Was Wittgenstein a Mystic?
Dropping acid might help you understand this guy. But if you understand Wittgenstein, you don’t understand him.
HOBOKEN, DECEMBER 27, 2024. If you jam two enigmas together, do you compound your confusion? Or might you get clarity, just as multiplying two negative numbers yields a positive? The latter, I’m hoping, as I take on Wittgenstein and mysticism.
First, let me spell out what I mean by “mysticism.” The term is often used as a snarky synonym for woo, that is, fuzzy, superstitious thinking. But it also refers to experiences in which you feel you’re encountering absolute truth, the ground of being, God. Something along those lines.
You might feel blissfully one with everything, but your experience can be hellish, too. William James makes that crucial point in The Varieties of Religious Experience, still the best scholarly investigation of mysticism. James calls mystical experiences ineffable, which means you can’t F them. Kidding. It means they can’t be described in ordinary language.
“Those who know do not speak,” says the ancient Chinese text Tao Te Ching. “Those who speak do not know.” The Tao Te Ching and other mystical tracts seethe with such Gödelian, “this-sentence-is-false” paradoxes.
So does Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only book oddball philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) published during his lifetime. [See Note 1.] First released in German in 1921, Tractatus is a cryptic meditation on what is knowable and unknowable. Wittgenstein flicks at mysticism, writing, “Not how the world is the mystical, but that it is.” He elaborates:
“We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.”
My take on that passage: When the world has been explained by science, it hasn’t really been explained at all. The answer to the riddle of life is that there is no answer.
In his 1966 paper “The Mysticism of the Tractatus,” philosopher B.F. McGuinness argues that Tractatus reflects Wittgenstein’s mystical intuitions. In a “Lecture on Ethics” published after his death, Wittgenstein describes once feeling “absolutely safe” and “in the hands of God.” In another episode, he’s filled with astonishment at existence, he sees “the world as a miracle.” Yeah, I can dig that.
McGuinness likens Wittgenstein’s experiences to ones described by Schopenhauer, Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, Muslim sage al-Qushayri and William James. McGuinness also cites the hippy classic Doors of Perception, in which Aldous Huxley recounts tripping on mescaline.
Bertrand Russell, who called Wittgenstein “the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived,” comments on his protege’s mystical inclinations in a 1919 letter. Russell says Wittgenstein, to understand his own mystical experiences, has been studying Varieties of Religious Experience and other works.
Russell, an atheist, adds that Wittgenstein “has penetrated deep into mystical ways of thought and feeling, but I think (though he wouldn't agree) that what he likes best in mysticism is its power to make him stop thinking.” I like that final sardonic twist.
I found this Russell quote in a 2009 essay on Wittgenstein’s mysticism by philosopher Russell Nieli. Most commentary on Tractatus, Nieli complains, focuses “on the book’s technical system of logic and language with little concern for its overarching moral and spiritual thematic.” Tractatus “remains misunderstood,” Nieli says, “largely because of interpreters’ failure to appreciate the importance of the mystical and the ecstatic as they are interwoven into the text.”
For a similar reading, check out “Understanding the Mysticism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus,” an essay on the website EPISTEMIC EPISTLES. The author asserts that “properly understanding Wittgenstein’s intention in the Tractatus requires conceiving of the Tractatus as a mystical project, intended to acquaint us with mystical experience, rather than an attempt to communicate analytic ‘truths’.’”
Failure to recognize Wittgenstein’s mystical obsessions, this writer says, results in “a misconceived superficial reading.” See also this well-sourced 2022 essay by education scholar Michael A. Peters. He quotes Wittgenstein writing a friend, “I am not a religious man, but cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.”
Now here’s the problem: If you haven’t had a mystical experience, mystical writings seem like nonsense. Bullshit. Woo. I encountered this problem six years ago during a discussion of Tractatus in a philosophy salon.
Philosophers in the salon viewed Tractatus as an extreme, idiosyncratic expression of logical positivism, a philosophical perspective popular in the early 20th century. My salon-mates expressed puzzlement and even disdain for the “incoherent” and “juvenile” (their words) mystical elements of Tractatus.
I felt like blurting out, Haven’t you ever dropped acid or shrooms? Haven’t you ever been overwhelmed by the weirdness of the world?
To my mind, Tractatus is best viewed as a work of negative theology. This peculiar scholarly discipline, after stipulating that God transcends description, labors to describe Her/Him/Them/It anyway. Consider this passage from the writings of the 6th-century monk Pseudo-Dionysius (quoted in Nieli):
“The higher we soar in contemplation the more limited become our expressions of that which is purely intelligible … our speech is restrained until, the entire ascent being accomplished, we become wholly voiceless, in as much as we are absorbed in Him who is totally ineffable.”
And so on. Compare that passage with how Wittgenstein wraps up Tractatus:
“My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” [See Note 2.]
So the answer to my headline is: Yes. If a mystic is someone transformed by mystical experience, then Wittgenstein was a mystic, who had a knack for expressing, in his own gnomic way, the inexpressible.
Let me conclude by warning you that if this column makes everything clear, I’ve failed. If it mystifies you, my work is done.
Note 1. Not all highly educated people know who Wittgenstein was. In 1994 I attended a powwow on the limits of science at the Santa Fe Institute when I witnessed a funny exchange between complexologist Stuart Kauffman and Ralph Gomory. Formerly head of research at IBM, Gomory ran the Sloan Foundation, which had sponsored the meeting. Here’s how I describe the exchange in The End of Science:
Gomory remarked that a Martian, by observing humans playing chess, might be able to deduce the rules correctly. But could the Martian ever be sure that those were the correct rules, or the only rules? Everyone pondered Gomory’s riddle for a moment. Then Kauffman speculated on how Wittgenstein might have responded to it. Wittgenstein would have “suffered egregiously,” Kauffman said, over the possibility that the chess players might make a move—deliberately or not—that broke the rules. After all, how could the Martian tell if the move was just a mistake or the result of another rule? “Do you get this?” Kauffman queried Gomory.
“I don’t know who Wittgenstein is, for starters,” Gomory replied irritably.
Kauffman raised his eyebrows. “He was a very famous philosopher.”
He and Gomory stared at each other until someone said, “Let’s leave Wittgenstein out of this.”
Note 2: Years ago, I got into an email argument with philosopher Garry Dobbins, then my friend. I forget what the argument was about, but at some point Garry parried me with Wittgenstein’s line “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.” I replied, Then why are you still talking? Garry never spoke to me again.
Self-plagiarism Alert: This is a vastly improved version of a column I originally wrote for Scientific American.
Further Reading:
On God, Quantum Mechanics and My Agnostic Schtick
Conservation of Ignorance: A New Law of Nature
The End of Philosophy: What’s the Point? A Call for Negative Philosophy
Entropy, Meaninglessness and Miracles
A Buddhism Critic Goes on a Buddhist Retreat
Quantum Mechanics, the Chinese Room and the Limits of Understanding
Many other columns on this website explore mystical-ish ideas. See “About Cross-Check” for a list of all my columns. See also my book Rational Mysticism: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment.