the reason why Frazer sees the magical and religious notions of humans as mistakes is because he pictured them, rationalistically, as attempts to explain the world, that is, as theoretical endeavors. By doing so, Frazer put himself in a position to offer an explanation of magical practices, for he was then able to see the practices as the forlorn products of the mistaken notions. As an upshot, or so Wittgenstein (1971: 29) concludes (providing in the process a concise description of what Evans-Pritchard called the “if I were a horse” fallacy): “All that Frazer does is to make [these practices] plausible to people who think as he does.”
But Wittgenstein points out that where a theory is not put forward, there can be no mistake, since ordinarily we use ‘mistake’ to characterize an incorrect explanation of things. If, then, the magical and religious notions at point are not intended as theories, they cannot be mistaken. “Was Augustine mistaken…when he called on God on every page of the Confessions?” Wittgenstein asks, rhetorically (1971: 29). Moreover, Wittgenstein finds it utterly implausible (as did Durkheim) that people construct and continue to deploy all these notions and practices “out of sheer stupidity” (ibid.).
If these notions are not attempts at explaining the world, then what are they? We have already seen that Wittgenstein was prone to regard them as expressive, but his descriptions are far richer than that. The notions are, to gather together his allusive and aphoristic remarks, strongly affective (“The crush of thoughts that do not get out because they all try to push forward and are wedged in the door”; 1971: 30); spiritual (“What narrowness of spiritual life we find in Frazer!” ibid.: 31); ceremonious or ritualistic (“The ceremonial [hot or cold] as opposed to the haphazard [lukewarm]”; ibid.: 32); highly relevant to our everyday lives and what makes an impression on us (“That a man's shadow, which looks like a man, or that his mirror image, or that rain, thunderstorms, the phases of the moon, the change of seasons, the likenesses and differences of animals to one another and to human beings, the phenomena of death, of birth and of sexual life, in short everything a man perceives year in, year out around him, should play a part in his thinking [his philosophy] and his practices, is obvious, or in other words it is what we really know and find interesting”; ibid.: 33); mythological (“A whole mythology is deposited in our language”; ibid.: 35); gesticulatory (“We have in the ancient rites the use of a very highly developed gesture-language”; ibid.: 36); and, finally, universalistic (“[T]here is something in us too that speaks in support of those observances by the savages”; ibid.: 34).
From this emphasis on affect, existential relevance, and gesticulation or bodily language, it is tempting to conclude that all Wittgenstein is doing is juxtaposing practice to theory. He is certainly doing this, but it is not all he is doing. It is crucial to see, especially in view of the evidently dichotomous way in which he divides the expressive from the instrumental, that the juxtaposition does not constitute a dualism. For when one adds up the content of all these remarks, one sees that what Wittgenstein is opposing to theory (and opinion and explanation and belief) is no simple counterweight, no opposing but equal principle. On the contrary, what he has in mind enjoys a certain fundamental primacy with respect to theory. As pre-eminently affective and bodily, spiritual and mythological, existentially relevant and universalistic, such magical and religious notions bespeak the bedrock dynamic on which theory, opinions, explanations, and beliefs necessarily rest.
If this is so, then these notions cannot themselves be matters of opinion: “The characteristic feature of primitive man…is that he does not act from opinions” (Wittgenstein 1971: 37). Nor can they be open ultimately to explanation: “Even the idea of trying to explain [such practices]…seems to me wrong-headed” (ibid.: 29). Rather, the sole form of accounting they are open to is description: “We can only describe and say, human life is like that” (ibid.: 30). In effect, they constitute existential certainties or, to use the technical philosophical term, the synthetic a priori.
Precisely because this kind of a priori is neither theoretical nor empirical, it obtains in a logical and ontological nowhere, between necessity and contingency. For this reason, it confounds explanation, the representational demands of which leave no room to maneuver in the face of ambiguity that is basic. When confronted with ambiguity of this kind, all one can do is show it. That is to say, by definition that which is basically ambiguous cannot be logically determined. Since it is neither this nor that, with respect to saying what it is, one can only say (as the Hebrew scriptures say about the godhead), saying everything and nothing at once, that it is what it is. This is why I think that instead of saying “We could say, man is a ceremonious animal,” Wittgenstein says “We could almost say” this, and goes on to say that it is in any case a partly false and nonsensical proposition. Because man's “ceremonious” faculty, his capacity to make meaning, is precisely neither theoretical nor empirical, it is basically inexplicable. Any explanation of this faculty—that is, any attempt to rigidly designate it as either this or that—will in the very (creative and processive) endeavor of trying to do so necessarily go beyond itself and thus belie itself. As a result, although this faculty can be shown, or can show itself, it cannot be said as a truth-functional proposition, at least not without making a partial nonsense logically.
One provocative way of capturing such basic ambiguity is by reference to the so-called gestalt switch. About the famous ambiguous figure that can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit, Wittgenstein had this to say (in Monk 1990: 507–8): “Suppose I show it to a child. It says ‘It's a duck’ and then suddenly ‘Oh, it's a rabbit.’ So it recognises it as a rabbit.—This is an experience of recognition. So if you see me in the street and say ‘Ah, Wittgenstein.’ But you haven't an experience of recognition all the time.—The experience only comes at the moment of change from duck to rabbit and back. In between, the aspect is as it were dispositional.” What is important here is Wittgenstein's claim that insofar as the ambiguity is basic, the experience of recognition is dispositional and depends on a change of aspect. The moment of change is immediate and therefore inexplicable. Moreover, it describes perception in terms of an irreducible relationship between the perceiver and what is perceived. That is to say, the question to ask is not what the figure really is or if its determination as anything at all is simply a function of something that goes on inside the head of the perceiver. Rather, the only useful or sensible question that can be asked is, what difference does the change of aspect make? The other questions do not admit of clear answers as long as the ambiguity, as between the figure and itself as well as between the perceiver and the perceived, proves basic. The attempt to see the gestalt switch in terms of such questions always leads down the futile path of having to decide between materialism and idealism, as if the thing had to be either object or idea. What Wittgenstein is trying to show by reference to such gestalten is that although idea and experience or thinking and seeing or, more comprehensively, the internal and the external are not the same thing, neither does it make sense to understand them as perfectly separate and distinct from each other.
The immediacy of the change of aspect implicates a creative process. That is to say, at some point in looking in to it, the synthetic a priori lacks an empirical genesis or even an origin through learning. Wittgenstein (1971: 36) alludes to this creative process in terms of what we ordinarily construe as the conduct of choice: “If a human being could choose to be born in a tree in a forest, then there would be some who would seek out the most beautiful or the highest tree for themselves, some who would choose the smallest and some who would choose an average or below-average tree, and I do not mean out of philistinism, but for just the reason, or kind of reason, for which the other man chose the highest. That the feeling we have for our life is comparable to that of a being who could choose his own standpoint in the world, is, I believe, the basis of the myth—or belief—that we choose our body before birth.” Here Wittgenstein is pointing out that humans are given to experience their “standpoint in the world” as somehow their own choice, and he seems to imply that this experience provides a basis on which humans come to believe that the mind is one thing and the body another (“the basis of the myth—or belief—that we choose our body before birth”). But he also suggests that in a (logically impossible) sense, one's “standpoint in the world” is in fact a matter of ‘choice’. Hence, if one could choose to be born “in a tree in a forest,”
