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Remarks on Frazer's "Golden Bough"

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all of its contents are available (both in German and English) in the collection of Wittgenstein's writings titled Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951,

Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough (Paperback) by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Another useful book mercifully collected by Rush Rhys (we owe him a lot for his recordings of snatches of Wittgenstein's thoughts). Find these collected in "Philosophical Occasions: 1912-1951" and other oddities of Wittgensteinania.

Lots of Philosophy geeks end with Wittgenstein's Tractatus and dismiss his break with his own work in Remarks on Colour and his Blue and Brown books. In other words, Wittgenstein spent the rest of his life refuting his own work and trying to find that ineffable quality in language, particularly in the language of poetic imagination that somehow connects some to the divine.

Enter Wittgenstein's engagement with James George Frazer's Golden Bough, which he returned to again and again. Wittgenstein made a detour into Victorian imagination? Dead-end, or source for reconsideration of the limits of language elucidated in the Tractaus? You decide.

The remarks he makes here do not seem all that insightful to me, and Wittgenstein appears to have bought into the argument that Frazer's theory of the killing of the sacred King was a valid hermeneutic structure, although Wittgenstein's goals were seeking poetics and the force of metaphor. Wittgenstein apparently was unaware that Frazer's work was being dismantled and discredited by serious Anthropologists even in his lifetime, and that the Golden Bough, while a rollicking good novel, was scientifically on the level of phrenology and to anthropology what Erich von Däniken is archaeology.