Egocentricity and Mysticism: An Anthropological Study

By Ernst Tugendhat

Ernst Tugendhat sees mysticism as a response to a deep need for peace of mind. We experience this need in connection to our discursive practices that relate us to and differentiate us from one another and the world we inhabit for a short period of time. This condition, Tugendhat shows, prompts us to step back” from our egocentric concerns. Mysticism satisfies our need for self-transcendence born from the tensions arising from language, social interaction, and mortality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Oct 4, 2016
• ISBN: 9780231542937

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EGOCENTRICITY AND MYSTICISM

EGOCENTRICITY AND MYSTICISM

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY

Ernst Tugendhat

Translated by

Alexei Procyshyn and Mario Wenning

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS      NEW YORK

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English translation copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press

Egozentrizität und Mystik. Eine anthropologische Studie

Copyright © 2006 Verlag C. H. Beck oHG, München

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-54293-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tugendhat, Ernst, author.

Title: Egocentricity and mysticism: an anthropological study / Ernst Tugendhat ; translated by Alexei Procyshyn and Mario Wenning.

Other titles: Egozentrizität und Mystik. English

Description: New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016012707| ISBN 9780231169127 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231542937 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Egoism. | Self-interest. | Self (Philosophy)

Classification: LCC BJ1474. T8313 2016 | DDC 171/.9—dc23

LC record available at https://Iccn.loc.gov/2016012707

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

Jacket design: Rebecca Lown

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

CONTENTS

Translators’ Introduction

Introduction

PART I. RELATING TO ONESELF

1. Propositional Language and Saying I

2. Good and Important

3. Saying I in Practical Contexts: Self-Mobilization and Responsibility

4. Adverbial, Prudential, and Moral Good; Intellectual Honesty

5. Relating to Life and Death

PART II. STEPPING BACK FROM ONESELF

6. Religion and Mysticism

7. Wonder

Addendum: On Historical and Nonhistorical Inquiry

Notes

Index

TRANSLATORS’ INTRODUCTION

Ernst Tugendhat’s Egocentricity and Mysticism is a remarkable work. Published in German in 2003, this text, which Tugendhat claims to be his final philosophical monograph, marks a return to the interests of his student days at Stanford (1946–49), where he attended seminars on Zen Buddhism and mysticism.¹ In it, Tugendhat draws on his previous philosophical work on ethics, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action, and phenomenology to elucidate a deep, human need for what he calls peace of mind (Seelenfriede). He then proceeds to show why mysticism appears to us as a legitimate response to this need. Together with the subsequent collection of essays Anthropologie statt Metaphysik (Anthropology Instead of Metaphysics), the present work elaborates a new form of mysticism, differentiates it from alternative forms found in the most prominent mystical traditions, and shows how it responds to our need for peace of mind without committing us to problematic forms of transcendence or a withdrawal from the world.² Along the way, Tugendhat also sketches a form of philosophical anthropology that reintroduces into philosophical discourse existential questions concerning life, death, and their importance for relating ourselves to our life as a whole. His naturalized version of anthropology sidesteps the dead ends of fundamental ontology and transcendental philosophy, on the one hand, and the increasingly technical and narrow problems countenanced by the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind, on the other.

Although English-speaking readers are only beginning to become aware of Tugendhat’s significant contributions to contemporary philosophy, his earlier interpretations of Aristotle, Husserl, and Heidegger can be considered modern classics.³ His lecture courses on ethics and analytic philosophy of language have influenced an entire generation of German philosophers by introducing them to recent trends in Anglo-American analytic philosophy from the 1970s until the 1990s, while his early readers in the Anglo-Saxon world, like Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, Robert Pippin, Michael Dummett, and Charles Larmore, credit him with bridging the analytic-continental divide. Rorty, for instance, emphasizes that Tugendhat’s work is not only an admirable example of hard, concentrated, philosophical thought, but a successful attempt to build bridges between continents and centuries.⁴ We are therefore confident that Egocentricity and Mysticism will bring English-speaking readers from both analytic and continental traditions to the same table, since it exhibits the exact virtues Rorty praises the earlier work for: the kind of conceptual analysis of core issues in the phenomenological and existentialist tradition that enriches both philosophical paradigms.⁵ We expect, however, that even seasoned readers of Tugendhat’s earlier work will be surprised by his turn to non-European traditions, existential concerns, and mysticism in the present text. Not only is Tugendhat well known for championing a postmetaphysical view of reason seemingly at odds with the existential dimensions we usually attribute to mysticism or religion, but also his efforts to reclaim philosophical anthropology are downright untimely: where many contemporary thinkers are embracing increasingly specialized approaches to ever-narrowing philosophical problem-spaces, Tugendhat insists that Kant’s famous—and notoriously neglected—question What is humankind? should ground and coordinate philosophy’s division of intellectual labor. The big questions concerning the value and goal of a good life, he insists, need to guide contemporary philosophical research once again. For they provide the systematic coherence of and unity to the very intellectual engagements upon which the increasing subdivision and specialization of academic philosophy are premised.

