Introduction

Wittgenstein seeks to throw light on our concept of understanding by looking at how misunderstandings arise and what kinds of failure they involve. He discerns a peculiar kind of misunderstanding in the writings of the social anthropologist James Frazer. In Frazer’s hands, the anthropological project of enabling us to understand human behaviour seems to yield the paradoxical result that there are certain forms of human behaviour that simply cannot be understood. The source of Frazer’s misunderstanding, according to Wittgenstein, is that he places narrow requirements on what could count as meaningful, prior to, and independently of, his encounter with the subjects of his interpretation. Frazer, similar to some of the philosophers who Wittgenstein addresses in his other works, succumbs to nonsense in his very attempt to draw the limits of sense.

My aim in this chapter is to clarify the connections between Wittgenstein’s criticism of Frazer and his criticism of his fellow philosophers, in particular of Frege. The materials I draw on stem from various periods in Wittgenstein’s career, and they reveal, in my mind, an important continuity in Wittgenstein’s thought: addressing misunderstanding, in Wittgenstein’s view, is fundamentally an ethical problem, not a theoretical one.

The Anthropologist’s Misunderstanding

Frazer, as Wittgenstein interprets him, occupies the position of an observer of human behaviour who declares himself unable to properly understand his fellow humans, not through any fault of his own, but because his interlocutors’ thoughts and behaviours are allegedly inherently defective. The element in Frazer’s thought that Wittgenstein highlights is representative of a larger trend in early anthropology, within the context of which the mindset and mentalities of the members of various non-Western, so-called primitive societies have been treated as irrational; and Wittgenstein’s criticism of Frazer is in this sense comparable to later developments in anthropology, in which the tendency to pit the allegedly rational observer against the allegedly irrational subjects of his study has been criticized and debunked.

Frazer’s inability to understand the subjects of his study testifies, in Wittgenstein’s eyes, to Frazer’s own confusion: