ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough' on a number of occasions. It describes the criticisms to Wittgenstein's contemplative conception of philosophy. John Cook has argued that Wittgenstein shows the implausibility of this view, but that he replaces Frazer's intellectualist theory with an expressivist theory of his own. Frank Cioffi says that when Wittgenstein does claim that all rituals are of this kind, 'This is a dismally opinionated utterance and a profoundly unWittgensteinian one. Wittgenstein thinks we do, according to Cook, because he ignores a third possibility, namely, that rituals are the product of conceptual confusions which are characteristic, generally, of religious beliefs. When Wittgenstein says that all the shifts from one use of a symbol in a ritual to another or 'figurative' use of it are familiar or 'natural' in our own ways of speaking, he would assume they were natural also in the speech of those people outside ritual.