17:47.035 --> 17:50.765
to offer some kind of instinct, account of ritual

17:50.795 --> 17:52.725
that you instinctively kiss a photograph.

17:53.075 --> 17:54.285
It's not that I'm thinking,

17:54.285 --> 17:57.005
that photograph represents my wife, I miss her.

17:58.105 --> 18:00.245
I'm just gonna kiss this for one motor for another.

18:00.325 --> 18:02.165
I just automatically do that kind of stuff.

18:02.425 --> 18:03.805
In the same way, in a great example

18:03.805 --> 18:07.225
of Fen Shine gives himself, this is probably

18:07.225 --> 18:08.505
what you are doing at the moment, by the way,

18:08.505 --> 18:09.785
this example says,

18:09.845 --> 18:13.845
if a man is talking too much in my company, I often

18:14.645 --> 18:16.685
instinctively press my lips together

18:18.165 --> 18:19.625
as if I could keep his closed.

18:21.365 --> 18:23.935
See, and that's interesting

18:23.935 --> 18:25.775
because he's saying ritual is something like this.

18:26.975 --> 18:30.375
I think I got a bit too, enthusiastic about that,

18:30.485 --> 18:32.695
that view in my earlier, book,

18:32.695 --> 18:33.895
which I can flash the book here,

18:33.895 --> 18:35.855
that was the book I wrote back in the, I wrote

18:35.855 --> 18:36.855
that back in the 20th century.

18:36.915 --> 18:40.875
Can you imagine, instead,

18:40.955 --> 18:42.795
I don't think he's offering any kind of theory at all.

18:42.865 --> 18:44.955
He's just saying there is a tendency for us

18:44.955 --> 18:49.275
to think in generalities about rituals, prayers,

18:49.675 --> 18:50.755
practices of one kind another.

18:51.135 --> 18:54.395
And instead just think about the, the multiplicity

18:55.215 --> 18:59.835
of reasons or no reasons why people do things.

19:00.375 --> 19:02.755
And then you are tempted to make any kind of general claim.

19:03.095 --> 19:05.395
It, it was very important to emphasize

19:05.415 --> 19:07.875
how much he loathes generalities.

19:09.155 --> 19:11.975
He talks in the blue book about the craving, you know,

19:11.975 --> 19:14.695
this craving for, for generality.

19:15.635 --> 19:19.055
And so it sounds almost like a craving for sugar

19:19.235 --> 19:20.495
or cocaine or something.

19:20.525 --> 19:23.495
It's something you have to undermine in yourself.

19:24.485 --> 19:26.865
And once you've got rid of the craving for generality,

19:26.965 --> 19:30.265
you can see things as they are in their

19:31.025 --> 19:34.305
multifarious forms, their great variety of things.

19:34.605 --> 19:38.505
And so a patient attention to particulars as he,

19:38.505 --> 19:43.225
as he calls it somewhere, is to be preferred to any theory,

19:43.715 --> 19:46.345
which by definition, you know, in a kind

19:46.345 --> 19:48.625
of pro-Russian way will force

19:49.255 --> 19:51.225
disparate phenomena into one mold.

19:51.485 --> 19:54.705
He doesn't wanna do that. The final thoughts I have is,

19:54.805 --> 19:57.185
is really there's nothing final about it.

19:57.325 --> 19:59.225
You know, in the, there's this great paper

19:59.225 --> 20:02.225
by Freud called Analysis Terminable and Terminable.

20:02.335 --> 20:04.025
It's just, it just keeps going on.

20:04.085 --> 20:08.025
And I think, you know, the interability of, of threads

20:08.025 --> 20:10.505
that Stein's thought,

20:11.715 --> 20:13.995
provokes in us should be pursued in a number of ways.

20:13.995 --> 20:16.355
And there, you know, I mentioned Freud, right?

20:16.395 --> 20:18.795
I, I, I would love to see people doing more work on

20:19.855 --> 20:21.635
the influence of Freud on Wienstein.

20:21.975 --> 20:25.835
Gordon Baker, who, who, who died rather young awfully

20:26.585 --> 20:28.395
started this work in a great set

20:28.395 --> 20:30.515
of papers called Stein's Method.

20:31.695 --> 20:34.115
And he really spelt out how the,

20:34.215 --> 20:37.735
how psychoanalysis had had this very,

20:39.465 --> 20:41.215
great influence on Stein's method.

