Introduction
A number of years ago, an interesting and protracted exchange took place between several scholars regarding Wittgenstein's ‘scapegoat remark’, a critical comment about the ancient Jewish rite described in Leviticus wherein participants cast their sins onto a goat who is sent into the desert to die. Those who have written about the remark all agree that Wittgenstein believes the rite to be conceptually confused, but they differ in their explanations why. There are two close variants of the remark in Wittgenstein's Nachlass, the first given once and the second repeated three times.Footnote 1 Most references have been to the final instance, from Section 93 of The Big Typescript. The remark reads: ‘The scapegoat, on which one lays one's sins, and who runs away into the desert with them – a false picture, similar to those that cause errors in philosophy’ (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein, Nordman and Klagge1993), 250). The remark first caught the attention of Rush Rhees (Reference Rhees, and 1997) and D. Z. Phillips (Reference Phillips1986) because it seems to refute Kai Nielson's (Reference Nielson1967) charge that Wittgenstein – and Wittgensteinians like Rhees and Phillips – are fideists who defend all religious beliefs and practices on the grounds that religions are autonomous belief-systems.
The scapegoat remark and the debate it sparked are worth another look, but not for the sake of defending or attacking Wittgenstein's supposed objection to the rite. For starters, as Duncan Richter reasonably argues, scholars have already wasted too much time worrying about the validity of Wittgenstein's criticism when he was merely hunting for an analogy to throw light on the nature of philosophical errors (Richter (Reference Richter2001), 173). Had someone pointed out the insensitivity of his criticism of the ritual, says Richter, there is ‘no doubt [that Wittgenstein] would have expressed himself more carefully’, that he would have withdrawn it and instead used a less objectionable example (Richter (Reference Richter2001), 173). Much more importantly, I will argue, the extant debate rests on a thoroughgoing misunderstanding of Wittgenstein's analogy, and thus it has obscured deep and valuable lessons of Section 93. Briefly stated, those who have commented on the scapegoat remark thus far have presumed that Wittgenstein means to say that the scapegoat ritual is inherently confused, and is itself analogous to a philosophical mistake. What Wittgenstein actually says is that the scapegoat ritual is analogous to those things that cause errors in philosophy. Section 93, in which the scapegoat remark occurs, draws an extended analogy between ritual and language, and helps develop Wittgenstein's idea that both constitute meaning in essentially the same way. The point of the scapegoat remark is that the ritual easily lends itself to misunderstanding, in much the way that certain grammatical constructions tend to cause philosophical confusion. ‘Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of well kept wrong turnings’ (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein1980a), 27). Ordinary language is not conceptually flawed, according to Wittgenstein, but rather certain peculiar grammatical facts set traps that tend to lead to conceptual confusion (2001, §144). Analogously, the scapegoat ritual is a sort of trap that leads to misunderstanding; it is not the consequence of a misunderstanding.
My first aim in this article is to make sense of the analogy that Wittgenstein draws between linguistic meaning and ritual meaning, an analogy that culminates in the idea that rituals can have substantial meaning for many of the same reasons that language does. My second aim is to follow up on a disturbing implication of that analogy, the fact that many living rituals probably have little or no meaning despite the fact that they are precious to participants. The analogy between ritual and language that dominates Section 93 implies that to be meaningful, rites must be performed in a vernacular in which participants are fluent, so to speak. Yet, unlike natural languages, rituals are often perpetuated by institutional forces and sentimental attachments despite remaining stuck in the vocabulary of another time and place. Admittedly, Wittgenstein never spells out this implication in his edited remarks, but in a record from conversations that took place in 1949, Bouwsma reports Wittgenstein saying that ‘religion is bound up with a culture, with certain externals in a way of life’ that inevitably change, and when they do, ‘well, what remains?’ (Bouwsma (Reference Bouwsma1986), 34). When they diverge from the context in which they exist, rituals and even whole religions can fade into meaninglessness. In a startling but helpful passage, Bouwsma reports: ‘[Wittgenstein] remarked that he did not understand modern Judaism. He did not see what could be left of it since sacrifice was no longer practiced. And now? What was left was too abstract. Prayers and singing’ (Bouwsma (Reference Bouwsma1986), 33). Wittgenstein's judgment of modern Judaism is certainly too harsh. There are numerous examples of spiritually significant Jewish rituals. Judith Shulevitz (Reference Shulevitz2010) makes a convincing case that the Sabbath can help us carve ‘sacred time’ out of our busy, modern schedules to reorient ourselves to a world that is largely beyond our control. Still, the remark in Bouwsma's book suggests that Wittgenstein did recognize that some living rituals might be hollow. It is also interesting to note that in this comment, precisely contrary to extant readings of the scapegoat remark, Wittgenstein suggests that ancient Jewish sacrifices were meaningful.
