Wonder and Tugendhat's mysticism

Ernst Tugendhat has recently argued that mystical experiences are prompted by a specific sense of wonder or awe. This sense of wonder, he contends, promises to alleviate the existential stresses that follow from the kinds of concerns our propositional language engenders. In this essay, I outline Tugendhat's account of mysticism, focusing on the role wonder plays in it, and expressing a few perplexities about his position. Specifically, I question whether Tugendhat is committed to a disjunctivist theory of experience (with an epistemic or mystical orientation to the contents of experience) and whether this implicit disjunction hinges on a difference between the skilled environmental coping usually associated with a non-propositionally structured form of know-how and a propositionally structured form of knowing-that. I then consider whether Tugendhat's conception of mysticism involves a form of skilled coping that he had previously rejected in his discussion of human language use. The potential re-emergence of skilled coping in mystical practices, I conclude, indicates a tension in Tugendhat's account of mysticism and its relation to wonder.

Link to Journal site: https://existenz.us/volume12No2.html