20:41.955 --> 20:46.375
I'd like more work to be, to be seen on that. And, you know,

20:47.685 --> 20:49.165
I just think people should be reading Wienstein.

20:49.165 --> 20:51.725
Well, there's a, there's, there's his influence.

20:51.725 --> 20:52.845
It's, it's an interesting thing.

20:52.885 --> 20:56.645
I think John s makes this point somewhere that, you know,

20:56.645 --> 20:58.365
we talk about Fierstein's the greatest philosophers

20:58.365 --> 21:01.685
of the centric, perhaps, but his influence is fairly minimal

21:01.685 --> 21:03.285
because philosophers are still doing what they do.

21:04.105 --> 21:05.835
You know, we still go to conferences

21:05.855 --> 21:07.675
and deliver our clever papers and so on.

21:08.775 --> 21:10.475
But if Stein had a real

21:10.475 --> 21:11.755
influence, people wouldn't be doing this.

21:11.775 --> 21:13.675
They'd be doing something else.

21:13.825 --> 21:16.435
They wouldn't be, as it were, presenting these papers

21:16.455 --> 21:18.075
and offering new accounts of X.

21:19.035 --> 21:22.375
And so there's a sense in which philosophers don't wanna

21:22.375 --> 21:25.135
read ign time because it, it's almost like Turkey's voting

21:25.275 --> 21:26.375
for Christmas, as it were.

21:26.775 --> 21:27.935
I would encourage anyone to read him

21:27.935 --> 21:29.415
because he is a master stylist

21:29.675 --> 21:33.855
and one of the most unique voices of the, of the, of the,

21:33.915 --> 21:35.615
in within the subject of philosophy.

00:00 - It's, it's rooted in the work of the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, who, who's, looked at wienstein. I mean, that's arguable, I suppose people might say Heger is the, is the greatest, or Russell, but I think Wienstein in terms of originality and and, importance is, is, I think the greatest,

00:20 - just a word about who he was. I mean, he was an Austrian philosopher, Viennese, who is typified or characterized by the strange thing that he has two philosophies in his life, in the early philosophy, in a later philosophy, which stand in market opposition too, one another. So his first book, you know, have a prop here. Even, there's this book, tri Logical Philosophical, which is a, a study I suppose of, of language. I mean, Stein thought of as a philosopher of language.

00:51 - The, the, the real emphasis, I think for Stein is on philosophical problems themselves. And the, the discussion of language is really there to throw light on what the nature of a philosophical problem is, and as we'll see how to get rid of philosophical problems to dissolve the subject and what the tractus does. And this book was published, in English translation in 1922. He wrote it during the First World War.

01:17 - Its central idea is this, this notion that, language serves to picture factual states of affairs in the world. And that is with a few qualifications, that's all that it can do. So it a, a paradigm example of a, of a statement would be, you know, the cat is sitting on the mat. That's perfectly acceptable. Because when I say that sentence to you, you can picture something which is associated with it.

01:45 - And the, the, the statement is true if the cat is sitting on the mat, it's false if the cat is not sitting on the map. And then there are other sentences which do not straightforwardly picture states of affairs in the world. And these for Wienstein, are now to be banished into the realm of silence. You can't talk about this stuff. Hence the, the great last line of the tractates, which is whereof one cannot speak thereof.

02:10 - One must be silent. So you must be silent about things that you can't talk about. And into that category of things you can't talk about are things like, theological discourse, values, ethics and aesthetics. plain nonsense, of course. and interestingly, philosophy itself, which given that language was, the parameters of language were to be the, the totality

02:35 - of the propositions of natural science. He says, philosophy is not one of the natural sciences, therefore, strictly speaking, philosophy is nonsensical. And he said, indeed, that the book itself is nonsensical. That when you finished under, when you finished reading it and you've understood it, you recognize that what I've said is, you know, meaningless. So you throw the book away. He then said, in this remarkable way that I'd solved all the problems of philosophy

02:59 - with this one book, all the problems of philosophy were, were solved there. So he, he gave up philosophy and did other things. Interestingly, in the 1920s, he became a, an elementary school teacher and then an architect, and built this remarkable house in, Vienna for his sister. But then sometime towards the end of the 1920s, he starts to detect what he calls grave mistakes in his work. And, you know, in a way, I think

03:26 - this may have come from his work in architecture, like the, the, the sense of how communication is more relational, between human beings. And in his work teaching, school children, he talks a lot in his later work about how when we wanna get clear about a word, we focus on the question of how that word was learned. And that's an educationist. or, or someone involved in education would, would pose that question quite naturally.

