SOURCE: "The Mystical," in Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy: Three Sides of the Mirror, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990, pp. 151-61.

Peterson is a Scottish educator and author. In the following essay, he examines Wittgenstein's notion of the mystical within his Tractarian philosophy.

In venturing behind the great mirror, the Tractatus acquires a breadth of vision uncommon in the philosophy of language. The first sections of the book concern the reflection of the world in the mirror, the middle sections address the inside of the mirror, and now at the end we find remarks on the 'mystical' domain of what lies behind the mirror and cannot be reflected in it. To this last division Wittgenstein assigns the 'sense of the world', value, ethics, aesthetics, the 'problems of life', the revelation of God, and what is 'higher'. These things—which he tends to group under the title of 'ethics'—are not to be found...