Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 to 1951) was an Austrian-born philosopher who taught that the meaning of a word is its use in the language. Words are not fixed labels stuck onto things, but tools that do different jobs in different ways of life, which is why no one owns the word ‘shamanism’, and why it matters to notice what our words are doing to us. He also held that magic and ritual are not failed science, which sits close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s distinction between 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, though he never claimed that a spirit world exists.
Who was Ludwig Wittgenstein? #
He was born in Vienna in 1889, into an immensely wealthy family, and first studied engineering, going to Manchester to study aeronautics. His interest turned to the foundations of logic, and in 1911 he went to Cambridge to study with Bertrand Russell. He served in the Austrian army in the First World War, and during it wrote the only philosophical book published in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). Believing he had solved the problems of philosophy, he left the subject, worked as a schoolteacher in remote Austrian villages, and returned to Cambridge in 1929, by now convinced that much of his earlier thinking was wrong. His later work, above all the Philosophical Investigations, was published after his death in Cambridge in 1951.1 His last words are said to have been “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”2
What did the early Wittgenstein say about the limits of language? #
That language can picture facts in the world, and that whatever lies beyond facts cannot be put into words at all. Ethics, the meaning of life and what he called the mystical fall outside what can be said. “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” The book ends with the line “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”3 He did not mean that such things are unimportant; for him they were the most important things of all, only not sayable.
What does “the meaning of a word is its use” mean? #
That a word does not get its meaning from some essence behind it, but from how people use it. In the Philosophical Investigations he wrote that for a large class of cases “the meaning of a word is its use in the language”.4 Language is made up of many ‘language games’, ways of using words bound up with ways of living, such as giving orders, telling stories, praying, joking or describing an experiment.
His best-known example is the word ‘game’. Board games, card games, ball games and children’s rhyming games share no single feature, yet we know what the word means, because the uses overlap like the resemblances between members of a family, some sharing the nose, some the eyes, some the walk.5 So the search for the one true definition of a word like ‘game’, or ‘religion’, or ‘shamanism’, is often a mistake.
Why does this matter for the word ‘shamanism’? #
Because there is no agreed definition of shamanism, even among practitioners, and some purists hold that only the Siberian practice the word first named is true shamanism. The word came from the Evenki people of the Siberian and Mongolian region, entered English several hundred years ago, and has since come to have a much wider use. Since the meaning of a word is its use in the language, and most people now use ‘shamanism’ in a broad way that includes animist practices which may not be strictly shamanic on a narrow definition, Therapeutic Shamanism uses it in that modern, broad sense.6 See What is shamanism? and What is the relationship between animism and shamanism?
What did Wittgenstein say about magic and ritual? #
That they are not bad science. In notes written on James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the famous study of magic and religion that treated magic as a primitive mistake about cause and effect, he objected that Frazer had misunderstood what people are doing. If a rain dance were really a failed attempt at weather control, he pointed out, it would be strange that the people never noticed that it rains sooner or later anyway.7 Kissing the picture of someone we love, his own example, is not done in the belief that it will have some effect on them; it does not aim at anything at all, and neither is a ritual a hypothesis waiting to be disproved. He saw humans as ritual-making beings by nature.
A related line runs through shamanic practice, between mythos and logos. Logos is what is literally true. Mythos is what is metaphorically true, and shamanic journeys are mythos. Like dreams, they are full of meanings, relationships and insights, not literal facts, and a lot of damage has come from people taking mythos for literal truth.8 Wittgenstein’s point and this teaching are not the same, but both refuse to judge one way of knowing by the rules of the other. See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?
How does language shape the way we experience the spirit world? #
Wittgenstein warned that a way of speaking can trap us without our noticing. He wrote, “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”9
One such picture is at work all through modern spirituality, the hierarchical value judgement that ‘up is good and down is bad’. It is soaked into everyday speech. We call a better state of consciousness ‘higher’, talk of ‘raising’ our vibration, treat ‘ascent’ as good and ‘descent’ as bad, and link ‘down’ with darkness, the less evolved and even hell. The language we use moulds and shapes the way we perceive and relate to the world around us, and this spell, a powerful thought-formThought-form. A human-created living being: an ideology, religion, corporation, conspiracy theory or platform that has taken on a life of its own. Genuinely alive, but soul-less in the deep sense: natural things alone are full of Soul. More about this, cuts people off from 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 and the Earth.10 It shapes how people experience the realms themselves. To experience them at all, we give them shapes and forms we can relate to, and someone coming from ‘up is good and down is bad’ will tend to experience the Lower-World as lesser, not as a place of love and healing.11 See What did Sapir and Whorf actually claim about language and thought?
What did he say about the body and the soul? #
Among his later remarks is the line “The human body is the best picture of the human soul.”12 He meant that we come to know another person’s inner life through their face, gestures and expressions, not by guessing at a hidden private realm behind them.
In shamanism the body counts for more than that. The physical body is not just a vehicle for the soul or a thing we inhabit; it has its own consciousness, intelligence, wisdom, needs and drives, and needs to be listened to, honoured and respected as much as any other part of us.13 Original animists revered the body as sacred and truthful, and as closely connected with Soul. See What are Soul, Spirit, the middle-world self and the body?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
Wittgenstein was a philosopher of language, not an animist, and he never said that a spirit world exists. His remarks on ritual describe what people do without asking whether the beings they address are real. Shamanic practice does not settle that question by argument either, but by experience. The more people journey, the more they find that it goes beyond any personal imagination, and each person is invited to journey and find out for themselves whether shamanic reality is real for them.14
He also wrote that “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him”, since a lion’s way of life is so far from ours.15 Shamanic practice holds that a way across is possible, through shapeshiftingShapeshifting. Becoming another being within a journey, fully enough to know it from the inside: one of the two routes to grokking, a transformation practice, and a direct experience of interconnection. Read the full answer in a journey, knowing another being not only intellectually but from the inside out.16 See What are transformation practices and shapeshifting?
Does his approach put religious belief beyond criticism? #
Some philosophers have argued so. In 1967 the philosopher Kai Nielsen named a position he called ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’, the idea, drawn from Wittgenstein by some of his followers, that each form of life, religion included, has its own rules, so that outsiders cannot criticise it. Nielsen thought this shielded religious belief from proper scrutiny, and aimed his criticism mainly at the followers rather than at Wittgenstein himself.17
The philosopher of religion D. Z. Phillips, most often named as holding that position, replied that it was a caricature. Understanding religious language on its own terms, he said, does justice to belief and to atheism alike, rather than protecting either.18
