Wittgenstein on Frazer: myth, ritual, and the limits of explanation

Wittgenstein's remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, written in the 1930s, remain one of the most provocative documents at the seam between ordinary language philosophy and the humanities. They challenge the assumption that the meaning of a rite, a story, or a poetic image can be captured by a causal hypothesis about its origin. For literary scholars working on myth, the remarks open an avenue that does not require them to choose between a pseudo-scientific anthropology and a purely formalist reading of mythic texts.

These notes invite us to listen to what a ritual does in language, rather than assume that it encodes a forgotten piece of plot behind primitive belief. Across Australian universities from Melbourne to Brisbane, from the University of Sydney to the Australian National University in Canberra, the remarks now appear in courses on literary theory and comparative literature, where they offer a credible alternative to the Frazerian model that once dominated the study of myth.

Frazer's model and Wittgenstein's objection

James George Frazer's evolutionary schema cast myth and ritual as survivals of an early magical stage of human thought, eventually superseded by religion and science. Wittgenstein disputes this picture, not by defending myth as true, but by questioning whether explanation of this kind does what it claims. A fire festival, he suggests, is not an unsuccessful piece of physics, and a rite of mourning need not be a misfired hypothesis about the dead.

Frazer's interpretations are themselves presentations of a custom, often no less imaginative than the practice they purport to decode. Wittgenstein proposes that we describe how such behaviour is woven into a form of life, and what the participants would say if asked. This descriptive turn aligns ordinary language philosophy with a literary sensibility that reads myth as enactment, and scholars working on Aboriginal oral traditions have found the approach less patronising than older anthropological frameworks.

Forms of life and the reading of mythic texts

The concept of a form of life runs quietly through the Frazer notes, even where the term itself is not foregrounded. Wittgenstein treats ritual speech and mythic narrative as moves inside a shared practice, intelligible to those who inhabit it, opaque to those who do not. The point is not to deny depth, but to refuse the leap from unfamiliarity to hidden cause.

For the critic of myth in literature, this reframes a perennial problem. When David Malouf draws on ancient or local legend, the question is not solely which archetype the text conceals, but how the ritual logic of the source continues to live in the new idiom. Malouf's handling of Mediterranean myth, taught at the University of Queensland and the University of Adelaide, sits comfortably within this Wittgensteinian reading, since it preserves the strangeness of the rite.

The same orientation supports attention to what Wittgenstein calls primitive reactions: awe, terror, grief, hope. Literary works that draw on mythic material frequently trade in such reactions without needing to be justified by an explanatory theory.

Language games, misunderstanding, myth criticism

Wittgenstein's notion of a language game asks us to attend to use rather than hidden content. Frazer repeatedly violates this principle by treating the surface of a rite as a coded message about something else. The remarks insist that the rite already means what it does, in its setting, and that the search for further meaning can be misunderstanding dressed as scholarship.

This has consequences for myth criticism. Where Northrop Frye and his followers inherited a Frazerian confidence in universal patterns, a Wittgensteinian critic is more cautious. Patterns may be there, but they are patterns of language and practice, not of unconscious belief. Recent work at the University of Melbourne on classical reception has been alert to this distinction.

The remarks do not forbid comparison. They ask that comparison proceed by careful description of similarities and differences in use, not by imposing a master narrative onto disparate material. A contemporary Australian novel that draws on Greek myth gains from being read alongside the ancient practice from which it draws, without being reduced to it.

Reception in Australian scholarship and teaching

Australian universities have long hosted serious engagement with Wittgenstein, and the remarks on Frazer have found a place in graduate seminars at the Australian National University, in undergraduate options at Monash, and in reading groups associated with the Australasian Association of Philosophy. Melbourne University Press has published commentary that brings Wittgenstein into dialogue with literary criticism, and the Sydney Review of Books has carried essays that situate the Frazer notes alongside contemporary mythmaking in poetry and fiction.

The remarks also travel well into the classroom. Teachers of literary theory at the University of New England use them as a concise counter to older anthropological approaches, while colleagues at Flinders find them useful for thinking about how ritual language persists in postcolonial writing. Funding from the Australian Research Council has supported projects on ordinary language philosophy and the humanities, which often return to the Frazer material as a touchstone.

Passages that anchor the argument

For readers new to the text, a few short passages anchor the argument better than lengthy summaries.

• The opening observation that Frazer's own account is itself a representation, not a superior one.
• The remark that a fire festival is not an attempt at meteorology.
• The passage on the difference between explaining a practice and describing how it is done.
• The closing reflection that depth is found in the practice itself, not behind it.

Reading the remarks with literary eyes

To read Wittgenstein on Frazer as a literary critic is to ask what the remarks themselves perform. They imitate a voice at once cautious and precise, hospitable to strangeness and unwilling to translate it into the familiar vocabulary of the laboratory. That stylistic quality has its own lesson for critics who treat ritual and mythic material with the seriousness it deserves.

In Australian publishing, this attention to tone is visible across a range of venues, from small imprints in Hobart and Perth to the established lists of university presses. Scholars who would like to pursue the questions raised here might begin with the following points of entry.

Points of entry for further reading

• The standard English edition of the Remarks on Frazer, edited by Rush Rhees, with a prefatory note on textual history.
• Secondary essays in collections on Wittgenstein and the humanities published in Australia and abroad.
• Articles in journals such as Sophia and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy that engage Wittgenstein with religion and ritual.
• Recent doctoral work at Australian universities on myth, ritual, and ordinary language, much of it available through open access repositories.

The next step belongs to the reader. Pick up the remarks slowly, with a text of the myth at hand, and let an ancient practice remain itself rather than being decoded out of existence.