Читать книгу Narrative Ontology - Axel Hutter - Страница 11

The Socratic insight that self-knowledge is a quite peculiar form of knowledge, distinct from ordinary knowledge of objects while constituting its blind spot, has indeed never been developed into a lasting achievement in the further course of the history of human thought. This is because the basic orientation of everyday consciousness to ‘graspable’ things proved overpowering, pushing itself in front of the enigmatic exceptional nature of self-knowledge, which consequently fell again into obscurity.

Yet, precisely for this reason, the Delphic commandment of self-knowledge constitutes the secret source of unrest and irritation in human thought. Moreover, it is in the exceptional moments of our intellectual history that the enigmatic non-objectifiable nature of the I is rediscovered in always original ways and its intangibility brought into paradoxical or ironic concepts that seek to do justice to the ‘ungraspable’ character of the I in human self-knowledge.

Such a rediscovery finds expression with David Hume. ‘There are some philosophers’, Hume writes, ‘who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our Self; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence.’ Of all the possible objects of knowledge, the I, it appears, is a very special one. It is the one that is closest and most familiar to us, the one that is easiest to comprehend and is immediately present: there is nothing that we know better than our own self. Of all the possible kinds of knowledge, self-knowledge would be the one, then, that we need not demand of anyone since everyone has already achieved it. Hume’s critique sets a powerful Socratic question mark suitable for tearing the overly confident human self-consciousness out of its dogmatic slumber: ‘Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very experience, which is pleaded for them, nor have we any idea of self, after the manner it is here explain’d.’ It must ‘be some one impression, that gives rise to every real idea. But self or person is not any one impression.’ Consequently, ‘there is no such idea’ (2007, 164).

The I that underlies all grasping as the condition of possibility withdraws itself (precisely for that reason?) from our conceptual grip. As Hume observes, it does not allow for a real impression of an objective thing to which we could trace our conception of an I. In the case of the I, there is, then, precisely no reference given to an objectively ‘given’ object that ordinarily lends our everyday knowledge and language a solid foundation. From this it follows, however, that everything that the I grasps is the object of a knowledge, so that it itself as the subject of knowledge becomes a blank space of knowledge. The Delphic project of self-knowledge must, for this reason, highlight anew time and again this peculiar ‘blank space’ of the kind of knowledge sought here (Socratic non-knowledge).

The first ‘result’ that appears in the attempt at self-knowledge is thus an astonished puzzlement about oneself, which one also finds in Hume’s Treatise: ‘But upon a more strict review of the section concerning personal identity, I find myself involv’d in such a labyrinth, that, I must confess, I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent’ (398–9). For this reason, the specific peculiarity of self-knowledge cannot initially at all be elucidated directly and positively, but rather only indirectly and negatively, and indeed by means of the critical demonstration, carried out as concisely as possible, that all knowledge of a self or an I – under the presupposition that we are dealing here with an ‘object’ of knowledge – necessarily remains empty, leading into a confusing labyrinth of contradictions.

In this negative manner, Schopenhauer, too, formulated the critique of the dogma of a positive comprehensibility of the human I in an especially compelling thought experiment. If the self were, namely, a special object among other objects of knowledge, then ‘it would be possible for us to be conscious of ourselves in ourselves and independently of the objects of knowing and willing. Now we simply cannot do this, but as soon as we enter into ourselves in order to attempt it, and wish for once to know ourselves fully by directing our knowledge inwards, we lose ourselves in a bottomless void; we find ourselves like a hollow glass globe, from the emptiness of which a voice speaks. But the cause of this voice is not to be found in the globe, and since we want to comprehend ourselves, we grasp with a shudder nothing but an insubstantial ghost’ (1969a, 278 explanatory note).

Here, Schopenhauer takes alleged human ‘self-knowledge’ oriented to knowledge of objects at its word: it misunderstands the self as a special object of knowledge and, as a consequence, seeks this self ‘inwardly’ in human beings. He thus inspects the concrete accessibility of a graspable self that would lend to self-knowledge that objective ‘footing’ (Hume: impression) that ordinary object knowledge invokes. This thought experiment leads again to the critical result that a self-knowledge carried out in the mode of object knowledge – so long as it does not deceive itself – necessarily leads to a ‘bottomless void’ that reveals negatively to knowledge that the required self-knowledge cannot have the form of ‘other knowledge’, i.e. knowledge of a graspable object.

The commandment of self-knowledge leads in this way into a labyrinth of aporias, which question from within the overly naïve and uncritically accepted paradigm of everyday knowledge that is primarily interested in stable objects. They are thus suitable to wake human consciousness out of its dogmatic slumber of self-forgetfulness that it enjoys in the arms of familiar object knowledge. So long as human beings orient themselves in self-knowledge unquestioningly and uncritically to the mode of knowledge of comprehensible objects, they face the unsatisfactory alternative of either alienating themselves into an object of knowledge or else dismissing the peculiar ‘ungraspable’ I as a mere illusion, because it cannot be sensually objectified. Human beings are threatened with their own I becoming a comprehensible yet foreign object, in which their subjectivity is forgotten, or an incomprehensible nothing that is not knowable in the way we know things – thus vanishing into a ‘ghost’.

The I, the self that is to each our own, is for us not the closest and most familiar, but rather the most distant and most alien. As fitting as it was at the outset to call object knowledge a ‘knowledge of something other’ because it does not concern our selves, it is now fitting to designate self-knowledge in a completely different sense as ‘other knowledge’, because it demands of us a form of knowledge that is entirely distant and alien to us: in everyday life, only knowledge of objects is familiar and close to us.

Yet the peculiar otherness of the knowledge required here frees the project of self-knowledge from the suspicion of pursuing only a narrow and selfish ‘self-interest’. This is because the selfish character of an overly narrow self-interest consists precisely – as will still need to be shown – in the self-deception that one is closest and most familiar to oneself. If the self is the radically other and unfamiliar, then the effort to understand oneself is not the effort of a narcissistic home-body, not a lazy self-absorption, but rather an adventure of abandoning the familiar shores of object knowledge in order to venture out onto the open sea of self-knowledge.