Phibsophical Investigations 7:4 October 1984 ISSN 0190-0536 82.50

W ittg ens tein’ s Anthropology Self-understanding and Understanding Other Cultures

Richard H. Bell, The College of Woostev, Ohio

And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be - unutterably - contained in what has been uttered!

Wittgenstein, Letters to Engelmann

This singularly unpoetic remark made about a poem by Uhland expresses Wittgenstein’s view of criticism: aesthetic, literary and cultural criticism. I intend to examine what his view of cultural criticism is. Although culture is not a specialist’s concept, it has recently come to full attention in the hands of anthropologists such as Marvin Harris, Clifford Geertz and Mary Douglas. Some of Geertz’s reflections will be placed alongside Wittgenstein’s to illu- minate a theme buried within several of Wittgenstein’s texts. The theme in philosophy of “understanding other cultures” connected with the debate about “rationality” is not new, but Wittgenstein’s approach to the theme and debate does offer something new. By comparing aspects of aesthetic criticism with cultural criticism, attention will be focused on differences in “interpretation” and “understanding”, and between kinds or degrees of understanding when applied to other cultures and one’s own. The end in mind for this essay is to find an answer to a question raised by Wittgenstein: How can we contemplate the depth of certain practices in the lives of persons who hold beliefs and customs different from our own?

An earlier version of this paper was presented to the faculty seminar of The Department of the History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge University, and to the Philosophy Department, University College, Swansea, Wales, during the fall term, 1979. I am grateful for the discussion and criticism on those occasions.

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My answer lies in the development of what I will call an analogy of self-understanding.

i. Art, culture, and self-expression. Late in his life (1949), Wittgenstein remarked: “Culture is a

monastic rule. Or, it presupposes a monastic rule.”’ A culture is contained in, so to speak, its rules and the particular mode of symbolism by which it expresses its life. This can be seen as an extension of Wittgenstein’s earlier remark (191 7) that Uhland’s poem contains in it all that it has to convey; or that its essence is expressed by its grammar. Regarding both a poem and a culture one might say that its meaning is self-contained in its form and its particular mode of symbolism by which each expresses its own life.

Let us move back and forth for a moment between what is involved in understanding a work of art (poem, play, painting and sculpture) and understanding another culture. By culture I mean a self-contained, rule-ordered society with unique modes of symbol- ism relative to its creative life. Furthermore, by saying another culture we are marking off a culture alien to our own, e.g. as we might find in a traditional African society like the Dogon, the Dinka, or the Samburu. Thus, like a work of art, the culture can be relatively circumscribed, is autonomous and independent of its observers or interpreters, has its own internal form which gives it its meaning, and its own symbolism for its self-expression.

Culture, like a work of art, has its own ontological status; it has an existence that is unique, there to be understood by a person. Furthermore, its status is extended by the understanding that an observer or another person has of it, or by the interpretations given to it. Thus, part of its life is determined by how persons understand it and the interpretations they give to it while attending to its own form and features. Part of the life of a work of art and to some degree that of another culture is tied to a person’s understanding of it, and that that understanding of it is related to how the work of art or the culture expresses itself to another. In its own being and in its own presentation of itself it also leaves part of its life for others, i.e., for those who wish to understand it. If our understanding of another culture thus depends upon its own life and presentation, we

1. Vermischte Bemerkungen (Frankfort, GDR, Suhrkarnp Verlag, 1977), p. 157. The German is “Kultur ist eine Ordensregel. Oder setzf doch eine Ordensregel vorous”.

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can also say that in that presentation it leaves much for another’s understanding - much that must be processed in the observer’s understanding. And yet there is nothing that one can ultimately understand about another culture that is not already contained in what is given. What is given and another’s understanding of it meet in a mutually imaginative interchange where what is expressed and what is understood merge in a common world.

Another way of putting this is to say that a work of art or another culture may occasion in another person the experience with which it deals, even the truth it contains - a person may begin to see its colour and form, its order and function; or a person may begin to love or to suffer, to hope or despair, to dance or mimeti- cally transform his or her life through passages occasioned by another but familiar to one’s own life view. Such experiences are a consequence of an understanding of the givenness of the work of art or the culture attended.