Indeed, with its breadth, systematic coherence, and untimely reoccupation of a traditional form of philosophical inquiry, this slim volume is likely to create the singular impression that it is bigger on the inside. And, despite Tugendhat’s light, generally nontechnical, and often personal manner of exposition and the clarity of his analysis, the sheer number of themes he examines threatens to overwhelm. By way of an introduction, then, we would like to map out the basic argument so that readers can better orient themselves. This will involve highlighting some of the more important features of Tugendhat’s argument and flagging some of the critical responses to them. We will also situate his conception of mysticism and take note of some of the stickier points of translation.

THE CENTRALITY OF PROPOSITIONAL LANGUAGE AND THE NEED FOR PEACE OF MIND

The first striking feature of this conceptually expansive text is its comprehensive vision: Tugendhat works across a variety of domains, traditions, and methods to present an intricate and sophisticated argument. In the first chapters of the book, he works to identify the essential features of human agency. On his view, what distinguishes us from other species are the pragmatic competencies involved in propositionally structured language use, which come to the fore in the way we use the word I. In contradistinction to the context-specific signal-languages of other higher animals, speakers who can say I⁶ or, simply, I-sayers (Ich-Sager) find themselves equipped with a language whose content transcends their immediate context. The context-transcending character of propositional content, Tugendhat argues, introduces new strata of evaluation: over and above the kind of situational adequacy or correctness that one finds in signal-language communication or the coping strategies of creatures limited to their environment, the propositional content of human language introduces indicative and subjunctive forms of evaluation that require us to return to one and the same idea from a variety of distinctive contexts. In other words, since propositional content is cross-contextually stable, it may therefore be evaluated from a variety of perspectives in a variety of situations with regard to its truth in the actual world or with regard to its significance or consequences in a variety of possible worlds. These evaluative dimensions imply that a competent speaker implicitly recognizes herself, first, as participating in some kind of a whole (a universe of discourse, a space of reasons) and, second, as necessarily occupying an epistemic perspective within this whole (a locus for deliberation and action-coordination, which is important to herself or to others). They also imply, third, that the epistemic privilege an I-sayer attaches to her perspective remains ontologically relative—other perspectives or loci are possible and, in the grand scheme of things, what one takes to be paramount is not so important after all.

For Tugendhat, then, every utterance of I implies a dynamic mode of practical deliberation in which the fundamental content being reflected upon is intersubjectively available and context-independent. That is, each agent must take a stand on a given propositional content based on what she holds dear, while (implicitly) recognizing the relativity of her stance. The necessity of taking up an epistemic perspective while countenancing its relativity ensures a dynamic deliberative process in which a range of distinct perspectives on and assessments of the same content become available. And the availability of these contingent perspectives for the deliberative process allows an agent to acknowledge that what she holds dear may not be all that important in the end, or at the very least not the most important in the grand scheme of things. Recognizing this in the course of deliberation, Tugendhat contends, generates the existential concerns surrounding our finitude, the anxiety at the prospect of our death, and the motivation to have our achievements recognized by others. Thus, not only does saying I distinguish us from other higher animals in the crude sense that we can use and recognize indexical expressions, it also implies a form of practical deliberation that goes well beyond coping with one’s environment: because our goal-directed activities and intersubjective modes of assessment are inextricably bound up with context-independent contents, they are open to indicative and subjunctive considerations—concerning what is true, what would be a good or better course of action if things were different, if one were a slightly different kind of practical agent, with different abilities or priorities.

The guiding insight in these opening chapters is that good depends upon this dynamic relationship between the epistemic necessity of taking a stand based on what an agent holds dear and the ontological relativity of any one such perspective that propositionally structured language makes possible. The simple fact of saying I implicates us in this dynamic. Framing matters in this way helps Tugendhat respond to his silent interlocutors from the continental tradition. His account of good, for instance, can be profitably read against Nietzsche’s in the Genealogy of Morality, which also involves taking a Yes/No stance toward a given performance from a unique first-person perspective, but does not depend on propositional content. More salient, however, is Tugendhat’s attempt to synthesize the Aristotelian and Kantian practical traditions by offering a novel deduction of prudential and moral goods out of what he calls the adverbial good.

Such a synthesis might remind readers of Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology, in which a roughly Aristotelian theory of practical agency opens onto a broadly Kantian account of the preconditions for an agent’s engagements with the world. The connection is not accidental: Tugendhat was drawn to philosophy by studying Being and Time with his mother at the age of fifteen, and attended Heidegger’s courses in Freiburg during the 1950s. He continues his critical engagement with Heidegger’s work in Egocentricity and Mysticism by reconstructing and refining the latter’s existential analytic to circumvent the irrational implications of Heidegger’s thought.⁷ More specifically, Tugendhat treats the early Heidegger’s account of Being-Toward-Death⁸ as a foil to sharpen his own account of time consciousness, in relation to the experience of death as neither universal nor imminent. The defining feature of our finitude, for Tugendhat, is not the anxiety an imminent death might elicit in us (animals experience that too), but rather the sense that death is always on the temporal horizon, just outside the immediate context of our actions. This kind of death-experience becomes existentially significant, Tugendhat contends, because death appears as an event that will happen soon enough, but not now. The experience of death as a nonimminent threat thus increases the existential weight of an agent’s current endeavors: in reflecting on the fact that she will die soon enough but not now, an I-sayer realizes that the things she takes to be important need to be accomplished sooner rather than later.

Mysticism, on Tugendhat’s account, is a tonic for the sense of oppressive inevitability that we experience when we reflect on the nonimminent and yet concrete prospect of our death and the urgency it imparts to our deliberations and actions. Tugendhat even seems to suggest, albeit implicitly, that mystical calmness is an alternative to Heidegger’s early conception of resoluteness as well as his later reflections on Gelassenheit, or releasement. Also, in contrast to the late Heidegger’s attempt to think beyond language, propositional language remains the condition that makes I-sayers both suffer from these kinds of existential concerns, which Tugendhat gathers under the label of egocentricity, and seek ways to alleviate this suffering. Lastly, contra Heideggerian authenticity, Tugendhat’s mysticism relinquishes neither propositional language nor rational deliberation on what one ought to do; the mystic retains an egocentric care (chapter 5, section 4).

Against this background, in part 2 of the book Tugendhat turns his attention to a comparative analysis of Buddhism, Confucianism, Christianity, Daoism, Hinduism, and Judaism, which aims at a rigorous differentiation of religion and mysticism. On Tugendhat’s account, religion is no longer able to attenuate the stresses and anxieties of contemporary practical life, whereas mysticism presents us with a live option—indeed a practice, Selbstrelativierung, which amounts to putting oneself into perspective—for achieving peace of mind. Such practices, as Tugendhat will argue in the book’s final chapter on wonder, no longer need to be rooted in religion or religious doctrine per se. His postmetaphysical mystic may turn to philosophy just as easily as she might turn to Daoism’s effortless participation in the way of things, or to Meister Eckhart’s apophatic quest for God within each object, for all three express a concern for the world as a whole, which we encounter in a mode of wonder.⁹ The mystical sense of wonder, which Tugendhat elaborates via an extended discussion of Wittgenstein, rests on the idea that the mystic does not unburden herself of her egocentric passions and the suffering they engender by taking flight into Nirvana, but rather finds peace of mind in the realization or acknowledgment that, while the existence of the world as a whole remains incomprehensible, she can nevertheless enjoy a sense of familiarity or fittingness with it.¹⁰

THE PRIMACY OF THE PRACTICAL AND THE RETURN OF PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

As this synopsis illustrates, Egocentricity and Mysticism is an ambitious text, which raises at least three critical issues. From the broadest to the most specific, they concern the text’s place within contemporary debates, Tugendhat’s argumentative strategy, and the transition from the more recognizable material of part 1 to the comparative discussions in part 2. Our sense is that these three critical issues converge on Tugendhat’s appeal to philosophical anthropology, from which Egocentricity and Mysticism derives its strengths. That is why understanding what he means by philosophical anthropology will show why Egocentricity and Mysticism is not merely a postanalytic or postcontinental work, or a straightforward work of intercultural philosophy, but is something qualitatively new.

The place to start is Tugendhat’s positioning of his conception of philosophical anthropology. According to him, the virtue of approaching philosophy from this viewpoint is that it combines the best features of analytic, continental, and comparative approaches to philosophy while leaving (some of) their dogmas behind. As Tugendhat makes clear in his concluding reflections on method (see the addendum), which are critical of certain tendencies in analytic, continental, and comparative approaches to philosophy and the history of philosophy, philosophical anthropology reactivates the existential concerns that draw so many to philosophy (or religion) in the first place, but that tend to get lost in the specialized discourses of contemporary philosophy. Tugendhat’s appeal to philosophical anthropology is thus meant to ward off both the evacuation of existential content from ultraspecialized philosophical analyses, so much in evidence in some parts of analytic tradition, and the historical pedantry and hagiography that he thinks characterize (or stereotype) much of continental philosophy and the history of philosophy. Implicitly, Tugendhat is arguing that the good of philosophy is a mean between a deficiency and a surfeit of existential import. In this way, Tugendhat seeks to address the existential valences inherent in Kant’s question What is humankind?

The notion of philosophical anthropology thus throws up the first critical issue, since both analytic and continental philosophers are likely to have something very different in mind than what Tugendhat means by it. Analytic philosophers, for instance, might expect Tugendhat to draw on the kind of empirical, evolutionary research one finds in cognitive psychology or cultural anthropology, especially given Tugendhat’s own appeal to the notion of cultural studies or cultural science (Kulturwissenschaft) (see addendum). Continental philosophers, by contrast, might take the same allusion to cultural science in a different sense, expecting Tugendhat to deploy the teleological, genealogical, or transcendental deductive explanatory strategies usually associated with continental approaches to philosophical anthropology, say, in the works of Karl Jaspers, Max Scheler, Arnold Gehlen, Helmuth Plessner, Ernst Cassirer, or even early Martin Heidegger. Both expectations will be disappointed—and roughly for the same reasons. Although Tugendhat is committed, here and elsewhere, to some form of naturalism, and occasionally draws on arguments from evolutionary theory, his general strategy in this work is to identify the relevant anthropological constants or framing conditions of specifically human action and deliberation.¹¹ These constants, he argues, underwrite—and thus serve to unify—the variegated capabilities and competencies, cares and anxieties, anticipations and regrets that characterize the human condition. Although these features must, in the final analysis, be explainable in evolutionary or natural terms, Tugendhat does not engage in such an endeavor here. Like Freud, he is happy to bracket such considerations and simply insist that his account will, in the final analysis, be consistent with evolutionary accounts.

The attempt to identify the constellation of anthropological constants that characterize humankind, while bracketing any developmental account of these constants’ historical emergence, provides us with the clue we need to understand Tugendhat’s philosophical anthropology. For it alerts us to the text’s reliance on indispensability arguments: Tugendhat consistently extrapolates his anthropological constants from our pragmatic engagements with the world and then shows how the kinds of deliberation we can undertake in light of these features produce specific kinds of existential concerns. In other words, his philosophical anthropology spells out the relevant conditions of possibility for our concrete abilities.

Tugendhat’s approach thus differs from the one an analytic philosopher might expect him to use, in that his philosophical anthropology is not empirically grounded, even though it needs to be consistent with empirical findings. Continental philosophers may nod along, while wondering how this approach differs from theirs. We take the salient difference to consist in Tugendhat’s point of departure: in choosing our ability to say I, he aims to track our genuinely existential concerns for our finitude and a meaningful life back to their logical, semantic, or pragmatic preconditions. In so doing, however, he does not appeal to a transcendental theory of subjectivity, a fundamental ontology, or a historical process to ground them. In this sense, Tugendhat’s indispensability arguments remain decidedly postmetaphysical.

Hence, the second critical issue that Tugendhat’s book as a whole and its philosophical-anthropological gambit throw up: How are we to organize and integrate the range of themes just mentioned according to their existential import and pragmatic preconditions, but in the absence of any transcendental or teleological explanation, that is, independently of any historical, developmental narrative or empirical findings? A good answer to this question will go a long way in clarifying the conceptual unity of Egocentricity and Mysticism. One way into this question is to turn to Tugendhat’s marriage of Kant and Aristotle. Like them, Tugendhat emphasizes the primacy of the practical: the question What is humankind? is to be answered by specifying the preconditions for our distinctively human mode of practical engagement with the world and with one another by analyzing the competencies and capabilities that differentiate us from other animals and the unique issues or obstacles that these capabilities give rise to. Put slightly differently, when we ask what it means to