Anders Klostergaard Petersen Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer: An Emotional Philosophical Puppet Abstract: The basic tenet of my essay is that Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough (RFGB) exhibit a Frazerian strawman which Wittgenstein is using for his own philosophical purpose. I call for a reassessment of Frazer which not only places him in the historical context of his thinking but also attempts to instantiate a dialogue between him and Wittgenstein in light of recent develop- ments in the study of ritual. Through a close reading of the RFGB, I argue that Wittgenstein’s criticism of Frazer is skewed by the fact that too much emphasis is placed on the emotional side of ritual to the detriment of the ambition to explain it. In contrast, Frazer is lauded for his acknowledgement of this aspect, but is crit- icised for underestimating the emotional dimension of ritual. However, if Frazer’s argument is transposed into contemporary cognitive science of religion, it may be used to criticise Wittgenstein and, correspondingly, Wittgenstein’s RFGB may serve as a rejoinder to a one-sided Frazerian view of ritual (and religion) as provi- sional and flawed science. Das Zeremonielle (heiße oder kalte) im Gegensatz zum Zufälligen (lauen) charakterisiert die Pietät. Ja, Frazers Erklärungen wären überhaupt keine Erklärungen, wenn sie nicht letzten Endes an eine Neigung in uns selbst appellierten. (Wittgenstein, PO: 126) Since their days (the Brothers Grimm) systematic enquiries carried on among the less edu- cated classes, and especially among the peasantry, of Europe have revealed the astonish- ing, nay, alarming truth that a mass, if not the majority, of people in every civilised country is still living in a state of intellectual savagery, that, in fact, the smooth surface of cultured society is sapped and mined by superstition. Only those whose studies have led them to investigate the subject are aware of the depth to which the ground beneath our feet is thus, as it were, honeycombed by unseen forces. We appear to be standing on a volcano which may at any moment break out in smoke and fire to spread ruin and devastation among the gardens and palaces of ancient culture wrought so laboriously by the hands of many gen- erations. After looking on the ruined Greek temples of Paestum and contrasting them with the squalor and savagery of the Italian peasantry, Renan said, “I trembled for civilization, seeing it so limited, built on so weak a foundation, resting on so few individuals even in the country where it is dominant.” (Frazer, The Scope of Social Anthropology, 1908, 15f.)