Misreadings of the scapegoat remark
The central debate about the meaning of the scapegoat remark pits D. Z. Phillips and Rush Rhees on one side against Brian Clack, aided by Berel Dov Lerner, on the other. All of them understand that the key to the remark lies in Wittgenstein's analogy, which somehow relates rituals to language and philosophical errors. According to Wittgenstein, metaphysics is a philosophical blunder deriving from misunderstanding the logic of one's own language. When we encounter a grammatical substantive whose referent is mysterious, a referent that obviously cannot be an ordinary physical object, we are prone to posit transcendent objects. Here is one place where language sets a trap for us. Since the words ‘time’ and ‘fruit’ can be substituted for one another in many sentences, as in ‘I wish we had more –’, we are prone to imagine that ‘time’ names a thing of some sort, just the way ‘fruit’ does. Misled by the grammatical similarity of nouns to each other, we set about trying to define just that sort of thing time is, or, what sort of thing ‘time’ names. And of course, time seems then to be a very odd thing indeed. ‘In our failure to understand the use of a word we take it as the expression of a queer process. (As we think of time as a queer medium, of the mind as a queer kind of being)’ (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein2001), §196).
Rhees was the first to suggest that Wittgenstein believes that rituals and myths contain a confusion similar to those that we find in metaphysical theories:
Wittgenstein would not call an ancient ritual practice ‘metaphysics’. But the misunderstanding of the logic of language (or of the way language functions) gives rise to metaphysics. … And he might have said that the hold of ancient rituals on people also rested on such a misunderstanding. (Rhees (Reference Rhees, and 1997), 75)
Thus we see Rhees's formulation of the central analogy at work in the scapegoat remark: ritual is analogous to metaphysics, and so it is the incoherent product of a misunderstanding of something deeper and more basic, such as language. (Neither Rhees nor Phillips clarifies just what that deeper something is, but we need not worry about that here.) Years later, D. Z. Phillips would affirm Rhees's account:
Wittgenstein does not deny that rituals may harbour deep confusions akin to metaphysical confusion. In fact, at the time he wrote his Remarks on Frazer, Rush Rhees informed me, he thought that the majority of rituals probably harboured such confusions. (Phillips (Reference Phillips2003), 197)
The confusion within the scapegoat ritual, according to Rhees and Phillips, is that it incoherently introduces an animal into the conceptual scheme of sin and salvation, a domain in which animals have no place. It makes sense to speak of casting one's sins onto another person – as we sometimes say a child assumes the sins of its parents, or a whole people is separated from God by the sins of a few of its members – says Rhees.
But a goat? What would it mean to say that a goat has to bear its own sins, let alone that it has to bear the sins of people? Bunyan's image of Christian bearing his sins like a heavy pack on his shoulders does not jar in this way. (Rhees (Reference Rhees, and 1997), 82)
The concept of ‘sin’ has a meaningful place in human life, but no foothold in the animal world. Expiation from one's sins normally comes by way of personal sacrifice or acts of devotion. In the case of communal sin, we might speak of a collective unburdening, but here again it seems only symbolic human acts can have the right meaning. Phillips reiterates: ‘What does it mean to speak of an animal feeling remorse for his own misdeeds, let alone being able to remove the sins of a people?’ (1993, 90).
Rhees's account leaves a lot to be desired, however, since it really only shows that we moderns cannot make sense of the scapegoat ritual in our terms. That is a point made convincingly by Berel Dov Lerner, whose sensitive interpretation of the scapegoat ritual is worth studying in detail. Lerner, who presumes Rhees's interpretation to represent Wittgenstein's view fairly, points out that Rhees does little to imagine ancient Israelite sensibilities – their ideas of expiation from sin, and how they might be likely to interpret it (Lerner (Reference Lerner1994), 2). When Rhees attempts to make sense of the scapegoat ritual by reference to the possibility of a man bearing the sins of a people, he reveals his own Christianizing tendencies. ‘By modeling his interpretation of the scapegoat ritual on the crucifixion, Rhees reduces it to a kind of confused religious farce’ (Lerner (Reference Lerner1994), 2).
By contrast, Lerner convincingly suggests that the ancient Israelites employed the goat in the practical role in a ritual that really concerns their relationship with God. It is God who forgives people's sins on the Day of Atonement, and the role of the goat was merely to carry away a spoken list of sins into the desert, giving graphic representation to God's expiation. Lerner compares the ancient ritual to the modern one of tashlih, when Jews throw breadcrumbs into a natural body of water while they read Micah 7:19: ‘He will take us back in love; He will cover up our iniquities, You will hurl all their sins into the depths of the sea.’ If water symbolically swallows up the worshipper's sins, it does not do so in the way that Christ does.
Brian Clack offers an alternative reading of the scapegoat remark based primarily on Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough. After citing Lerner approvingly in his own analysis, Clack goes on to employ the analogy between metaphysics and ritual more narrowly than Rhees and Phillips. Clack claims that Wittgenstein's real point is that all rituals arise from exactly the same sort of confused interpretations of language that give rise to metaphysics. In support of his thesis, Clack points to Wittgenstein's discussion of old European celebrations of Lent wherein a town's children ‘carry out death’. Frazer describes a variety of forms the ritual might take, but in most there is a doll or some other effigy dressed as a skeleton, or otherwise disguised as death, that the children carry out of town for ritual slaughter. The participants return chanting of their victory over death, sometimes carrying bits of the mutilated effigy with them as talismans of health and fertility (Frazer (Reference Frazer1981), 257–258). Here is the comment on that ritual made by Wittgenstein which Clack cites as a key piece of evidence for his reading:
To cast out death or to slay death; but he is also represented as a skeleton, as in some sense dead himself. ‘As dead as death.’ ‘Nothing is so dead as death; nothing is so beautiful as beauty itself.’ Here the image which we use in thinking of reality is that beauty, death, &c. are the pure (concentrated) substances, and that they are found in the beautiful object as added ingredients in the mixture. (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein, Nordman and Klagge1993), 199)
Clack takes this passage to show that Wittgenstein ‘wants here to connect this Lenten observance with the Platonic doctrine that properties are ingredients of things’ (Clack (Reference Clack and Schilbrack2004), 106). Thus, according to Clack, Wittgenstein wants to connect the ritual with the same tendency towards metaphysics which leads the philosopher into ‘complete darkness’ (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein1998), 18). Clack sums up his reading this way:
What Wittgenstein sees in the custom of ‘Carrying out death’, then, is the application of an over-simplified language in which words and concepts such as ‘death’ and ‘life’ are seen as pure qualities, or reified forms, existing in abstraction from objects exhibiting signs of life and death. By reifying an abstract noun, the peasants in the European custom have been misled by the [grammatical] substantive ‘death.’ (Clack (Reference Clack and Schilbrack2004), 107)
If Clack is right, then Wittgenstein's criticism of the scapegoat ritual would come to the charge that it is based on a confusion about what the word ‘sin’ designates. The ancient Jews reified ‘sin’ and developed the scapegoat ritual around the resultant imaginary object. Thus, they thought that they could literally load sin onto the back of a goat and send it away into the desert. That is an uncharitable reading of the ritual, to be sure, but Clack goes on to suggest that Wittgenstein's real purpose may have been an equally uncharitable reading of all Christianity, and indeed all religion. Clack writes:
given the widespread nature of rituals involving the notion of transference of evil and sin, Wittgenstein's analysis, if persuasive, has to be extended to countless other rituals, extended even to the foundations of Christianity itself … [since] Wittgenstein's diagnosis of the problem inherent in the scapegoat ritual suggests that the idea of Christ taking on himself the sins of this world is a confused one. (Clack (Reference Clack and Schilbrack2004), 110)
Wittgenstein's sympathetic attitude towards religion is really addressed to its social and emotional power, says Clack, while at the same time he is deeply critical of the ‘false pictures’ at its foundation.
Rituals are analogous to language, not metaphysics
The context of the scapegoat remark strongly suggests that the aforementioned authors have misconstrued the analogy between language, metaphysics, and ritual. Section 93 of The Big Typescript is a brief digression of just eight remarks focused on the ways in which both language and religion are littered with the detritus of ancient concepts and practices. It is these relics that are the traps into which we are prone to fall and make philosophical mistakes. The section opens with the heading, ‘THE MYTHOLOGY IN THE FORMS OF OUR LANGUAGE. ((PAUL ERNST.))’. The cryptic reference to Ernst is telling. Ernst's postscript to Grimm's Fairy Tales seems an unlikely influence on Wittgenstein, but it would appear to have provided him with one of the most important ideas in his later philosophy, namely, the notion that the remnants of ancient cultures wend their way through our language in manifold, wildly unexpected ways, resulting in a convoluted logic that we are prone to misunderstand. These ancient relics are part of our living vocabulary, but when we try to explain them, we are prone to ‘rationalize’ them, to provide accounts in terms of modern beliefs and values, as though we had invented them for our own purposes. The truth, on the other hand, is that they are a bizarre inheritance laden with the overtones of strange cultures from the past. Here is the crucial passage from Ernst's essay:
The overwhelming majority by far of motifs and materials that can still be used today certainly does not originate in reality. It is often the extremely ancient legacy of peoples, occurring in enigmatic and still not adequately explained form among the most distant and different peoples, originating … from changes of language, when later ages no longer understood the logic of the past and interpreted it through fabrications; through changes in views about the connection of the world, about death, the soul, the afterlife, God etc., by rationalistically interpreting uncomprehended remnants of previous beliefs; through the migration of this material to other peoples, through its retelling in changed circumstances and through adaptation to the new. The process is essentially always this: a problem that is unsolvable by means of the experience of reality is solved by an invented, rationalized story. (Künne (Reference Künne1996), 273)
Immediately beneath the reference to Ernst, Wittgenstein introduces the analogy between language and ritual (not between ritual and metaphysics):
In the ancient rites we have the use of an extremely developed gesture-language.
And when I read Frazer I would like to say again and again: All these processes, these changes of meaning, we have right in front of us in our language of words. (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein, Nordman and Klagge1993), 197)
The very next remark is the scapegoat comment.
It is notable that the English translation of the scapegoat remark more strongly implies an error within the ritual than the original German. The English refers to the scapegoat as ‘a false picture’, which implies something intrinsically wrong. However, while it is true that the German ‘falsches Bild’ is most naturally translated as ‘false picture’, it could also reasonably be translated as ‘deceitful image’ or even ‘misleading model’, both of which carry a message more in keeping with the rest of Section 93. More tellingly, the second half of the remark reads, ‘ein falsches Bild, ähnlich denen, die die philosophischen Irrtümer verursachen’. Even in the English translation, this phrase emphasizes that the false picture precedes (causes) error (‘a false picture, similar to those that cause errors in philosophy’). However, the German ‘verursachen’ might more strongly emphasize that the false picture leads to philosophical error, since ‘ursachen’ means to provoke, bring about, or spark, as well as to cause.
One might object that Wittgenstein elsewhere uses ‘falsches Bild’ to name the sort of confusing hypothetical that we posit to explain strange linguistic constructions – that is, to name specious theories. There is no doubt that Wittgenstein does sometimes use the expression ‘falsches Bild’ that way, as in his remark that: ‘It is easy to have a false picture (falsches Bild) of the processes called “recognizing”; as if recognizing always consisted in comparing two impressions with one another’ (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein2001), §604). However, the context of the scapegoat remark suggests that Wittgenstein's immediate purpose is different. The last passage in Section 93 explicitly states that a bad model is not identical with philosophical error, but is only an impetus to error. In that remark, Wittgenstein says that a simplified model only causes trouble when we lose sight of its status as a model, when we take it to be a literal description:
So long as one imagines the soul as a thing, a body, which is in our head, this hypothesis is not dangerous. … The danger sets in when we notice that the old model is not sufficient but then we don't change it, but only sublimate it, as it were. So long as I say the thought is in my head, everything is all right; things get dangerous when we say that the thought is not in my head, but in my spirit. (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein, Nordman and Klagge1993), 199)
Few people would imagine that thoughts (or souls) are literally physical objects inside the head, and so they will not be confused by a model describing them that way. If we remember that it is only a model, that picture might helpfully illustrate certain aspects of the concept of ‘thinking’ or ‘soul’. Confusion sets in when one loses sight of the model's status as mere analogy, and one begins treat it as an object suited to empirical study. Wittgenstein returns to this point in the Investigations, where he writes,
For we can avoid ineptness or emptiness in our assertions only by presenting the model as what it is, as an object of comparison – as, so to speak, a measuring-rod; not as a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond. (The dogmatism into which we fall so easily in doing philosophy.) (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein2001), §131)
So long as we keep straight what is metaphor and what is literal description, all is well.
If the scapegoat ritual ‘is a false picture, similar to those that cause errors in philosophy’, that must mean that it is a picture whose status as model or metaphor we have forgotten or that we are apt to forget. In other words, the scapegoat ritual is analogous to certain forms of ordinary language that easily lend themselves to misinterpretation, despite being sound in their own right, and the conceptual confusion that Clack describes lies in his interpretation, not in the ritual itself. Ordinary language has meaning by virtue of its constitutive place in our forms of life, and the dark confusion of metaphysics arises only when we take language ‘on holiday’, and postulate transcendent meanings and referents. Similarly, the scapegoat ritual and the ritual of carrying out death will have meaning just so long as they are authentically and substantially woven into our forms of life. In fact, it is highly un-Wittgensteinian to suggest that a gripping and widespread ritual like carrying out death might originate in an intellectual blunder. Wittgenstein believes that rituals are ‘extensions of instinct’ (1993, 151), and that a ritual will take root only where it ‘corresponds to a general inclination of the people’ (ibid., 149).
Frazer locates the ritual of carrying out death within the larger context of spring rites of purification, including Lent. Many communities aimed not to kill death in some literal, highly confused sense, but rather to purify their towns and fields of the illness and infertility associated with winter in anticipation of spring (Frazer (Reference Frazer1981), 264–271). In many places, Frazer tells us, twigs from the mutilated effigy of death were carried back to town and buried amongst the crops or livestock to promote fertility and prosperity. ‘In Leipzig at Mid-Lent’, death was ritually cast out to cleanse the city of plague and suffering, and to make ‘young wives fruitful’ (Frazer (Reference Frazer1981), 268). Even if some of those people who participated in the rite of carrying out death were conceptually confused and believed that they were working magic on a transcendent substance, clearly there is some deeper inclination in us to celebrate the end of winter's sorrows and the beginning of a new growing season. Clack's reductive reading of the ritual misses this deeper inclination with which Wittgenstein is so keen to put us in touch.
For analogous reasons, it impossible to entertain seriously the idea that Christianity is founded on the mistaken idea that ‘sin’ refers to something concrete that can be cast onto goats or prophets like so many fleas. There is ample documentation that the church's seminal thinkers were much better than that. For example, in Romans 6:11–14 (NRS), St Paul suggests that to sin is to act on corporeal passions that run counter to divine commandment, or, to surrender one's will to the whims of the flesh rather than to act in accordance with divine duty:
Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
Even if Paul's point is not perfectly clear, it is obvious that he hasn't simply confused sin for a strange and magical substance.
Let us return to the crucial question of how to interpret the claim that the scapegoat ritual presents a false picture. It will help to compare Wittgenstein's comment in the Investigations regarding why a picture of the soul as a thing separate from the body might not be misleading, even if it would be a metaphysical mistake to take such a picture literally:
Religion teaches that the soul can exist when the body has disintegrated. Now do I understand this teaching? – Of course I understand it – I can imagine plenty of things in connexion with it. And haven't pictures of these things been painted? And why should such a picture be only an imperfect rendering of the spoken doctrine? Why should it not do the same service as the words? And it is the service which is the point. (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein2001), §178)
The service to which the scapegoat ritual is to be put is expiation of sin. If the picture can be employed to that end, then there is nothing ‘false’ about it. If the scapegoat ritual is ‘ein falsches Bild’, that is only because, as it is a relic from the distant past, we today are prone to misinterpret it via our contemporary beliefs and values – like Rhees and Phillips – rather than to employ it meaningfully, as Lerner shows us how to do.
The language of rituals is analogous to the language of everyday psychology
If the scapegoat ritual is analogous to inherited linguistic forms that tend to cause confusion, then a good point of comparison is our everyday psychological language, where we find a raft of misleading expressions. Many of Wittgenstein's later writings aim to clarify the depth grammar of psychological language in order to clear up numerous common, deeply rooted confusions about the nature of mind and mental phenomena. We will consider the problem of dualism specifically. There are sundry peculiarities in the grammar of our psychological expressions that suggest the picture of mind as an interior mechanism. For one, there is the superficial parallel between expressions for psychological processes and expressions for bodily processes, which incorrectly leads us to imagine that thinking is a biological process analogous to digestion or respiration (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein2001), §571). There is also the highly unusual difference between the first-person and third-person uses of psychological statements. The phrase ‘I'm hurt’ is expressive, and not normally based on observation of my bodily state or behaviour. The phrase ‘he's hurt’, on the other hand, is descriptive, and is based on observable evidence (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein1980b), §836). When we are in a reifying mood, this difference suggests to us that sensations of pain are metaphysically peculiar phenomena hidden within a person's interior where they are observable to the subject, but hidden behind the veil of the body for others.
Of course, Wittgenstein is hardly the first to object to the idea that mental phenomena are metaphysically peculiar things locked away in a metaphysically peculiar place. Nor is he the first to say that it makes no sense to suppose that our ordinary psychological expressions refer to these ontological whatsits. Logical behaviourism says that psychological expressions must actually refer to behaviour if they are to be meaningful, and physical reductionism says that our psychological expressions must ultimately refer to brain states. So, on the one side there are those who stick to their guns and say that mental phenomena are metaphysically peculiar things beyond the physical realm. On the other, there are those who would jettison or reduce our psychological vocabulary for a physicalist vocabulary.
Wittgenstein's solution is fundamentally different. He asks us to look at meaning itself in a radically new way, one in which we no longer expect that the word ‘pain’ refers to a thing of any sort. Instead, Wittgenstein takes a sharp turn towards a naturalistic, even animalistic, account of language. Language has meaning for us because of how it is woven into our repertoire of reactions and gestures that are built from an amalgam of instinct and acquired behaviour (Clack (Reference Clack, Arrington and Addis2001), 24). Wittgenstein makes that point most famously in his suggestion that expressions of pain like ‘Ow!’ and ‘I feel a sharp pain in my arm’ are first learned as substitutes for crying; each verbal expression is an acquired form of ‘pain-behaviour’ that replaces the instinctive reaction of crying (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein2001), §244). This animalistic account of meaning is an essential and enduring feature of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. In a remark drafted very near the end of his life, he writes:
I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination. As a creature in a primitive state. Any logic good enough for a primitive means of communication needs no apology from us. Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination. (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein1969), §475)
Language is meaningful for us because of how it is integrated into our lives more broadly, because it plays a constitutive part of such various forms of life as singing hymns, celebrating marriage, building houses, planning wars, expressing love, and nearly everything else we do. ‘Language – I want to say – is a refinement, “in the beginning was the deed”’ (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein1980a), 31).
The parallel with ritual is close and informative. How are we to account for the meaning of a superficially inscrutable ritual like the Eucharist? Two approaches that are widespread in both scholarly and popular thought parallel common interpretations of psychological language. On the one side, there is that line of interpretation found in Catholic scholarship, for example, which invokes metaphysical processes and substances. Thus, the Eucharist is said to have meaning because through the real transubstantiation of wafer and wine it invites the spirit of Christ into congregants (Ratzinger (Reference Ratzinger2003), 78). Taken flat-footedly, such interpretations threaten to equate the meaning of ritual gestures with supposed transcendent accompaniments when real meaning is inherent in the ritual gestures themselves (cf. Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein1998), 95). In Wittgenstein's view, any account of accompanying spirits and metaphysical processes should be understood as a simile or allegory, roughly speaking (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein, Nordman and Klagge1993), 137). His point does not imply that all accounts of the Eucharist that refer to transubstantiation are metaphysically confused, to be sure. Wittgenstein acknowledges that there may be no way to articulate the meaning of a ritual without using similes, allegories, riddles, or other ostensibly indirect forms of expression (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein1980a), 64). Rather, the point is that such interpretations should not be taken as simple descriptions of hidden objects and forces wholly external to the ritual gestures, but somehow lending them significance.
On the other side, there are those Christians who regard the Lord's Supper as an earthly memorial, and who reject the ideas of transubstantiation and consubstantiation. At least originally in the Anabaptist theology, the Eucharist was simply a ‘fraternal meal that represented a foretaste of the kingdom to come’ (Johnson and Webber (Reference Johnson and Webber1993), 407). And Ratzinger notes that even some Catholic theologians have viewed the Eucharist ‘quite literally and exclusively as “orientation” to a community’ (Ratzinger (Reference Ratzinger1989), 286). Such a reading parallels behaviourism in that it looks to define the ritual gesture by its external nature and effects rather than by way of hidden properties or forces. Clearly secondary effects are not meanings, Wittgenstein insists. I might intend to make someone stare and gape in confusion by saying to her, ‘Milk me sugar’, but ‘I don't on that account call it the order to stare and gape, even if that was precisely the effect that I wanted to produce’ (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein2001), §498). If we accept that the meaning of the Eucharist lies in its secondary effects, we threaten to reduce its significance to what might be equally or better accomplished by a picnic or a secret handshake. The parallel with the alternative accounts of psychological language is clear. In each domain, when faced with mysterious gestures, we look to either transcendent accompaniments or external consequences for meaning. In both categories, Wittgenstein urges a third approach.
The key to understanding Wittgenstein's account of rituals lies in his idea that they are rooted in instinct – a crucial point that Clack (Reference Clack1996), Rhees (Reference Rhees, and 1997), and Phillips (Reference Phillips2003), all get right. Like beating the ground in anger, Wittgenstein says, all rites can be ‘called Instinct-actions’ (1993, 137) – they emerge from us much as instinctive expressions of emotion do.
When I am furious about something, I sometimes beat the ground or a tree with my walking stick. But I certainly don't believe that the ground is to blame or that my beating can help anything. ‘I am venting my anger.’ And all rites are of this kind. (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein, Nordman and Klagge1993), 137)
This and similar remarks have led many readers mistakenly to describe Wittgenstein's account of ritual as ‘expressivist’, i.e. as asserting that rituals have no meaning beyond the secondary function of venting emotion.Footnote 2 Frank Cioffi reads Wittgenstein that way, for example, and so declares Wittgenstein's remark ‘dismally opinionated’ and ‘profoundly un-Wittgensteinian’ on the grounds that it is unreasonably reductive and patently false. Of course, rituals are not of any one kind, says Cioffi, and Wittgenstein clearly knows that, since even within the remarks on Frazer he comments on other sorts of ritual. Moreover, not ‘all ritual is as natural and non-conventional as stamping the ground in anger’ (Cioffi (Reference Cioffi1998), 188). Many rituals are highly choreographed and unnatural even to seasoned participants. Cioffi's objections are reasonable, but they target a straw man. Wittgenstein's point is not that all rituals are automatic or of one kind, but that all meaningful rituals have some basis in our natural ways of seeing and reacting to the world. Ritual and ceremony – along with song, dance, painting, and countless other forms of expression – are natural ways of responding to aspects of the world that are meaningful and important to us: ‘[The] characteristic feature of the awakening mind of man is precisely the fact that a phenomenon comes to have meaning for him. One could almost say that man is a ceremonial animal’ (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein, Nordman and Klagge1993), 189). Wittgenstein's point is to locate ritual along a great continuum of acquired gestures that also includes poetry, topiary, and tap dance. He writes: ‘Think of the multifariousness of what we call “language”: word-language, picture-language, gesture-language, sound-language’ (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein1974), 129). Ritual and language are not merely analogues – they are conjoined twins.
The awakening mind of man responds to meanings, says Wittgenstein, but his point is not that meanings are transcendent facts to which human minds are naturally attuned. Rather, we are naturally inclined to respond to certain aspects of our lives and of the world around us, and it is those aspects that we call meaningful. Thus Wittgenstein writes at great length about aspect perception in his later philosophy. He writes about how we respond to ‘picture objects’, for example, simple line drawings of faces, animals, houses, and other everyday objects (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein2001), §166). What fascinates Wittgenstein is that it is perfectly natural for us to see and respond to pictures almost as though they were instances of what they depict (Mulhall (Reference Mulhall and Glock2001), 250). Children naturally make up stories about picture-object people, for example, and we all naturally look in the direction in which a picture-object hand is pointing. In fact, if your child could not recognize the emotions ‘expressed’ by simple line drawings of faces or she did not grasp that she should look in the direction of a pointed finger, you would seek medical help. Wittgenstein calls people missing these normal capacities ‘aspect-blind’, and he notes that ‘the aspect-blind will have an altogether different relationship to pictures from ours’ (2001, §182). Such blindness comes in degrees and types, but in every case, the aspect-blind seem to miss the meaning of what the rest of us intuitively grasp. It is helpful to think of those with a tin ear for music as aspect-blind, or musically near-sighted, say. Someone who simply cannot perceive the sorrow of Mozart's Requiem or the thrill of love in Etta James's version of ‘At Last’ can fairly be accused of missing the meaning of the music. Grasping meanings is at least in part an animal act.
Ritual meaning reconsidered
The analogy between ritual and language developed in Section 93 suggests a provocative account of meaning that confirms Rhees's and Phillips's idea that Wittgenstein leaves some rituals open to criticism. However, as noted above, the lesson is not that some rituals are conceptually incoherent, but that they might be nearly or wholly meaningless. I leave aside the question of whether there is evidence or room in Wittgenstein's view to count some rituals as conceptually confused. My point here is only that the scapegoat remark does not warrant that claim. By exploring the analogy between ritual and language more fully, I hope to reveal the view of rituals that Section 93 and the scapegoat remark actually suggest.
