tree, and whatever the choice, it is taken for “just the reason, or kind of reason”—that is, I think, the ‘reason’ of self-fashioning—for which other persons choose the other trees to house their particular identities.
These choices, though, arising as they do somehow between thought and perception, cannot be altogether witting and free. Hence, Wittgenstein calls the proposition that our minds somehow obtain prior to our bodies—and, it must follow, as against Kant, the proposition that our conduct of choice can be perfectly autonomous—a “myth.” It is for this reason—the reason that the conduct he is describing both does and does not amount to choice—that he qualifies by the conditional (“If one could choose”) his picture of choice throughout. Nevertheless, this conduct is, I believe, a question of ethics for him (1971: 36): “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’). And in this sense every view is equally significant. It is important also that the contempt each person feels for me is something I must make my own, an essential and significant part of the world seen from the place where I am.” Wittgenstein seems to be saying here that from the perspective of our faculty to make meaning of the world, no standpoint is more (or less) significant than any other. That is to say, synthetic a priori or foundations of human worlds, the standpoints of the highest tree and of the lowest, though different, are equal. If you live in the highest tree and your other in the lowest, that does not mean that the latter has got the world wrong—your other is not seeing it, as Frazer seems to think, “as something other than it is.” And precisely in order to see this, Wittgenstein finds that it is “important” to make the other's “contempt” for us (a contempt issuing from the other's particular standpoint in the world), “an essential and significant part” of our own standpoint. By doing so, of course, by learning the other's language (another way, according to Wittgenstein [1971: 36, third footnote] to understand what it means to incorporate into our own view the other's outlook on us), we position ourselves to see the ‘truth’ in the other's standpoint as well as the relativity of our own.
Such an exercise, one that Wittgenstein practiced with incomparable rigor over the course of his life (indeed, in a sense it is this exercise that defines his philosophy), is by any other name ethics. For it is an exercise in self-liberation and self-creation by means of, paradoxically, the respectful acknowledgment of the other as other. As such, it also implies the understanding, which I believe Wittgenstein held, that the synthetic a priori, the certainties in terms of which we define ourselves and take our existential bearings, remain open to human judgment despite the fact that ordinarily nothing seems to speak against them. By the same token, it implies that although all such standpoints may be equally meaningful as ciphers of ‘reality’, and therefore immune to theoretical judgments of right and wrong, they are not necessarily off-limits to judgments of good and bad. That is, their nature as existential attitudes toward the world may render theoretical assessments of them misplaced, but it cannot save them from ethical evaluations. It is for this reason that I speak of these attitudes, these a priori, as primordial choices. However much they may be taken for granted and acted on in terms of certainty, they are also auto-constructed in terms of a good. Wittgenstein saw that such standpoints are subject to evaluations of use, but I cannot say whether he formally entertained the point I am making about ethical evaluations. The point, though, is certainly implicit in his argumentation and also, I should think, his conduct: he had a strong sense of the good and was not shy about judging others according to it (cf. Monk 1990: 278).
In view of this understanding of the synthetic a priori, it is no wonder that Wittgenstein concluded that Frazer's evolutionary account of the Beltane May Day or fire festival fails to furnish satisfaction. This festival, which took place in certain parts of Great Britain and Northern Europe up to the nineteenth century, centered on a cake, ritually prepared and divided into lots (one of which could serve as a selector), which were then distributed for purposes of determining a victim to be thrown symbolically into the fire. Impressed with the sinister aura of this festival, Frazer explained it in terms of the hypothesis that the festival found its ultimate origin in ancient rites of human sacrifice. But Wittgenstein points out that even if Frazer's evolutionary hypothesis proved wrong, we would still be impressed with the sinister character of the Beltane festival. In other words, although the genetic explanation may throw a certain light on the festival, it cannot account for our impression that there is something deep and sinister about it.
“I think it is clear,” Wittgenstein says (1971: 38), “that what gives us a sinister impression is the inner nature of the practice as performed in recent times, and the facts of human sacrifice as we know them only indicate the direction in which we ought to see it.” By “inner nature of the practice,” he means (ibid.: 38), “all those circumstances in which it is carried out that are not included in the account of the festival, because they consist…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 lies in the character of these people themselves.” Plainly, in this passage Wittgenstein is referring to ‘cultural context’, to the culturally certain foundations that distinguish and identify the people in question. The reason why we find something deep about this festival is, then, according to Wittgenstein, that the spirit of the festival, that is, its inner nature or existential meaning, smacks of the sinister. Put another way, the dark character in question is an aspect of who the rite's practitioners are, of their particular identity as cultural beings.
But Wittgenstein's key point looks beyond the cultural context of the people of the rite to embrace the observer's context. “What makes human sacrifice something deep and sinister anyway?” he asks. His answer is (1971: 40): “[T]his deep and sinister aspect is not obvious just from learning the history of the external action, but we impute it from an experience in ourselves.” The impression is given not only because something deep and sinister rests with the inner spirit of the rite and with the character of the rite's practitioners, but also because “there is something in us too that speaks in support of those observances” (ibid.: 34). Here, with this turn to the beholder's share, Wittgenstein, despite his conspicuous and philosophically central discomfort with the idea of universals (he regarded as pathological the philosophical craving for generality), insinuates the universal—though not in the received sense of the notion. This movement is unmistakable in the sentence that brings his essay to a close (ibid.: 41): what we see in ceremonies and stories evocative of human sacrifice “is something they acquire, after all, from the evidence, including such evidence as does not seem directly connected with them—from the thought of man and his past, from the strangeness of what I see in myself and in others, what I have seen and have heard.”
Thus, Wittgenstein argues that the context of meaning to which the impression at point must be referred includes the observer's experience and stock of knowledge. In effect, he sees the observer as participant of what she is observing, helping to define and construct it as it does her in return. This point reiterates Wittgenstein's rejection of both empiricism and intellectualism in favor of the understanding that although the perceiver and the perceived are relatively separate and distinct, there obtains between them a fundamental continuity. As partly a product of the character of the ‘outside’ observer, the impression of something deep and sinister directly ties the idea of the synthetic a priori to the idea of the universal. This is true despite the fact that by virtue of its syntheticism, this kind of a priori is essentially particularistic. The possibility of an a priori that is at once both particular and universal is a function of the fact that the implied universalism does not project a world of fixed things, but rather evokes a perceptual dynamic that continuously fires the possibility of a world in common. Although each and every synthetic a priori is culturally particular, insofar as it is a product of the human faculty for making meaning, it must be open to the active understanding of others. Thus, by not allowing our intellectualism to obstruct our vision, and by keeping a sharp eye out for the “connexions” and “intermediate links” (Wittgenstein 1971: 35) that make a gestalt, including especially the gestalt
