Wittgenstein's Ladder Revisited

Wallace Stevens held that, even if we accept Wittgenstein's stipulation that metaphysical talk be abandoned as "senseless," there is still room for (and, indeed, a crying human need for) "Supreme Fictions." For Stevens, entertaining this most human of needs was not a retreat back into the arms of religious self-delusion but a determined advance towards the creative imagination: an embrace of elusive "poetic truths" where, formerly, we had craved the solid ground of [equally elusive dreams of] scientific or theological certainty.

Wittgenstein's correct Methode der Philosophie yields scientific propositions accompanied by an understanding that what such propositions leave "unsaid" is the "knowledge" of what Stevens called "how to live/what to do" (savoir faire). The latter knowledge is, perhaps, best communicated by lived example (tarbiyya). It is also intimated, however, by speech that conforms to Ibn 'Arabi's (d. 1240 C.E.) "law of Idris" (Enoch). That "law" is the same law identified by Stevens in his poem "Large Red Man Reading": the law of "being and its expressings...Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines...."

We arrive, at last, in the sacred precincts of Norman O. Brown's most vatic lines:

The antinomy between mind and body, word and deed, speech and silence, overcome. Everything is only a metaphor; there is only poetry.

Climb Wittgenstein's ladder, climb it! But don't forget, when you've reached the top, to follow his advice and toss it away.