Let us speak even more personally now. Another culture, like a work of art, places requirements upon me if I am to understand it. I must be attentive and open, try not to bias my view any more than possible, search myself for my own limitations in seeing the unfamiliar, and find ways to translate the unfamiliar to the familiar. In the end there can be no more transformations in my self than there are possible transformations toward a common judgment within the work of art or culture itself. The work of art or culture must in the end place upon us its own limiting characteristics; it must draw us back to itself by virtue of what it possesses (contains) and by what it evokes (expresses). We must, finally, allow our interpretations and evaluative remarks to be fixed by the grammar of the work of art or the culture itself as we come to an understand- ing of it.

We have before us, then, this picture: a unique culture or a work of art with its own identity, on the one hand, and a person “looking on”, trying to understand, on the other hand. The culture or work of art opens out to the observer, and the observer, constrained by what is presented to him or her and by his or her own self- constraints, attempts to understand the culture or art work, or to offer one interpretation or another. It will be illuminating now to recast this discussion into the philosophical arena known as “understanding other cultures”. In doing so, we will see some relevant criteria for understanding and, more sharply, the limita-

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tions built into understanding because it is tied to the self - to the person doing the understanding.

ii. Understanding other cultures Wittgenstein was steering us between the extremes of rational-

ism and relativism - searching for common ground in our human actions rather than in “some kind of ratiocination”. When it comes to understanding other cultures whose beliefs and symbolism are alien to our own, it is tempting to read Wittgenstein’s pages as swerving dangerously close to the relativistic shores.’ What must be remembered, however, is the truth in relativism that does not deny us a common ground - that is, as human beings who imaginatively form cultures we are unique and this uniqueness manifests itself in a great diversity of creative forms in varied environmental surroundings. Clifford Geertz has summarized what I believe to be Wittgenstein’s view on this matter:

The truth of the doctrine of cultural relativism is that we can never apprehend another people’s or another period’s imagination neatly, as though it were our own. The falsity of it is that we can therefore never genuinely apprehend it at all. We can apprehend it well enough at least as well as we apprehend anything else not properly ours; but we do so not by looking behind the interfering glosses which connect us to it but through them.3

We can and do apprehend other cultures “well enough” - though not without difficulty. We can describe their unique forms and features and still not understand them, but we can also describe their forms and features and go on to understand them in a degrec

2. This has been one of the consequences of Peter Winch’s reading of Wittgenstein. Cf. Winch, “Understanding A Primitive Society”, Americarr Philorophical Quarterly,

I t must be said, however, in Winch’s defence that the relativism one might draw from his pages could be viewed as a piece of good common sense against those who seek commensurability of cultures by imposing their own Western intellectual biases. Too little has been credited to the last pages of his celebrated essay where he makes some interesting observations for “understanding other cultures”. His sug- gestive remark on the conception of human life involving certain “limiting notions” - notions of birth, death, and sexual relations - which persons in all cultures experience and which must “take a central place and provide a basis on which understanding may be built”, has not escaped my notice in the development of the argument in this essay. (Cf., ihid., pp. 320 ff.) 3. Clifford Geertz, “Found in Translation: O n the Social History of the Moral Imagination”, The Georzia Review, Volume 31, Winter 1977, p. 799.

I, 1964, pp. 307-24.

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limited only by ourselves. Wittgenstein, like Geertz, was con- vinced that we can and do offer both interpretations of and under- stand other cultures in ways not unlike how we interpret and understand a work of art. Though neither the other culture nor the work of art may be our own, by attending to them in a descriptive manner and by continually expanding the horizons of our self- understanding, we can come to a limited understanding of them. Wittgenstein has given us some instructive guidelines for these two movements towards understanding, description and self- understanding. I have called this Wittgenstein’s anthropology because it follows the grammar of human actions in its attempt to show how we might understand our human nature through cross-cultural comparisons. This grammar passes through the life and symbolism of other persons and one’s self, rather than attempting to look at what is often only an “interfering gloss”, i.e., a ratiocination or bias abstracted from people’s lives.

Description is for the purpose of having a more “perspicuous representation” of how things are in the world; it is preparatory for understanding. It gives us a vantage point for understanding. Witt- genstein’s own descriptive moves are richly illustrated in his many paradigms of human events and activities (both real and imagined). Description, then, helps us to see “factual material so that we can easily pass from one part to a n ~ t h e r ” ; ~ it enables us to see the structure and the workings of the symbolism of another culture in the context of and from the vantage point of those people who give their life expression.