In Wittgenstein's later philosophy, language and ritual lie along a single continuum of human behaviours that have meaning for us because they are woven into forms of life that we are naturally able to acquire. Healthy children readily learn simple forms of life that make use of meaningful symbols such as picture-objects, pointing, and verbal commands, and many also learn how to pray and sing hymns. The ‘animal’ basis of learning and meaning is the same in all these cases and others, too. The ‘ritual of the ancient myths was a language’, Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein2000, MS 110, p. 265) says, and it was constructed on the same basis of instinctive action as spoken language. In other words, ritual is a refinement – in the beginning was the (more basic) deed. Normal people have the capacity to learn ‘languages’ of ritual gestures just as they learn languages of words and languages of picture-objects. We naturally grasp how these gestures can be woven into our forms of life.
Wittgenstein's difference with Frazer regarding the meaning of the sinister Beltane Fire Festival is helpful here. This Scottish rite has historical roots many centuries old, but its modern formulation goes something like this: each ritual participant draws a piece of cake from a bonnet. One of the pieces will be painted black or otherwise marked to designate the unlucky soul who is to be sacrificed to the fire. Fortunately, at least in its modern formulations, the victim is rescued at the last minute by a group of do-gooders (Frazer (Reference Frazer1981), 256). Frazer searches for the meaning of the ritual in its historical origins and comes up with the hypothesis that long ago people suspected of being witches really were burned in the fires, and it is the vestiges of these frightening origins that lend the modern practice its sinister quality (Frazer (Reference Frazer1936), vol. 11, p. 31).
As Clack rightly points out, Wittgenstein might find such historical facts interesting in their own right, but he resists reducing the sinister and substantial aspect of the ritual to these, or any other, facts that lie beyond the ritual itself (Clack (Reference Clack1999), 140–144). Instead, Wittgenstein emphasizes that the deep and stirring quality of Beltane can be seen if one simply attends to the right aspects of its present form. ‘I believe it is clearly the inner nature of the modern practice itself which seems sinister to us’, Wittgenstein writes, ‘and the familiar facts of human sacrifice only indicate the lines along which we should view the practice’ (1993, 144–145). Wittgenstein offers several remarks to help his reader escape or avoid the overly rationalistic ways of seeing that leave some moderns, possibly including Frazer, unable to see the depth of frightfulness of the Beltane festival. ‘We see something here that looks like the last vestige of drawing lots’, he writes, ‘And, through this aspect, it suddenly gains depth’ (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein, Nordman and Klagge1993), 145). Two pages on, he extends the revealing analogy this way:
The fact that lots are drawn by the use of a cake is particularly terrible (almost like betrayal with a kiss), and that it strikes us this way is again of fundamental importance for the investigation of such practices. (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein, Nordman and Klagge1993), 147)
The ‘kiss of death’ is a familiar and frightful gesture that defies our expectations of kindness and humanity, making the villain seem more frightfully cruel than ordinary killers.
Clack argues that Wittgenstein's real purpose in his discussion of the Beltane Fire Festival is to emphasize the wickedness of modern man that lies hidden, just beneath the surface of his civilized exterior. Wittgenstein's point, says Clack, is to show us that ‘underneath our rational exteriors are strange and passionate creatures with violent propensities’ (1999, 152). This dark theme is certainly one that is important in Wittgenstein's Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough (see Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein, Nordman and Klagge1993), 151), though Clack probably emphasizes it too strongly. Wittgenstein's remarks put us in touch with our instinctive, animal ways of seeing and understanding pleasant rituals as well as horrific ones. Wittgenstein tries to excite our understanding of an African rain dance (1993, 137) and a Bulgarian adoption rite (ibid., 125), for example, as well as our understanding of sacrifices and our repressed, wicked urges.
The lesson that rituals are performed in a language of gestures refined and extended by culture might be better conveyed by Ian Reader's (Reference Reader, Martinez and Van Bremen1995) account of how he came to understand ritual sweeping in Japan than by any of Frazer's ghastly examples. Reader describes his puzzlement and irritation the first time he was sent, while studying at a Buddhist temple, to sweep leaves from a garden that was already spotless. Why not go and have a cup of tea, he asked his local companions, since there was no work to do (Reader (Reference Reader, Martinez and Van Bremen1995), 229). They were as perplexed by his reaction as he was by theirs. To them it was plain that the thing to do was go through the motions of sweeping for the assigned hour. In time, says Reader, he came to understand that in Japanese society and religion (Buddhist and other), cleaning, especially cleaning for the benefit of others and in the community of others, is commonly considered honourable and spiritually edifying. Schoolchildren are expected to clean their own classrooms, for example, not only for practical reasons, but also to emphasize their place in the community and their obligations to others (Reader (Reference Reader, Martinez and Van Bremen1995), 229). To give another example, Reader and his wife were once asked, with some obvious pressure, to help with a neighbourhood clean-up. As with the temple garden before, Reader again found that there was almost nothing to clean, since the residents kept the neighbourhood virtually spotless all the time. Still, everyone stayed for the scheduled two hours, and did their best to appear both busy and enthusiastic (Reader (Reference Reader, Martinez and Van Bremen1995), 229).
