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Lars Svendsen

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“Wittgenstein wrote a comprehensive critique of the Scottish anthropologist J. G. Frazer's masterpiece "The Golden Bough" (1890), a comparative study of religion and mythology. One of Wittgenstein's main objections was that Frazer ascribes the natives he discusses with irrational beliefs for which there is no evidence: for example, that a certain ritual will make it rain. The problem is that Frazer is unable to see what the natives are actually doing. Wittgenstein states: "Frazer is much more savage than most of his savages... His explanations of primitive practices are much cruder than the meaning of these practices themselves." While Frazer believes that the natives' actions are based on mistaken beliefs about causal relationships, Wittgenstein suggests that they are not based on such beliefs at all. Once, after a very bad game, I smashed my tennis racket. Had my opponent thought like Frazer, he would have believed that my action was a ritual sacrifice aimed at changing the outcome of the tournament for me. But my action was not based on any such expectation. It was simply an immature expression of anger and disappointment. The most reasonable understanding of the natives' ritual practices involves considering them as expressions of hope, among other things, not as irrational notions of causal relationships. Our idea of causation stems from us observing regularities. We will have repeatedly seen that A is followed by B. What regularities would have led the natives to see a causal relationship between a specific ritual and a specific natural phenomenon such as rain? Is is unlikely that rain was usually brought about by a specific dance, and the natives must have seen that it sometimes rains despite no ritual being performed. Not least, the natives should have danced a lot during the driest parts of the year, but they didn't. So it's far more plausible to consider this dance an expression of hoping for rain. From that perspective there is nothing irrational about the natives' actions. The dancing is a shared expression of their understanding that the desired rain might come.”

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Book:A Philosophy of Hope
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