Wittgenstein poses the problem which exists in moving from description to understanding in the following passage:

We also say of some people that they are transparent to us. I t is, however, important as regards this observation that one human being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of the country’s language. We do not understand the people. (And not because of not knowing what they are saying to themselves.) We cannot find our feet with them.5

He reminds us of our dilemma of understanding and not-

4. Wittgenstein, “Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough”’, The Human World, No. 3 (May, 1971) p. 35. Henceforth cited as RFCB and page. 5. Inv. 11, P. 223e.

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understanding; of the many epistemological barriers that exist because understanding is tied to a person. In this passage there are two things to note: 1) making transparent the behaviour of people who hold different beliefs and customs than our own, and 2 ) finding our own feet with respect to those beliefs and customs. Wittgenstein believes, on the one hand, that we can fairly clearly determine what these people in a strange country are saying to themselves. That is, we can determine how it is that the beliefs and customs they hold have meaning within their own life. This we do by description. But, on the other hand, there may still not be an understanding - we may not have, as it were, “found O U Y feet” with respect to those beliefs and customs.

The question arises what is the nature of the “understanding” that Wittgenstein is looking for here? For surely to arrive a t a clear (or nearly transparent) account of what the people are saying to themselves is a kind of understanding of their life. And we have a number of such nearly transparent accounts of strange countries by anthropologists which provide us with a claim to understanding those cultures. What then is the understanding that is lacking? If we leave the matter, as many philosophers and ethnologists do, with the transparent account, then we arrive at a kind of culturally relativistic impasse - we make claim to a kind of “understanding” of its structures (social, economic, political) and symbolism with- out a “view from within” (for here a complete understanding is thought to be possible only from the actor’s point of view). We are still left with the enigma of whether someone who does not view the matter from within (is not a principal actor) can have the same “understanding” as those who do (the native actors)?6 Many argue persuasively that however clever and insightful the ethnographic description, it is at best an interpretation and not itself an understanding.’

Wittgenstein would, himself, side with those who argue this

6. These issues are aired fully in the collected essays found in Rationality, (ed.) Bryan Wilson, (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1971), and Modes of Thocrflrt, (ed.) R. Finnegan & R. Horton, (London: Faber, 1973). 7. Clifford Geertz, for example, says in his Interpreratiori of Cultures, (New York: Basic Books, 1973): “In short, anthropological writings are themselves interpreta- tions, and second and third order ones to boot,” p. 15. “Cultural analysis”, he goes on, “is guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape”, u. 20.

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latter point, but is unsatisfied to leave it at that. He goes on to show that the deeper, and more important, philosophical issue has to do with how we might “find our feet” with respect to these strange beliefs and customs. He does, in the end, hold that there is a way of understanding those practices we find strange, and that coming to such an understanding is really the only important issue in the whole complex set of relations found when we confront such strange practices.

Let us sort out some of the issues here and get a clearer reading of what it is that Wittgenstein is after when he says: “We do not understand the people,” yet insists that we come to an understand- ing in ourselves. In response to these issues he has given us what I will call a model built around an analogy ofself-understanding. This is found primarily in his “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough” and can be supported through numerous discussions found in other texts. Let us turn to see how this model can be developed.

Wittgenstein does two things in his “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough”. He f i rs t criticizes Frazer’s attempt to give rational, causal explanations to various practices related to the myth of the succes- sion of the King of the Wood of Nemi and Frazer’s belief that certain “primitive” expressions of related religious myths amounted to “erroneous” or “mistaken” views of the world.* Central to Wittgenstein’s charge is that Frazer had failed to under- stand how the myths and rituals of other people do function for them. Wittgenstein does not believe that the people who practise rites have somehow confused “magic” and “science”, nor have they jettisoned the ordinary workings of their own symbolism for some newly empowered set of symbols. Wittgenstein claims that we can see their uses as familiar ones, even though that often proves difficult. He writes:

We might say ‘every view has its charm,’ but this would be wrong. What is true is that every view is significant for him who sees it so (but that does not mean ‘sees it as something other than it is’).9

The characteristic feature of primitive man, I believe, is that he does not act from opinions (as Frazer thinks).”

8. For a fuller discussion of this criticism, see R. H. Bell, “Understanding the Fire-Festivals: Wittgenstein and Theories in Religion”, Religious Studies. 14, March 1978, pp. 113-124. 9. RFGB. , p. 36. 10. RFGB, p. 37.

302 Philosophical Investigations

He goes on to note that it would be nonsense to suppose that the ritualistic actions of a people spring from their “wrong ideas about the physics of things”, and concludes:

If we hold it a truism that people take pleasure in imagination, we should remember that this imagination is not like a painted picture or a three dimensional model, but a complicated structure of heter- ogeneous elements: words and pictures. We shall then not think of operating with written or oral signs as something to be contrasted with the operation with ‘mental images’ of the events.

We must plough over the whole of language.”

It was just this disjunctive picture of language and meaning - of oral or written sign and “mental images” - that Wittgenstein “ploughed over” in such detail in the Investigations. O u r imagi- nation and our symbolism is much more complicated and far more expressive (in its heterogeneity) of what there is, of the very essence of what is given in human life.

The second, and more significant, thing that Wittgenstein’s brief remarks on Frazer did was to attempt to locate how a deeper understanding of the actions of other people could be grasped by someone who does not share the same culture. How, he asked, can we contemplate the depth of certain practices in the lives of persons who hold beliefs and customs different from our own?

Rooted deeply within the myth of the priest-king at Nemi is the practice of human sacrifice. And central to Frazer’s long quest in The Golden Bough is his desire to resolve the riddle of human sacrifice by immolation as it is (has been) embodied literally and imitatively in the fire-festivals of Europe. Frazer had asked himself: “What is the meaning of such sacrifices? Why were men and animals burnt to death a t these festivals?”’* Wittgenstein found Frazer’s answers to these questions quite unsati~factory.’~

Wittgenstein put his concern strikingly: “. . . the fact that on certain days children burn a straw man could make us uneasy . . . . Strange that they should celebrate by burning a man! What I want to say is: the solution is not any more disquieting than the riddle.”14

11. R F C B , p. 33f. 12. Sirlames Frazer, The Golden Bough, A Study in Magic and Religion, one volume abridged edition, (New York: Macmillan, 1922, Macmillan paperback edition, 1963), p. 761. 13. Frazer’s answers are also discussed at length in my essay, “Understanding the Fire-Festivals: Wittgenstein and Theories in Religion”, op. cit. 14. RFCB., p. 41.

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With all of Frazer’s explanations, we still have not been given a way to connect these strange ceremonies with our thoughts and feel- ings. They are no less disquieting after all the hypotheses and theories offered to explain them. Wittgenstein insists that although we might find a way of seeing how those whose myths and practices they are stand in relation to them by good ethnographic descriptions, i.e., give an interpretation of the meaning of the practices, we still must come to an understanding in ourselves - that is, we must determine how w e stand to the myths and practices; how we connect our own feelings and thoughts with the burning of a man.

This concern of Wittgenstein changes the nature of his investi- gation and makes it both more universal and more particular. Uni- versal in that Wittgenstein sees the relevance of tying the feelings and actions expressed in one culture to similar feelings and actions in another, namely in one’s own. There are deep cross-cultural connections here. It is more particular because the psychological phenomenon of understanding itself is deeply tied to a person - again by being tied to a person he does not mean purely subjective. Rather, understanding comes from the place where Z urn, and this place is always surrounded by some common ways of acting formed within and by the symbolism of an inherited background: my family and community, my language, my culture, my status, my uniqueness as a human being. It is against this background that our understanding arises.

Before looking further into Wittgenstein’s discussion of the “fire-festivals”, let us look at the notion of understanding other cultures - this from the point of view of a contemporary anthropologist, Clifford Geertz. Geertz’ analyses of cultures follow all the prescribed cannons of good ethnographic description while at the same time he manages to prepare his readers for understand- ing at this more personal level. Geertz does this in a manner similar to Wittgenstein, that is by suggesting a kind of analogical model for understanding. Looking at Geertz’ analyses, therefore, should help to further clarify what Wittgenstein is after.

iii. Description, imagination, and understanding culture: Clifford Geertz

Geertz, like Wittgenstein, is committed to the notion that “society comes to more than behaviour”. The analysis of culture

304 Philosophical Investigationr

cannot be reduced to an arrangement of behavioural data. Our sentiments as well as our thoughts impinge upon our actions, and the powers of the human imagination are “a working force in our common consciousness”. l5 Though he begins with description, he is driven further. He is “haunted’ by a fundamental riddle - the same riddle in form that perplexed Wittgenstein about the burning of a man: “namely, that the significant works of the human imagi- nation (Icelandic saga, Austen novel, or Balinese cremation) speak with equal power to the consoling piety that we are all like to one another and to the worrying suspicion that we are not.”16 Bringing thought and sentiment, the mundane and the imaginative to surface - rendering them perspicuous - is Geertz’ aim.

In his thematic essay to The Interpretation of Cultures, Geertz is openly indebted to the insights of Wittgenstein and Ryle. He is most insistent on looking at the “informal logic of actual life”” and turning anthropology away from more formal systematization of “the thought of’ a culture or the “defects of psychologism”. We gain access to a culture, he says, “by inspecting events, not by arranging abstract entities into unified patterns”. l8 Even more important in his analysis is his insistence on the use of our imagina- tive powers “to bring us into touch with the lives of strangers”.” Geertz underscores familiar descriptive concerns and points to the significance of the human imagination.

To describe the people a5 they are is crucial. To understand another culture we must, says Geertz, “expose their normalness without reducing their particularity”. This “renders them acces- sible: setting them in the frame of their own banalities, it dissolves their opacity”.2” This comment of Geertz helps to illuminate the force of Wittgenstein’s criticisms of Frazer. Contrary to a recent charge,*l Wittgenstein appreciated Frazer’s concern for what

15. Geertz, The Georgia Review, op . ( i f . , p. 803. 16. Ibid. , p. 796. 17. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, op . cit., p. 17. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., p. 16. 20. Ibid., p. 14, see also p. 17. 21. In her essay “Judgments on James Frazer”, Daedalus, Fall 1978, vol. 107, no. 4, Mary Douglas charges Wittgenstein with some “pettish” criticisms of Frazer, and thinks Wittgenstein believes Frazer to be “superficial”. These are serious charges, but miss the significance of the point being made here. Cf. p. 158f. Ms. Douglas alsc uses Wittgenstein’s criticisms to make another, more positive, point about the changes of perspective in generations of anthropologists.

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appeared to be a deep issue - the strange and dark character of. people engaged in the burning of a man. This is, indeed, disquiet- ing, not trivial. But what Frazer misses is the “particularity” of the people’s action and thus their normalness. Instead, Frazer finally sees their actions as part of a larger theory playing across epochs and cultures and thus reduces the particular actions of a people to abnormalities - “magical fictions”, if you will. Wittgenstein in turn tries to place the strangeness of human sacrifice by immolation into the “frame of their own banalities”, then forcing upon us an inner glance at our own banalities in order to “find our feet” and project some semblance of human understanding for such deeply disquieting human actions.

Another characteristically descriptive point which Geertz reminds us of is that “cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete”. He goes on to comment:

. . . And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of the others, that you are not quite getting it right. But that, along with plaguing subtle peo le with obtuse questions, is what being an

For those Geertz criticizes - and the same is true for Wittgenstein - there always seems to be an endless search for some firm unifying ground upon which everything must rest. But this over- looks the coarseness of human life, the “groundlessness” of our believing (as Wittgenstein said), or the “tremulous” nature of most human judgments and actions. Geertz reminds us of how un- satisfying such incompleteness is, and how, in their urge to tidy things up, social scientists escape this: “by turning culture into folklore and collecting it, turning it into traits and counting it, turning it into institutions and classifying it, turning it into struc- tures and toying with it.”23

Turning from his more descriptive procedures to his more imaginative ones, we move to the heart of Geertz’ epistemological insights. In his essay, “Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali”, he writes:

The analysis of culture comes down . . . to a searching out of

ethnographer is like. E*

22. Geertz, The Interpretation ofc’rrltures, op. lit., p. 29. 31 lhid

270 Phil osoph t cal In vex tigat ions

find out - learn - what we already know; a denial of certain basic continuities between past, even remote past, and present which amounts to a denial of humanity. However, Frazer’s failings should not be thought stupid. It is natural that genetic preoccupations should blind us to what it is for an idea to be age-old and yet ageless, and should block our understanding of how we know this. And of course Wittgenstein tells us less than we would like about the antithesis between the origins of a practice, which are for certain purposes discountable, and its “inner nature”, which instructs us in what we already know. In a passage to which I shall return Giraudoux marvellously captures some aspects of this an- tithesis. He draws attention to the difference between the “false divination which gives names and dates” and “true prophesy” which

reveals to men these surprising truths: that the living must die, that autumn must follow summer, spring follow winter, that there are four elements, that there is happiness, that there are innumerable miseries, that life is a reality, that it is a dream, that man lives in peace, that man lives on blood; in short, these things they will never

These (and kindred) ideas are those expressed - and celebrated

[W]e often say: this practice is obviously age old. How do we know that? Is it only because we have historical evidence regarding ancient practices of this sort? Or is there another reason, one that comes through interpretation?*

- in the kind of practices Wittgenstein writes about:

And again:

Above all: whence the certainty that a practice of this kind must be age-old (what are the data, what is the verification)? . . . I t is our evidence for it, that holds what is deep in this assumption, and this evidence is . . . non-hypothetical, psychol~gical.~

He is able to give the answer he does because he puts his question in this, and not some other, connection. The same question can be asked of hugely many other kinds of thing (including some, if not most, ancient ritual practices themselves) and the answer will be different. The certain knowledge he speaks of, founded as it is in

7. Jean Giraudoux. 8. Op. cit., p. 39. 9. Ibid. ( I have italicised the last sentence)

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The imaginative scope of his searching is perhaps best shown in his essay, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” There, better than anywhere else, he “prepares us for understanding!” The cockfight provides a cluster of symbols that gives unique expression to the meaning of Balinese character and culture. Carried slowly into this “game” of the Balinese, we soon find ourselves beneath the spectator level and beginning to see a new and significant paradigm for the personal status and social structure of the people - a personal and social drama begins to unfold, all the while knowing that we cannot be the actors in this particular Balinese drama. But the “cockfight renders ordinary, everyday experience comprehensible” at its deepest level, just as Lear and Crime and Punishment render the temperaments and deep emotions of our lives more comprehensible to us. As Geertz says:

. . . it [the drama of the cockfight for the Balinese and Lear and Crime and Punishment for us] catches up these themes - death, masculinity, rage, pride, loss, beneficence, chance - and, ordering them into an encompassing structure, presents them in such a way as to throw into relief a particular view of their essential nature.30

With this move to familiar literature within our own cultural heritage, Geertz has, by analogy, put us in touch with “our own thoughts and feelings”, making it possible to “converse” with the Balinese - to see and perhaps be in a position to understand their world more clearly. The last two sections of his essay metaphor- ically leave the Balinese and imaginatively place the western reader into a vantage point for understanding. This is precisely what Wittgenstein does in his attempt to understand the fire-festivals.

The cockfight is an interpretive device - an interpretive story - for the Balinese experience in the way that a Shakespeare tragedy tells us a story of our own human fallacies. The cockfight becomes a “text”, not just a social mechanism, and our conversation with the Balinese requires not a mere deciphering of a code as many anthropologists suggest, but the reading of a literary text expressed in symbolic actions. Furthermore, says Geertz, “the culture of a people is an ensemble of texts” that requires “close reading”.31 This is a rather novel hermeneutical device for social sciences; one which Geertz notes “has yet to be systemically e ~ p l o i t e d ” . ~ ~ Its advantage 30. Ibid., p. 443. 31. Ibid., p. 452f. 32. Ibid., p. 449, and see his footnote number 38 o n Levi-Strauss’ structuralism.

