A couple of nights ago, I finished Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The closing passages are as satisfying, as inspring, as inevitable, as rich, and as ambiguous as any of my favorite endings in the world of art, from The Crying of Lot 49 to The Godfather, from In Search of Lost Time to Lost In Translation:

6.53

The right method of philosophy would be this: To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other--he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy--but it would be the only strictly correct method.

6.54

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.

7

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

In his preface, Wittgenstein writes, "This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it--or similar thoughts." I've thought similar thoughts (though I make no claims to having fully understood the book), and so has Harold Bloom, as evidenced by his views on Hamlet's death scene (which happens to end with the words "the rest is silence"):

...Language, so dominant as such in the earlier Hamlet, gives almost the illusion of transparency in his last speech, if only because he verges on saying what cannot be said:

You that look pale and tremble at this chance,
That are but mute or audience to this act,
Had I but time--as this fell sergeant, Death,
Is strict in his arrest--O, I could tell you--
But let it be.

Evidently he does know something of what he leaves, and we ache to know what he could tell us, since it is Shakespeare's power to persuade us that Hamlet has gained a crucial knowledge... [N]o other figure in Shakespeare seems to stand so authoritatively on the threshold between the worlds of life and death. When the hero's last speech moves between "O, I die, Horatio" and "the rest is silence," there is a clear sense again that much more might be said, concerning our world and not the "undiscovered country" of death...

I get that same feeling from Wittgenstein's writing: that he climbed his ladder and abandoned it--threw it away for the rest of us to use--after he reached its destination. I don't think he's idly speculating. There's the sound of direct experience in his claim that one who surmounts his propositions will "see the world rightly," will achieve the non-dual experience whereof "one must be silent," because thereof "one cannot speak." In both cases, language (the subject of Hamlet and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) has been transcended. In the same way, Buddhists speak of crossing the stream of samsara in the vehicle of Buddhist practice, only to discard that vehicle when they've reached the emptiness of nibanna. I can imagine no other way of reading Wittgenstein than as a mystic.