style="font-size:15px;"> It seems ironic that in his critique of metaphysics, Kant, in the thrall of reason, failed to follow to its logical conclusion the implication of his own Copernican revolutionary thesis, for if it is the case that all knowledge presupposes a point of view, then his ‘transcendental logic’ cannot escape this circumstance. Even if Kant's ‘categories’ serve as preconditions of empirical knowledge, they too are a form of knowledge and therefore cannot but entail a point of view. The truth of Kant's usage of ‘transcendental’ (that is, its metalogical status) notwithstanding, unless Kant is claiming that this point of view is no less than God's, it must be characterized, as with all points of view, as particular and therefore as less than autonomous.
During his lifetime, Kant did not escape criticism of this kind. Most notably, Johann Georg Hamann, a compatriot of Kant and fellow inhabitant of the city of Königsberg, developed a substantial critique in reaction to Kant's critique of reason, one that had an enormous influence on both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers (Beiser 1987: chap. 1). But I wish to focus on the twentieth century, when the idea of the synthetic a priori was subjected to further extensive revision, entailing fundamental rather than formal confusion of the a priori and the synthetic. Thus, for example, Saul Kripke (1980), in his brilliant Naming and Necessity, differentiates necessity from analyticity by arguing that referents are fixed by names rather than descriptions. In other words, for Kripke, a spade is a spade because it has been so called (or, as he says, “rigidly designated”), this name being passed on from one speaker to another, rather than because a spade fits a certain criterial description (the description could be variable or even wrong). Here, as in the biblical book of Genesis, the identity of a thing originates with its name, resulting in a truth that is a posteriori but also quite necessary (a spade is indeed a spade, no matter if, say, under changed circumstances, it is no longer found to be black). If a truth is both necessary and dependent upon concrete evidence for its warrant, a matter of sensory perception and yet inevitable, it would seem to play loose with the difference between the a priori and the a posteriori.
Again, for example, Harvard philosopher W V. O. Quine (1953) argues, in his well-known essay, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” for a gradualistic rather than dualistic distinction between the analytic and the synthetic. As he sees it, from the point of view of pragmatism, every system of logic in the end must give way at its edges to the lessons of experience, making its analyticity distinctly relative. If Quine is right, then there is—in the final instance—no logically necessary a priori but only a synthetic one.
In another place (Evens 1983), writing on the efficacy of the Nuer incest prohibition, I drew on Quine's argument about epistemological gradualism as between logic and experience, in order to propose a nondualist solution to the so-called anthropological problem of primitive mentality. My solution centered on a notion of half-logic, predicated on the ontological thesis of basic ambiguity, and capacitated therefore to endorse, in a subtle but forthright way, the apparently magical possibility of a rule or convention that enjoys the force of nature. Here, however, in order to ground my ideas directly in a phenomenological theory of perception, it is fitting to appeal to the thought of M. Merleau-Ponty and Ludwig Wittgenstein, both giants of twentieth-century philosophy. Their work readily lends itself to discussion in terms that leave no doubt as to the essential relevance of the idea of the a priori to professional anthropology.
At one point in his career, Ludwig Wittgenstein asked his student and friend, M. O'C. Drury, to read to him from J. G. Frazer's The Golden Bough. They read only from the first volume, not getting very far because of the profusion of Wittgenstein's critical remarks. His commentary, soon developed by him in writing, was eventually published as “Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough” In this terse essay, Wittgenstein (1971) offers scathing criticism of Frazer's anthropological understanding of magical and religious practices among so-called primitives, and in doing so he sets out his own conception of how such practices might best be understood. His argument is, in my opinion, not only anthropologically rich and progressive, but also importantly revealing as to the way in which he came to think of the nature of the a priori in human life.
Basically, Wittgenstein argues that Frazer's understanding of magic and religion as a kind of foolishness is itself foolish, as it attributes to such practices a rational and instrumental objective that they do not entertain and fails to grasp their essentially expressive nature. In effect, Wittgenstein sets up a dualism of the instrumental and the expressive. However, in the course of his argumentation he makes points that are critically inconsistent with and transcend this dualism.
As Wittgenstein sees it, Frazer grasps magical and religious acts as mistakes, since such acts have no basis in the world of empirical fact. Wittgenstein objects (1971: 31): “There is a mistake only if magic is presented as science.” “If the adoption of a child is carried out by the mother pulling the child from beneath her clothes,” Wittgenstein goes on (ibid.), “then it is crazy to think there is an error in this and that she believes she has borne the child.” Such acts, he holds, are not intended instrumentally, and we therefore need to “distinguish between magical operations and those operations which rest on a false over-simplified notion of things and processes” (ibid.). “The same savage who, apparently in order to kill his enemy, sticks his knife through a picture of him, really does build his hut of wood and cuts his arrow with skill and not in effigy,” observes Wittgenstein (ibid.), as Malinowski similarly observed in his studies of magical usage among the Trobrianders.
How, then, as Wittgenstein sees it, should we understand magical acts? As essentially expressive (1971: 31):
And magic always rests on the idea of symbolism and of language.
The description of a wish is, eo ipso, the description of its fulfilment. And magic does give representation to a wish; it expresses a wish.
Thus far, the argument works as a dualism of the instrumental and the expressive, and I think that in the “Remarks,” Wittgenstein does indeed incline toward just such a dualism. However, when exemplifying and explicating what he means by the expressive, he plainly and importantly transcends the dualism (1971: 33):
The magic in Alice in Wonderland, trying to dry out by reading the driest thing there is.
In magical healing one indicates to an illness that it should leave the patient. After the description of any such magical cure we'd like to add: If the illness doesn't understand that, then I don't know how one ought to say it.
…[N]o phenomenon is particularly mysterious in itself, but any of them can become so to us, and it is precisely the characteristic feature of the awakening human spirit that a phenomenon has meaning for it. We could almost say, man is a ceremonious animal. This is partly false, partly nonsensical, but there is also something in it.
In other words, one might begin a book on anthropology in this way: When we watch the life and behaviour of men all over the earth we see that apart from what we might call animal activities, taking food etc., etc., men also carry out actions that bear a peculiar character and might be called ritualistic.
In these passages, Wittgenstein seems to be suggesting that what he sees as the ceremonious or ritualistic actions carried out by human beings is not simply expressive but in some sense true to the world as we find it. Hence, he concludes that when an illness is told to go away, if it fails to take heed, then he “doesn't know how one ought to say it”—as if such magical practices really do conform to nature. Or again, he finds that in arriving at his (misguided) conclusions about magic as misguided science, Frazer might just as well have believed “that when a savage dies he is in error” (ibid.: 34). In other words, the magical observances in question are, like death (and taxes), in some sense, necessary, certain, and natural. The sense in which this is so is, as Wittgenstein says, “partly false, partly nonsensical, but there is also something in it.” What he means exactly by this reserved affirmation bears sharply on the notion of the a priori and can be plumbed by looking more closely