308 Philosoph iral I r i vestiptiorir

is that one can read the cockfight in a “vocabulary of sentiment - the thrill of risk, the despair of loss, the pleasure of triumph. Yet what it says is not merely that risk is exciting, loss depressing, or triumph gratifying, banal tautologies of affect, but that it is of these emotions, thus exampled, that society is built and individuals are put together”.33 Geertz concludes:

If, to quote Northrop Frye again, we go to see Macbeth to learn what a man feels like after he has gained a kingdom and lost his soul, Balinese go to cockfights to find out whatAman, usually composed, aloof, almost obsessively self-absorbed . . . feels like when, attacked, tormented, challenged, insulted, and driven in result to the extremes of fury, he has totally triumphed or been brought totally

To Gecrtz the cockfight is not there to mirror something universal, but “creates what . . . could be called a paradigmatic human event . . . . Enacted and reenacted, so far without end, the cock- fight enables the Balinese, as read and reread Macbeth enables us, to see a dimension of his own s ~ b j e c t i v i t y . ” ~ ~

Finally, what Geertz has given us, is an interesting interpersonal model which adjusts our understanding (1) to the limitations of ethnographic description and its importance in interpreting and translating from one culture to another, and (2) to our own cultural experiences and their “subjectivity”, where the “vocabulary of sentiment” plays its role in allowing us to see what is common between our life and theirs. This model has its parallel in Wittgen- stein as we shall now see.

iv. An analogy of self-understanding Wittgenstein’s second move in his remarks on Frazer turns us

toward the “vocabulary of sentiment” as well. He recognized the “primitive” starting points within the grammar of human actions. To move from these starting points, however, where beliefs are largely inherited, and to develop the ability for voluntary self- expression with the mutuality of my society requires a new capac- ity, the capacity of self-understanding. If I am to understand another within his own unique surroundings, I must first see what it is to understand myself in my surroundings. Two questions are central here in Wittgenstein’s own analysis:

33. Ibid., my emphasis. 34. Ibid., p. 450. ?C, lhid

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1) How has my own world been formed? 2) Can my access to another’s world be any more perfect than

what I can understand for myself? An analogy emerges in response to these questions. It is to the degree that I understand my world, with all of its background beliefs, certainties and uncertainties, and its symbolism that I have the capacity to share another’s world. Wittgenstein’s question: How can we contemplate the depth of certain practices in the lives of persons who hold beliefs and customs different from our own?, receives the answer: By contemplating the depth of my own prac- tices and my own self-understanding. This, of course, follows appropriate description and translation.

When confronted with a strange custom and when an unease and disquiet results, it is difficult to “find our feet with them”. So we must make the analogous move of “finding our feet” where they are planted - in our own cultural setting. That is, even with good ethnographic help to describe and interpret what is “said” (done) by other people we must still try to imagine how we might “say” (do) something similar - and that comes from having an experi- ence in ourselves.

The unease and disquiet that a strange custom produces - how- ever distant the custom may be - means that there are resonant chords rtruck in us; it points to some common ways of feeling and acting.

The facts and theories that Frazer amasses for us on human sacrifice do not indicate the direction in which we ought to look for understanding; they are an interpretation “from outside” with all the intellectual biases of rationalism and could be interpreted differ- ently. Understanding requires that something be seen “from inside” - as a step in the course of one’s thoughts and feelings. We must remind ourselves here that “inside” does not mean from the inside of other persons (or even another’s thought world), but from inside one’s self. What is meant then when Wittgenstein said that we must look at “the inner nature of the practice as performed” - thegeirt or spirit of the festival? Was he suggesting a crude verstehen account of getting inside another’s I think not, though 36. Historians and some source critics have developed such “crude” verstehen accounts, cf, for example, R. G. Collingwood’s “Who Killed John Doe?” found in The Idea ofHictory (New York: Oxford, Galaxy Books, 1956) pages 266 to 283, and Robert W. Funk, Language, Hermeneutic, and Word o/ God, (New York: Harper & ROW, 1967), esp. pp. 231ff. Also seeJ. B. Cobb andJ. M. Robinson (eds.), The New Hermeneutic, (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).

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that interpretation might be given from his context.37 He says: . . . When I speak of the inner nature of the practice I mean all those circumstances in which it is carried out that are not included in the account of the festival, because they consist not so much in particular actions which characterize it, but rather in what we might call the spirit of the festival; which would be described by, for example, describing the sort of people that take part, their way of behaviour at other times, i.e. their character, and the other kinds of games that they play. And we should then see that what is sinister [Finstere] lies in the character of these people t h e m s e l ~ e s . ~ ~

So besides the ordinary ethnographic descriptions (the account of the festival) there is the fuller grammar of human actions which embody the “character” of people: their mood, sentiment, emo- tions. He adds to this the question: “What makes human sacrifice something deep and sinister Ifinster] anyway?” And he answers: “. . . this deep and sinister Ifinster] aspect is not obvious just from learning the history of the external action, but we impute it from an experience in ourselves. ”” Wittgenstein asks the question about our own self-understanding. We can understand the fire-festivals only if we are willing to inspect ourselves and find examples of things in our lives which are deep and sinister. We must look at what makes up our “character”. If our lives are bereft of some “character”, then the actions of others may escape our understand- ing.

