festival and thus satisfy ourselves as to why it impresses us as sinister. The capacity to do this bespeaks a universalizing nature, but because this nature describes the observer as being in the picture he himself projects, it remains ever beyond the reach of logical determination. It is, however, distinctly manifest in human interaction and therefore in a sense can be shown.
I have argued that Wittgenstein's “Remarks on Frazer's ‘Golden Bough’” offers an account of the synthetic a priori that radically revises the Kantian understanding. For unlike Kant, who held fast to the immaculate distinction between subject and object, inside and outside, and form and content, Wittgenstein (to leave aside his polemical argument about the expressive and the instrumental) relativizes these distinctions, making them definitively incomplete. As a consequence, while the distinctions do not disappear, their opposing principles enjoy a certain continuity with each other, meaning that they must be less than identical to themselves. This paralogical condition, a state of nondualism or basic ambiguity, yields an a priori that both is and is not certain, universal, and a matter of choice. The possibility of such an a priori stands with the picture of the human world as, in the first place, a dynamic of becoming, in which the said, for all its imposing power to fix and decide things, can never quite catch up with the saying. The said enters into the saying and may represent itself as the superior power, but it can never wholly supercede the primacy of its counterforce. For the human world proceeds in terms of meanings imprisoned in action, and although these meanings can be let out into the light of consciousness, if that light is to shine at all, there must always be further meanings that remain implicit and, in this sense, in the dark, behind the epistemic bars of practice—behind the limits of the self and self-consciousness.
I have read a good deal into the “Remarks,” a brief text that has certainly not been regarded by the philosophical commentators as central in the corpus of Wittgenstein's work (cf., however, Zengotita 1989). Still, I believe that I can reinforce my interpretation by glancing quickly at another work by Wittgenstein, especially On Certainty (1972), in which he deals with the problem of the a priori rather directly.
Wittgenstein's friend and Cambridge colleague, G. E. Moore, in his attempt to refute philosophical skepticism, that is, the position that there is nothing about the world that can be known with certainty, offered as evidence to the contrary certain common-sense understandings. The most famous of these is his proof that his two hands exist, which he demonstrated by holding them up and saying “Here is one hand, and here is another.” According to Wittgenstein, Moore's demonstration could hardly refute skepticism, since showing one's hands in this way cannot provide knowledge that one's hands exist. What it can do, said Wittgenstein, is make clear that it would be nonsensical to doubt the existence of one's hands. Moore, says Wittgenstein (1972: § 151), “does not know what he asserts he knows, but it stands fast for him.”5
In other words, Wittgenstein drew a distinction between, on the one hand, the ordinary, everyday experience of not feeling any doubt and, on the other, the epistemological condition of having certain knowledge. Whereas the latter is a question of logic and rationality (“One says ‘I know’ when one is ready to give compelling grounds. ‘I know’ relates to a possibility of demonstrating the truth” [1972: § 243]), the former has to do simply with making sense or nonsense of anything at all. Were we to doubt the existence of our own two hands, as we hold them up for all to see, there would be nothing safe from doubt, including our being in the world and our senses: “Doesn't testing come to an end?” (ibid.: § 164). Wittgenstein was arguing neither that one's senses are perfectly reliable nor that different people cannot arrive at different existential certainties. Rather, he was pointing out that in order to make any sense at all, it is necessary that we take some propositions for granted, for these propositions (such as “here is my hand”) belong to the frame of reference by virtue of which we can make meaning of the world in the least. If we did not conduct ourselves as if our hands exist or the earth abides beneath our feet, our world would lack any integrity whatsoever, and we could take no meaningful direction from it for purposes of getting on with life (ibid.: § 150): “How does someone judge which is his right and which his left hand?. If I don't trust myself here, why should I trust anyone else's judgment? Is there a why? Must I not begin to trust somewhere? That is to say: somewhere I must begin with not-doubting; and that is not, so to speak, hasty but excusable: it is part of judging.”
Plainly, Wittgenstein is pointing to a synthetic a priori, which can be conceived of in terms of a taken-for-granted world or, as he calls it, a world picture (Weltbild). The sort of picture he has in mind is not a proper theoretical projection of things, but a practical, meaningful framework on the basis of which we can judge and determine, which is to say, come to terms with things. Regarding Moore-type assertions as “absolutely solid,” says Wittgenstein (1972: § 151), “is part of our method of doubt and enquiry.” By “method” here he does not intend a technical procedure but rather our everyday practice of making sense of things (ibid.: § 148): “Why do I not satisfy myself that I have two feet when I want to get up from a chair? There is no why. I simply don't. This is how I act.” Hence, for all practical purposes, this taken-for-granted framework, this “substratum of all my enquiring and asserting” (ibid.: § 162) is groundless, without ‘why’: “The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing” (1972: § 166). Correlatively, Wittgenstein asserts (ibid.: § 152): “I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for me. I can discover them subsequently like the axis around which a body rotates. This axis is not fixed in the sense that anything holds it fast, but the movement around it determines its immobility.”
The last quotation suggests why such indubitable propositions constitute a world-view. Wittgenstein holds that unlike theoretical premises, they do not stand alone, as matters of logic proper, but rather together: “It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support” (1972: § 142). “When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole)” (ibid.: § 141). Wittgenstein describes how this holistic learning takes place as follows (ibid.): “I am told, for example, that someone climbed this mountain many years ago. Do I always enquire into the reliability of the teller of this story, and whether the mountain did exist years ago? A child learns there are reliable and unreliable informants much later than it learns facts which are told it. It doesn't learn at all that that mountain has existed for a long time: that is, the question whether it is so doesn't arise at all. It swallows this consequence down, so to speak, together with what it learns.”
The holism of synthetic a priori propositions helps us to understand how such groundless propositions can “stand fast.” They are of course taken for granted, which means that normally they do not dwell in the light of consciousness and therefore are not open to question (as Wittgenstein says, some propositions are simply swallowed down together with what is learned). But there is more to this kind of pre-epistemological security. Because they are all tied together, these propositions are continually rein-forced by all the other such propositions, in the sense that to question any is implicitly to question many, if not all. And since together they constitute one's world picture, that is, the picture according to which one goes about the activities of one's everyday, ordinary life (standing up, sitting down, going from one place to another, etc.), such questioning tends to pull the very ground from beneath one's feet. It is for this reason that Wittgenstein tells us that what holds these propositions fast is the movement around them (1972: § 114): “The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e., it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.” Such propositions are groundless, then, because they themselves constitute the ground. And like any ground or horizon, they are fixed only relative to their correlative figure or theme, which in the present case amounts to one's everyday, precognitive practices.6
Gier (1981: chap.