Ritual sweeping offers a more indirect spiritual lesson as well. It is a way to emphasize that spiritual cleansing is an unending task that must be performed continuously. Reader cites a passage of Tenrikyo scripture which tells us that just as we can keep our rooms clean only if we sweep them daily, so too ‘a man can keep his mind clean only when he sweeps it every day’ (Reader (Reference Reader, Martinez and Van Bremen1995), 235). Thus, many religious groups in Japan ritually clean public spaces, even public bathrooms (Reader (Reference Reader, Martinez and Van Bremen1995), 237), and speak of such cleaning rituals as a means to cleaning the soul itself (Reader (Reference Reader, Martinez and Van Bremen1995), 235). Done in the right spirit, such cleaning is a way to reorient the individual's relationship with her community, and even her place in the world. In the vernacular of Japanese religions, ritual sweeping might literally reveal the world under such an aspect as to help the participant see the meaning of life anew.
Reader's account of Japanese sweeping and Lerner's account of the scapegoat rite as it was understood by the ancient Israelites help demonstrate what it means to say that rituals have the potential to open up that ‘characteristic feature of the awakening mind of man’ to see phenomena as meaningful. The rituals that they describe would appear to fit Wittgenstein's ideal of religion as a way of reorienting one's entire life:
It strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence although it's belief, it is really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It's passionately seizing hold of this interpretation. (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein1980a), 64)
A meaningful ritual is one that brings new and significant aspects of life and world to light, and thus helps a person reorient his own life. For the sensitive participant, the right ritual can help invoke a spiritually edifying way of seeing birth, death, sex, love, and countless other things that are deeply important to human beings.
Wittgenstein's account does not provide a formula by which to distinguish meaningful from meaningless rituals in absolute terms, since the meaning of a ritual gesture depends on the use made of it. As any given phrase can be robbed of meaning if it is used the wrong way in the wrong context, so too even the best of rituals can be robbed of gestural significance. Thus, any ritual might be meaningless to a participant who lacks the spiritual and intellectual preparation to employ it properly – that is, to one who is not yet fluent in the requisite vocabulary.
In religion every level of devoutness must have its appropriate form of expression which has no sense at a lower level. This doctrine, which means something at a higher level, is null and void for someone who is still at the lower level; he can only understand it wrongly and so these words are not valid for such a person. (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein1980a), 32)
The idea that some rituals are inappropriate for novices is familiar and uncontroversial. Certain Tantric rituals of carnal indulgence are considered inappropriate for all but the most advanced Buddhists, for example (Shaw Reference Shaw1994).
A more disquieting implication of Wittgenstein's view is that some living rituals might have little or no potential to convey meaning to anyone at all. Rituals are often kept alive for institutional and sentimental reasons even when they are so baffling that even theologians and clergy are unclear about their significance. Such rituals might employ antiquated gestures that have so little foothold in modern life as to be wholly outmoded, as the word ‘dandy’ has little or no place in twenty-first-century America. In a conversation with Drury, Wittgenstein expresses doubt about the capacity of most moderns to promise ritually the level of self-denial that was once common amongst Christians and important to their form of religiosity. Drury recounts describing an Irish Catholic christening in which the godparents promise in the child's name: ‘To renounce the devil and all his works, the pomps and vanities of this wicked world, and all the sinful lusts of the flesh’. Hearing of this, Wittgenstein exclaimed:
To renounce the pomps and vanities of this wicked world. Just think what that would really involve. Who of us today even thinks of doing such a thing? We all want to be admired. St. Paul said, ‘I die daily’. Just think what that must have meant! (Drury (Reference Drury and Rhees1981), 153)
Paul's meaning is hardly obvious, but it seems that to Wittgenstein his point was something like this: upon my bodily death, all those things which have meaning to me because of their occupation in my life – money, status, possessions – will cease to have any value at all. My spiritual self, which will be resurrected, gains nothing from them. Knowing this, I live as one who is already dead, and thus above all vanity and self-interest. It is difficult to say whether Paul would have faced fewer temptations of his vanity, as Wittgenstein seems to believe, but it is certainly reasonable to suppose so. With their eyes fearfully focused on God, presumably Paul and his contemporaries would have paid each other less attention and had less interest in impressing one another. On the other hand, if it is true that our own eyes in our own day are on each other and each other's achievements, then we should expect the temptations of vanity to follow us even into our churches. Who can deny that piety and self-righteousness too frequently go hand in hand? ‘If you offer a sacrifice and are pleased with yourself about it’, says Wittgenstein, ‘both you and your sacrifice will be damned’ (Wittgenstein (Reference Wittgenstein1980a), 26).
If Wittgenstein is right, the meaning of our modern rituals must inhere in the ritual gestures themselves. If the Eucharist was originally a meal to which the socially outcast were invited, one can easily see how it might have transformed the meanings of community, mealtime, and justice for Jesus and his fellows (Crocket (Reference Crockett1989), 245). One might wish that it would hold that meaning for Christians today, but how could it? The ritual is now conducted within the confines of the church, in many formulations it is explicitly exclusive, and a cracker and thimbleful of wine or juice are no meal at all. The meaning of today's Eucharist could only be something else than what it was for Jesus, if for him it was that gesture of inclusion some believe. Worse still, it may be that some living rituals, possibly including the promise of self-denial included in the Irish Catholic christening described above, are as empty for most of us moderns as perfunctory prayers and singing.
