The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.
My latest article is up at 3 Quarks Daily:
Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?
That wasn’t my original title, which was “On Becoming a Secular Mystic, an informal inventory.” Upon reading a draft by friend David Porush suggested the current title, which comes from an anecdote early in the article, which is a collection of anecdotes with thoughts thrown in as the occasion warrants.
The mystical element is there, I report at least one “classical” mystical experience, which was quite powerful and influential, though I can’t say just how it was influential. But there is something about the whole article which resists language – I do include three images, each crafted by ChatGPT. And that got me to thinking, thinking about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
I read that in either my freshman or sophomore year at Johns Hopkins in the mid-1960s. It made a deep impression on me. It was a slender volume, with the original German published on the left and the English translation published on the right; Wittgenstein had insisted on that. It consisted of short statements, sometimes as short as a single line, but also occasionally two or three short paragraphs, even an occasional diagram. Each section was numbered, outline style, from 1 through 7. Here’s the opening proposition, No. 1:
Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
The world is everything that is the case.
And here’s the last, No. 7:
Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
And here’s the penultimate proposition, sometimes known as Wittgenstein’s ladder, No. 6.4:
Meine Sätze erläutern dadurch, dass sie der, welcher mich versteht, am Ende als unsinnig erkennt, wenn er durch sie – auf ihnen – über sie hinausgestiegen ist. (Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist.)
Er muss diese Sätze überwinden, dann sieht er die Welt richtig.My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
The overall effect was mesmerizing. And mystical, certainly. But not in the manner of the experiences reported by mystics, both East and West. This is a different kind of mysticism.
That led me to a dialog with Claude. I asked Claude to summarize it in the third person. I’ve placed the summary below the asterisks.
* * * * *
On Limits, Language, and the Excess of the World
A recent conversation between Bill Benzon and Claude ranged across mystical experience, the philosophy of language, and cosmology, finding unexpected convergences among them.
The conversation opened with the question of why mystical experience is so often described as ineffable. The standard reasons — that language presupposes the distinctions mystical experience dissolves, that it is knowledge of acquaintance rather than description, that it may involve non-ordinary cognition — were surveyed. But Benzon pressed toward something less familiar, noting that ineffability is not unique to mysticism. Tastes, qualia, dreams all resist full verbal capture, each in a different way.
This led to a discussion of Weston LaBarre’s speculation in The Ghost Dance that dreams may have been what first compelled early humans to philosophize. The key insight is that the problem isn’t the strangeness of dream content but the mnemonic residue — waking up with memories of having been somewhere that doesn’t exist in the waking world. That memory demands an account, and the account requires positing another order of reality. Dream epistemology, on this view, is not superstition but careful reasoning from unavoidable evidence.
Benzon then introduced Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, noting its paradoxical status as a founding document of the most rigorously anti-metaphysical tradition in Western philosophy and yet a work with a distinctly mystical frame — opening with “The world is everything that is the case” and closing with “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” with the famous ladder metaphor in between. The Tractatus mysticism, the conversation suggested, is different in kind from episodic mystical experience. It is not about a special state of consciousness but about the permanent boundary condition of all language and all saying.
Benzon noted that this Wittgensteinian orientation may be closer to his own secular mysticism than the more conventionally episodic forms — not a transport or vision, but a sustained dwelling at the edge of the articulable.
The conversation then turned to cosmology. The Planck epoch — the earliest moments of the universe, where the distinction between space and time breaks down and the equations of physics lose their meaning — offers a striking parallel. The universe, pressed to its own origin, becomes undescribable by the tools it eventually produced. The very attempt to picture that earliest state smuggles in categories that don’t yet apply.
What converges across all these limits — Wittgenstein’s structural limit of language, the subjective limit of qualia, the ontological puzzle of dreams, the cosmological limit of the Planck epoch — is perhaps this: existence exceeds its own accounting, structurally and permanently. The mystic, the philosopher of language, and the cosmologist arrive at adjacent positions by entirely different routes.
The conversation closed with a formulation from Benzon that served as its natural capstone: The universe is that which ever exceeds us and in that way both resists and gives way.
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