1. Wittgenstein writes, ‘It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.’ That is, perhaps, a readily comprehensible thought. It is closely analogous to another thought that is, at least at one level, also readily comprehensible. Speaking of his friend La Boetie, Montaigne says, ‘If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: Because it was he, because it was I.’ It is in the same spirit that Rowan Williams writes, ‘Being in love is normally thought to mean delighting in the simple actuality of the other.’ As we might express it: in so far as I love another, it is not how they are that is wonderful or astonishing, but that they exist. I take there to be something clearly correct there: something seen in, for example, a parent's delight in her newborn child, or in the particular character of the delight or horror that someone may feel in the face of the recognition that the person before him now, radically changed through long suffering or through dreadful damage, is Deirdre, the woman he loves. Now my concern is not so much as to whether Williams's observation about ‘being in love’ will stand up as a general claim about love as with the fact that this does characterise a way in which one person sometimes matters to another. This idea is, at one level, both, as I have said, readily comprehensible and also hugely important – though there may be little space for it in a good deal of recent English-language philosophy. The way in which the mere existence of certain people matters to almost all of us is, as one might express it, a fundamental form of ‘anchoring’ in the world: one closely analogous to that in which the mere existence of certain places is a fundamental form of ‘anchoring’ in the world; and, like that, one without which life would be, for most of us, deeply unthinkable. At least in a certain range of cases, it is, one might think, a crucial aspect of what the later Wittgenstein speaks of as ‘an attitude towards a soul’.

Yet these ways of talking may seem to involve a difficulty of a kind that marks them off from the early Wittgenstein's remark about the ‘mystical’.