Читать книгу Narrative Ontology - Axel Hutter - Страница 14

What hinders us from grasping the basic thought pursued here – of understanding narrative meaning as a systematic guide for the enlightenment of human self-knowledge – is the prejudice that the originary phenomenon of understanding meaning is not only unnecessary for knowledge of reality, but even misleading. The crucial difference between reality and a fictional narrative, so it seems, is that only the latter is characterized by the necessity of being meaningful. If fictional contexts were not meaningful, they would not exist at all. In stark contrast to fiction, factual reality (thus, also, one’s own life reality) is characterized precisely by having no meaning. For the common understanding of being, this is their fundamental difference: fiction has meaning; reality, not.

When one says ‘that is too good to be true’, one commonly means it is too meaningful to be real. If we perceive a purpose, a recognizable meaning, in reality, then we are immediately suspicious that we are dealing not at all with ‘objective’ reality but instead merely a ‘subjective’ enactment. One senses purpose and it makes one cross. Because of the traceable meaning, one is compelled to suspect that one is dealing not with solid, meaningless being but, rather, with beingless meaning – that is, mere fiction. For reality is precisely that which is meaningless: what is meaningless is reality.

If being is identified in this way with what is meaningless, then the question of course remains how it is possible in the first place for there to be an irritation by meaning. If what is real is meaningless in being real, then it is not clear how, under this condition, the irritating illusion of meaning is at all possible. How does the illusion of meaning enter being that is taken in itself to be meaningless? The answer ordinarily reads as follows: by human being. We ourselves are the ones, then, who introduce the illusion of meaning into the solid, objective, thoroughly meaning-free reality of being, whether it be by psychic projection, social construction or other means. In each case, it is the very dubious privilege of human beings to infuse reality with the appearance of meaning and, at the same time, to be the lonely consumer of their own product they call ‘meaning’, for objective being is defined in being strictly separated from meaning and fully indifferent towards it. Such meaningless being can at best be known, but not – like the meaning of a narrative – be understood.

Both dimensions of human existence, being and meaning, are in this way dualistically torn apart. The one half forms the basis of a knowledge of being exonerated of the demand of understanding, while the other half, in turn, forms the basis of the market of illusory meanings, exonerated of the demand of truth. Yet a meaning projected by a human being onto the meaningless world can in the end be nothing more than an ineffective consolation, or even an ideological concealment of the incurable despair that an ontology of meaningless being necessarily has ready for someone who, in understanding, is oriented towards meaning.

In the context of an ontology of meaningless being, humans must appear to themselves as incomprehensible strangers in the midst of a reality radically indifferent to them. The meaning they refer to in understanding – in listening as in speaking – may be grasped more specifically as a moral postulate, as an existential self-assertion, as a social construct or as a move in the games of language. Viewed in terms of the whole, this meaning always forms an entirely ungraspable, and for this reason illusory, exception in a reality indifferent to the human capacity for meaning, degrading it to an affair purely between humans.

But such an exception to the rule of meaningless being is itself meaningless. Humans must accordingly grasp their own existence as an absurd chance event, while their demand for a comprehensive understanding of the world and themselves shrivels to a resigned attempt to arrange themselves as successfully and comfortably as possible in a world without meaning and significance. To be sure, they simply express thereby their despair, for an existence oriented only towards comfort is itself as insignificant as the world in which this existence arranges itself.

Remarkably, a science exonerated of the demand of understanding leads to the same result. Such a science attempts to pursue in knowledge the paradigm of meaningless being as systematically and rigorously as possible. For this reason, it cannot confer even an exceptional position to human being within reality, for a human being, according to a strictly ‘objective’ consideration, is only an object among objects, a meaningless single case in the middle of meaningless being. One can attribute ‘subjectivity’ or a distinct ‘dimension of meaning’ to such an object, but at most in the form of a folkloric figure of speech, since subjectivity and meaning literally have no place in an objectivistic ontology of meaningless being, and thus ought to be exposed as ultimately untenable and illusory ways of speaking. Both half-measures – the production of convenient meanings exonerated of the demand of truth, and the production of useful knowledge exonerated of the demand of understanding – are simply two variants, then, of the one ontology that identifies reality with meaninglessness.

The first half-measure gets tangled up in the inconsistencies of a position seeking to establish meaning within an ontology of meaninglessness without changing the presupposed ontology itself from the ground up. Insisting on ‘meaning’ thus takes on the obscuring and ideological character of an illusionism that elicits, constantly anew and quite rightly, the critical enterprise of a naturalist disillusionment. The second half-measure expresses bluntly the meaninglessness, emphasizing openly the ‘objective’ character of human beings as objects among objects and drawing the only logical conclusion to be drawn from the presupposed ontology. Admittedly, the consistent striving for a truth free of illusions in the midst of a meaningless reality is itself meaningless, and must therefore in the final analysis itself become an illusion, so that science too, in the end (like illusionism), is only a means for human beings to suppress their own despair and to arrange themselves as conveniently as possible in a meaningless world.

For fundamental reasons, neither half-measure can gain a view of the whole of human existence. Or, to put it differently: both half-measures in which the human unity of being and meaning is divorced dualistically cause the sting and the commandment of self-knowledge to slide into oblivion. In the context of an ontology of meaningless being that asserts itself in both half-measures in their own ways, human self-knowledge in the Socratic sense is impossible from the outset.

Yet the separation of meaning from being must necessarily lead to a radical depletion of human self-understanding; a life that cannot understand itself in the context of an ontology of meaningless being is an entirely unfree life. One may still skilfully conceal the ontological inconsequence of conceding to the human understanding of meaning an ‘exception regulation’ in the middle of meaningless being; one may deliberately restrict one’s horizon to the moral or social ‘world’ in order to not have to address the icy meaninglessness of the world as a whole. Yet, in the end, the consequence of a thinking that can no longer ignore the question concerning the meaning of being as a whole overtakes such a provincialism of meaning. Genuine self-knowledge is only possible if it succeeds in grasping being and meaning as a unity differentiated in itself, so that human beings can discover and understand themselves as twofold beings characterized by being and meaning.