Wittgenstein’s Lion as a model for the Blatant Gift

Wittgenstein is one of my favorite philosophers, regardless of what his philosophy actually was. At one point, he thought the primary task of philosophers was to stand in the corner of other people’s lectures and yell ‘Semantics!”at them whenever they suggested  metaphysics was worth considering. Maybe you need to be me to think that’s really, terribly funny.

In Philosophical Investigations, he writes “If a lion could talk, we could not understand him”. It’s given as an axiom or aphorism; no attempt at argumentation is made. Many commenters suggest what he means is that the lion does not share the culture that enshrouds the language with sufficient context to give it meaning, or, alternatively, that the lion’s sensations are so different to ours that we, lacking a frame of reference, could not understand what the lion perceives, regardless of how clearly he enunciates his interpretation of the environment.

In Mythic Europe this is simply untrue. Everything is alive, in a spiritual sense, and can communicate clearly, if idiosyncratically, using the right spells. In House Bjornaer there are magi who are Essentially lions, but who can take the human shape and converse. Given that he is simply wrong in Mythic Europe, can the aphorism about the lion provide us with value in another area where communication fails?

Magi code switch, like children raised in multiple social environments. Code switching is the term which encapsulates the changes in the way people talk, move, and even think, when they move from one communicative community to another. When a magus is commanding the anima of a rock to talk, the magus is doing something fundamentally different to talking to a merchant about the price of a bag of flour. As the magus becomes more closely tied to the mystical, the capacity to code switch breaks down a little.

Many people who live for a time in two countries talk about the need to shift gears when moving between them, about the culture shock of transition. The magus begins to experience this. They interact with mortals so rarely that each of these conversations suffers due to the lack of a cultural framework. The magus is Wittgenstein’s lion: it can talk, but not be understood.