Hans Vaihinger (1852 to 1933) was a German philosopher and Kant scholar who held, in The Philosophy of ‘As If’ (1911), that much of human thought, in science, law, ethics and religion, runs on ‘fictions’, ideas we know to be false but use because they work, treating the world as if they were true. Therapeutic Shamanism also uses ‘as if’, but as a way in to experience, not as a fiction. We begin by allowing the possibility that everything is alive and sacred, and with practice begin to experience that it is.
Who was Hans Vaihinger? #
He was born on 25 September 1852 near Tübingen, in south-west Germany. He qualified to teach at Strasbourg in 1877 with a study of fictions, and after the first volume of his great commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason appeared in 1881 he settled at the University of Halle. He founded the journal Kant-Studien in 1896 and the Kant Society. Cataracts forced him to stop lecturing in 1906, and he later went completely blind. The Philosophy of ‘As If’ was more than thirty years in the making; it appeared in 1911, went through at least ten editions before his death in 1933, and counted Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud among its admirers. Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach later took over a journal he had founded and renamed it Erkenntnis.1
What is a fiction? #
An idea we know is not true, used because it is useful. In his words, “Fictions are never verifiable, for they are hypotheses which are known to be false, but which are employed because of their utility.”2 A hypothesis looks forward to being proved or disproved; a fiction is more like scaffolding, put up to get a job done and taken down afterwards.
His examples run right across human thought: the atom; Adam Smith’s picture of people as purely self-interested, of great value as a working assumption and ruinous when taken as the truth about people; the social contract; human freedom; the infinitely small in mathematics; even the everyday habit of carving the flow of experience into things that have properties. Thought itself, for Vaihinger, is a tool that life developed for getting on in the world, not a mirror of reality, and its test is whether it helps. “The criterion of a good fiction is simply its fertility in practical use.”3
What does “as if” mean in his philosophy? #
It is the form every fiction takes, in which one thing is regarded as if it were something else. Vaihinger found the model in Kant, who held that we cannot know whether God exists or whether we are free, and yet must act as if we were free and as if the moral law were a divine command. Much of the book follows that line through later writers, including Friedrich Karl Forberg’s ‘religion of as if’, in which religion is acting for the good cause even if one believes it will never win.4
He set his position apart from pragmatism. Pragmatism holds that what proves fruitful is true; Vaihinger held that an idea admitted to be false is not for that reason useless. His stance, he said, was “neither dogmatic nor sceptical, but critical”. The fictions are to be kept, knowingly, for what they do, and never mistaken for reality.5
What happens when a fiction is forgotten? #
It hardens into dogma. Vaihinger called this the law of ideational shifts, by which ideas slide from fiction to hypothesis to dogma, because the tension of holding something as if it were true is uncomfortable and people want to settle it. “What one man imparts as an hypothesis, the other accepts as a dogma.”6 Religion, he thought, shows it most clearly, where “the conscious fiction of the master became transformed into the unconscious dogma of the disciples.”7
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Through the ‘as if’ itself. For people raised in our culture, living as if it is all sacred usually begins as a possibility allowed. The practice “Everything Is Conscious and Sacred”, in Finding Your Deep Soul, asks us to look at each thing around us and allow the possibility that it is conscious, even where we cannot yet feel it.8 See What does it mean to live as if it is all sacred?
Vaihinger’s slide from fiction to dogma meets the teaching on mythosMythos. Metaphorical, symbolic, felt truth: the truth of art, poetry and shamanic journeys. Shamanic reality is mythologically true, not literally true, which is why journeys are interpreted, never taken at face value. More about this and logosLogos. Literal, factual, analytical truth: the truth of facts you can check. One of the two modes of truth, alongside mythos. More about this. Over the last few thousand years an enormous amount of damage has come from people taking things that are mythos, sacred books for example, and thinking they are literally true.9 His test of usefulness sits close to the shamanic saying “Does it grow corn?”, meaning “Never mind the dogma, does it work?”10 And his recognition that the mind shapes what it meets has a counterpart in shamanic practice. There is no objective way of knowing the shamanic realms; to experience them at all we fashion them into something, which is why Core and Therapeutic Shamanism make a deliberate choice to see the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer as a place of love and healing, and so experience it that way. Hierarchical thinking, in the shamanic saying, is not good seed.11 See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
On whether the ‘as if’ is false. Vaihinger’s fictions are known to be untrue. The shamanic ‘as if’ is a starting point, not a pretence. Done regularly, alongside journeying and other shamanic work, the practice leads people to experience that the world around them is alive, “rather than just thinking that it could be”.12 For hunter-gatherers the living world was “absolutely not just a belief” but a vivid, actual experience.13
On spirits. Vaihinger mentions “angels, devils, pixies, spirits” in passing among the figments of free imagination, and traced the habit of personifying things to “the childhood of the human race when everything was personified”.14 In shamanism everything is made of Spirit, Spirit is conscious, and so everything is conscious, in its own way.15 Journeys are co-created, but that does not make them fictions. What we experience is real, and we give it a form we can understand.16
On what counts as working. Usefulness alone is not the whole test. A fuller version of the shamanic saying asks not just “Does it grow corn?” but “What kind of corn does it grow?”17
What have critics said about Vaihinger? #
His reading of Kant was challenged by the philosopher Erich Adickes in 1927, who argued that Vaihinger ignored or misleadingly paraphrased the many passages in Kant that go against a fictionalist reading; Vaihinger partly conceded the point. A second objection, raised as early as 1923 and restated by the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah in 2017, is logical. If fictions contain contradictions, then anything at all follows from them, so they cannot do the useful work Vaihinger gives them. Appiah also offers a way round it, reading the useful contradictions as the use of several models that do not fit together, and the philosopher of science Arthur Fine held in 1993 that Vaihinger’s aim was to survey how science actually uses fictions, not to explain in general how contradictions can be fruitful.18