03:54 - So he goes back to philosophy around 1929. And, and, and his later work is very, very different. and it's ends up, it's this book, you know, philosophical investigations. His, his great posthumously published classic, which gives up the idea that there was any general form of language. You know, in the tract eight, he had said that that language was, had a general form, which is this is how things stand.

04:23 - He resists that and instead talks about the variety of discourse, different ways of talking, different ways of speaking, different uses of language. And then instead of thinking of language as fundamentally pictorial, he advances the familiar claim that, the meaning of a word is its use in, in the language. But even then, just to, just to close this a little bit down, even then that is qualified.

04:49 - He hates generalizations now. So he says, for a large class of cases, though, not for all the meaning of a word, is its use in the language. So he's keen now to stress particularities, varieties and so on. We have two things now that we're gonna be called philosophy. There is philosophy is he does it. And there's philosophy as it's traditionally done. And philosophy as it's traditionally done, he thinks,

05:17 - is itself an instance of being lost. And what he wants to do in his new type of philosophy is lead you out of being lost. So he says, in the later work, in philosophical investigations, a philosophical problem has the form, I don't know my way about. So someone, someone's got lost somewhere. And here you are, back to this idea that philosophy arises from what in the tract eight, seels,

05:51 - a misunderstanding of the logic of our language. So all of these philosophical problems which are occupied philosophers, you know, in the Western tradition for two and a half thousand years, they are instances of confusions or misunderstandings. And in the tract, there was this very easy way, of course, of, getting rid of philosophical problems, which was to say they violated the hard and fast boundaries of sense. Now, something different happens in the later philosophy, which we can, I think, approach by looking at the, you know,

06:22 - the very first line of this book that we are talking about here, which is his, he didn't intend this as a contribution to anthropology. But if you were an anthropologist interested in wienstein, one of the books that you would most wanna talk about would probably be this, which is the remarks on Fraser's Golden Bow, where Wienstein reads this classic work of anthropology, the Golden Bow by Fraser, and absolutely hates it and produces these notes against it.

06:52 - But the first line of these notes says this, I quote, we must begin with the mistake and transform it into what is true. That is, we must uncover the source of the error. Otherwise, hearing what is true won't help us to convince someone of what is true. It's not enough to state it. We must find the road from error to truth. And that is really what your question is about. You know, we've got this, this, this confused, mistaken,

07:27 - erroneous view, and we have to try to retrace the steps that led us to this. Now this is what he does in the case of this work about, anthropology. And he also does it about philosophical problems. What is, what's going on in a philosophical problem? Something's become tangled, it's produced a set of confusions. We have to unravel those confusions and get back to the source of the error.

07:52 - And then you're left with more or less ordinary usage of language, because ordinary people don't get enmeshed in philosophical problems. They go about their life perfectly. Well, you want to get back to that, instead of being what he calls tormented by philosophical problems, which in fact, in one of his books, in one of those preliminary studies for philosophical investigations,

08:17 - a a work called the Blue Book, he says, I don't even really like the word problem for this. I prefer the word troubles. And we have philosophical troubles, and he wants to resolve those. And the model then seems to be the kind of thing you do when you go and see a doctor, or more specifically given lichtenstein's interest. When you go and see a therapist, I'm struggling with this issue, you know,

08:41 - Vichtenstein iss very influenced by Freud. It has to be said, he's described himself as a disciple of Freud. That's a comment which hasn't had the attention that it deserves, I have to say partly 'cause Freud is so absolutely out of favor at the moment that people don't wanna explore this, this avenue. Stein is not uncritical of Freud, by the way. But the idea, just as in, in Freudian analysis, particularly in his earliest form in the studies on

09:06 - hysteria, which I think is the, the work that that Stein that was very interested in along with the work on dreams, is that the patient comes with a problem, and Freud sort of unravels that to take it back to the originating cause. And once you've got back to the, cause, the origin, the genesis of the psychological problem, the person's free to go about their life again. I mean, that was the promise of it. I mean, it didn't quite work out that way,

09:32 - but that's another conversation. but Wienstein think is interested in this method and then applies that to philosophical problems. It's, it's therefore very telling that at the beginning of philosophical investigations, he starts with this extended quotation from St. Augustine's confessions, which is about the learning of language. And he sees in this what he himself had done in the tract words, name, objects,

10:05 - sentences, a combination of words, sentences are always attempts to depict reality in some way, factual situations in the world. And then he tries to undermine that idea by presenting other examples of language use, which aren't just depictions of reality or words, naming objects. And that loosens the hold on us then of this picture, this very general universal picture about what language does.