This self-inspection, by analogy then, brings us into the range of our common experience with others - herein lies the possibility for our understanding. If I were unable to recognize a similar geist in myself, then I would have no way of even imagining why all the puzzlement over a ceremonial burning, much less would I feel uneasy.40 But there is that fundamental riddle that Geertz found in the Danish seaman’s account of the Balinese cremation; it is both “consoling” and “worrying”, “beautiful” and “terrible”, very close to home, yet hauntingly disquieting nonethele~s!~’ Such are

37. Even after I discussed this point at length with Robin Horton in Cambridge, fall 1979, he still went away thinking Wittgenstein revived the “old verstehen” accounts, especially in his remarks on Frazer. 38. RFGB., p. 38. 39. RFGB., p. 40. 40. Rush Rhees makes a similar point at the end of his essay, “Wittgenstem on Language and Ritual”, in Essays on Wittgenstein in Honour of C. H . Von Wright, Acta Philosophica Fennica, vol. 28, vols. 1-3, Amsterdam, 1976, pp. 481ff. 41. Geertz, The Georxia Review, op. cit., p. 796ff.

Richard Bell 31 1

the imaginative productions of human beings everywhere, full of instabilities and paradox: hope and despair, celebration and sobri- ety, good and evil, life and death. When we turn to think out analogies for ourselves, we discover that the actions of others are not “different in kind” from our own. What is sinister or joyful or fearful (deep) in them is not “different in kind” from what is sinister or joyful or fearful in us.

The point here, again, is one of searching for a way to make the transformation in ourselves. Only then are we approaching the capacity for the understanding. The attention needed is not so much that of knowing just the environment of an action (the immolation, be it ceremonial or otherwise - though that may be helpful in our making further and important connections), rather understanding is tied to those things which we can link up with our own life-view which has been fashioned by its own peculiar beliefs and customs. It is here that possession of one’s self is all important. The capacity for understanding is deeply tied to how one has cultivated capacities in one’s self for dealing with the perplexities of death and life, sorrow and joy, hate and love, despair and hope.

A major consequence of this view is that there are serious epistemological barriers that go with understanding - understand- ing ourselves, other persons and other cultures. These barriers cannot be overcome by an appeal to “ratiocination” or cross- cultural commensurability on the one hand; to certain general- logical bridges constructed to span thought worlds and cultures. Nor can they be overcome by views tied to crude verstehen notions on the other hand; i.e. to thinking, as Collingwood once suggested, that we can existentially enter another’s historial time and place. We cannot place ourselves inside another person and see and under- stand things as they do. O r rather I cannot see and understand as another person does. I can only understand as I do . But this is hardly a commitment to relativism and much less so to solipsism. Recognizing the barriers are to see what is both unique to and common among human beings. It points to the limits of our horizons and to how that affects our capacity to understand any- thing.

Recognizing our own capacities, or lack thereof, helps US to discover the lacunae in our own self-understanding. We may lack a life-view of our own, have few hopes, have suffered little, and our anxieties may be trivial. Not feeling what is sinister in the fire-

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festivals, or joyful in Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, or tragic in Lear or Cambodia, may reflect our own bereft lives - our own inability to understand something that is fundamental to our humanness. Our own horizons may be limited and our capacity to understand therefore impaired. In such cases it is better that we come to see our own limitations, the lacunae in our lives - only then would we place ourselves in a position prepared to understand others.42

Department of Philosophy The College of Wooster Wooster, Ohio 44691

42. The thought in this last paragraph was suggested to me by David Burrell. See his “Our Incompleteness and Self-understanding”, in Bell and Hustwit (eds.), Essays on Kierkqaard and Wittgenstein, (Wooster, Ohio: College of Wooster, 1978), pp. 101-105.