Russell Nieli is disappointed by James Atkinson's The Mystical in Wittgenstein's Early Writings. In the main, he's disappointed because Atkinson "simply doesn't understand the kind of higher level ecstatic experiences that lie at the heart of Wittgenstein's Tractarian project, and has little empathy for what Wittgenstein is trying to accomplish when he says that God and the meaning of the world 'must lie outside the world.'"
This criticism may be apt. But I want to express annoyance at a common mysical trope Nieli appeals to, viz., that "rapturous-ecstatic experience...carries the experiencer beyond the realm of normal reality and beyond the capacity of speech to express." In other words, religious experience is unique because it is ineffable; and because it is ineffable, it gives the experiencer access to a world beyond ours.
This is a rank fallacy. Why? One reason [1] is that ineffability is a property of all experience. You cannot express the content of an experience to someone who has never had that experience.
In fact, the general ineffability of experience is pretty much the whole basis of one of the most famous thought experiments in philosophy of mind. The reason that Mary the Color Scientist doesn't know what it's like to see red - despite having learned every propositional fact about what it's like to see red - is that seeing red is ineffable. And of course the point is a general one: seeing, feeling, hearing, smelling, tasting - these phenomena all equally ineffable; we can only "describe" them in terms of component sensations that we have in common with others. [2]
That so, the phenomenology of theosis is no more numinous than the phenomenology of listening to an Air Supply record, or going to the toilet. But I repeat myself.
(Via Cliché Reality.)
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NOTES
1. I set aside the issue of whether mystical experience is truly sui generis. I also set aside the issue of whether its being sui generis would say anything about its being evidence of another, metaphysical world.
2. Query whether something related to this point is embedded in Wittgenstein's private language argument.