10:36 - So that's, again, I think the, the model of philosophy therapy here is an important one. So to get back to your question and be, forgive me for, for going all around the thing, when Stein says an interesting thing somewhere about philosophy, which is, you know, always go with a bloody long way round, and I love this thing. Like, you, you are not gonna, you've always gotta be going around the sort of byways and alleyways to see different aspects of things.

11:02 - So forgive me for, for, for this. so in, in the remarks on phrases, golden ba you start with the same thing. You've now got a, an erroneous picture. He thinks of what ritual life in quote unquote primitive societies is like, he thinks phrase has given us this erroneous picture of why people engage in magical rituals, for example. So you're gonna look at that and try and unravel what's gone wrong,

11:38 - and hopefully then arrive at a correct view of what ri what the life, the ritual life of humanity is like. Hence why this book is, is so interesting, I think, and should be so interesting for anthropologists. But I think the way to do this is, I mean, there's a number of things that anthropologists might wanna do, and there have been anthropologists who have been very interested in stein's work. I'm thinking of Rodney Needham, Wendy James, you know, I would, it would be a great thing if people

12:07 - across disciplines would read Wienstein more. And, and the, and the philosophers would read anthropologists more. You know, we, this, the siloing of these disciplines is not helpful for anybody. I was just think then perhaps about what an anthropologist might take from the remarks on phrases golden bow, you know, Fraser's book, the Golden Bow, which I find fascinating. I think Vien Stein's wrong about this,

12:34 - mean he really hates phrase and says he's unspiritual and an awful person, and petty and, shallow superficial. I, I, I think that's unfair. It's a, the golden bow, which was first published in 1890 went through many, many variations until it landed on its massive sort of encyclopedic final version of 13 volumes of, of, of a study of the ritual, life of humanity. Nobody reads this book anymore.

13:05 - I think it's so outta fashion. I'm, I'm, I'm not sure I, I have to ask people in, in anthropology departments, whether they're interested in Fraser. I think he'd be an embarrassment to most people, partly 'cause he didn't do field work. I mean, anthropologists now will, I mean, Fraser stayed in his library and, rarely ventured outside of Cambridge. that's unfair,

13:27 - but, you know, he was not, he wasn't going into the field. And so he has this view, which is layers of a kind of scientific progressivism that the, the history of humanity for Fraser is the, the story of the scientific liberation from superstitious ignorance. So you have magic religion, both systems of, of, of, of what has been called primitive stupidity. And then you'll ultimately arrive at science, which is where we are in the West. And, you know, isn't this so great that we've,

13:59 - we've liberated ourself from, you know, entanglement with these, with these superstitious practices? Think Stein's gonna hate that, first of all. 'cause he hates a progressive view of history. He, he, he kind of thinks we're in a state of decline. Now, that's another, that's another story that you and I won't get to today, but Fraser's idea is this, magic is a kind of false system of science. It's an attempt to do what science now does.

14:24 - So the magician, who is someone who is ignorant of the way that things actually work in the world, they try to influence things by imitating what they want. So if you want rain to come, if you're in the middle of a drought, you sprinkle water on the ground because the imitation will produce the, the correspondence in reality. And the most famous example, of course, is that, if you want to kill your enemy, you make a little effigy of them and then stick pins in there.

14:50 - This is familiar, of course, but the, the, you know, the, the voodoo doll or whatever, and Fraser says, this is an attempt to get what you want, but obviously it's a mistake, it's an error. So ultimately, after many, many centuries, people realize they got it wrong, they go to religion. Instead of there being these, laws of, of supernatural laws that you can manipulate, you appeal to gods by prayer and so on. But prayer doesn't work either. Fred Razor thinks.

15:22 - So you get rid of that too, ultimately. And then you arrive at science and hey, presto, thank the thank the Lord. Now science works. This is the picture of the Wienstein binds in, in Fraser's work, great work of anthropology and really wants to attack. And he attacks it in an interesting way by focusing on everything that Fraser has written about, the, the destruction of effigies in, you know, quote primitive societies.

15:50 - And Vien Stein produces one observation about this, which he thinks will undermine everything that Fraser has written about magic as error. And he just says, we, we, we kiss pictures of loved ones, and that's it, right? And the observation, of course is meant to loosen the hold on you of the idea that, this is an attempt or the, the, the destruction of an average is the attempt to kill someone. Because, you know, when I kiss a picture of my wife,

16:23 - for example, when she's not here, I'm not expecting her to feel anything. I don't expect any result to follow. It is in some sense an expression of my love or an expression of a longing that she would be here rather than, you know, in Australia or, or, or wherever. So once you've got that idea in your head, and this is to do with that unraveling, you know, beginning with the error and transforming it into what is true,

16:49 - you stop thinking, all these religious practices are, mistaken attempts to get things done. Instead, you've opened up a set of vista or a vista of, of a number of ways of other possibilities of what ritual life could be. You know, it's of course a problem here. And I think I fell into that problem 25 years ago when I wrote the book, which I wouldn't have written the same way now, but that's, that's aging for you, of thinking

17:16 - that vien stein's replacing this Fraser's theory with his, with an alternative theory of magic. So people for many years had thought that was offering an expressivism theory of magic, the magical practices, and by extension also religious practices. Prayer, is, you know, we are expressing things. That's all, that's all that it is. It's not anything mistaken. I, I never thought that was true.

17:44 - but I did think that there was some, Stein was trying to offer some kind of instinct, account of ritual that you instinctively kiss a photograph. It's not that I'm thinking, that photograph represents my wife, I miss her. I'm just gonna kiss this for one motor for another. I just automatically do that kind of stuff. In the same way, in a great example of Fen Shine gives himself, this is probably what you are doing at the moment, by the way,

18:08 - this example says, if a man is talking too much in my company, I often instinctively press my lips together as if I could keep his closed. See, and that's interesting because he's saying ritual is something like this. I think I got a bit too, enthusiastic about that, that view in my earlier, book, which I can flash the book here, that was the book I wrote back in the, I wrote

18:35 - that back in the 20th century. Can you imagine, instead, I don't think he's offering any kind of theory at all. He's just saying there is a tendency for us to think in generalities about rituals, prayers, practices of one kind another. And instead just think about the, the multiplicity of reasons or no reasons why people do things. And then you are tempted to make any kind of general claim. It, it was very important to emphasize

19:05 - how much he loathes generalities. He talks in the blue book about the craving, you know, this craving for, for generality. And so it sounds almost like a craving for sugar or cocaine or something. It's something you have to undermine in yourself. And once you've got rid of the craving for generality, you can see things as they are in their multifarious forms, their great variety of things. And so a patient attention to particulars as he,

19:38 - as he calls it somewhere, is to be preferred to any theory, which by definition, you know, in a kind of pro-Russian way will force disparate phenomena into one mold. He doesn't wanna do that. The final thoughts I have is, is really there's nothing final about it. You know, in the, there's this great paper by Freud called Analysis Terminable and Terminable. It's just, it just keeps going on. And I think, you know, the interability of, of threads

20:08 - that Stein's thought, provokes in us should be pursued in a number of ways. And there, you know, I mentioned Freud, right? I, I, I would love to see people doing more work on the influence of Freud on Wienstein. Gordon Baker, who, who, who died rather young awfully started this work in a great set of papers called Stein's Method. And he really spelt out how the, how psychoanalysis had had this very,

20:39 - great influence on Stein's method. I'd like more work to be, to be seen on that. And, you know, I just think people should be reading Wienstein. Well, there's a, there's, there's his influence. It's, it's an interesting thing. I think John s makes this point somewhere that, you know, we talk about Fierstein's the greatest philosophers of the centric, perhaps, but his influence is fairly minimal because philosophers are still doing what they do. You know, we still go to conferences

21:05 - and deliver our clever papers and so on. But if Stein had a real influence, people wouldn't be doing this. They'd be doing something else. They wouldn't be, as it were, presenting these papers and offering new accounts of X. And so there's a sense in which philosophers don't wanna read ign time because it, it's almost like Turkey's voting for Christmas, as it were. I would encourage anyone to read him

21:27 - because he is a master stylist and one of the most unique voices of the, of the, of the, in within the subject of philosophy.

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