Читать книгу Narrative Ontology - Axel Hutter - Страница 15

The despair that results from an understanding of the world and of oneself that, as a consequence of an ontology of meaningless being, uncritically accepts the schism between meaning and being – this despair has been brought to our attention again and again in the history of philosophy. For Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, this critique finds its classical expression in striking formulations seeking to outdo one another.

With sober precision, Kant depicts the basic features of a world that is entirely indifferent towards the human demand for meaning, making human being into a being ‘that, after having for a short time been provided (one knows not how) with vital force, must give back again to the planet (a mere dot in the universe) the matter from which it came’ (2002, 203). In spite of human beings’ peculiar dignity, it is such that ‘nature, which pays no attention to that, will still subject them to all the evils of deprivation, disease, and untimely death, just like all the other animals on the earth … until one vast tomb engulfs them one and all (honest or not, that makes no difference here) and hurls them, who managed to believe they were the final purpose of creation, back into the abyss of the purposeless chaos of matter from which they were taken’ (1987, 342).

Schopenhauer radicalizes Kant’s thought: ‘In endless space countless luminous spheres, round each of which some dozen smaller illuminated ones revolve, hot at the core and covered over with a hard cold crust; on this crust a mouldy film has produced living and knowing beings: this is the empirical truth, the real, the world. Yet for a being who thinks, it is a precarious position to stand on one of those numberless spheres freely floating in boundless space, without knowing whence or whither’ (1969b, 3). And Nietzsche adds: ‘After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. – One might invent such a fable, and yet he would still not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature’ (1990, 79).

Thus, notwithstanding the many differences between their thinking, Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are evidently in agreement on this significant fundamental point – namely, that one must not avoid the view of the whole of being in order to locate freedom and the meaning of human existence in the ‘exception’ of a remote ontological province. They criticize – with a clear consciousness and with polemical intent – the inconsistency of a strategy that seeks to save the demand of human dignity and of a free understanding of meaning without breaking the hegemony of an ontology of meaninglessness. Instead, they emphasize, each in his own way, the radical meaninglessness and purposelessness inherent in the dominant understanding of being, and they emphasize the ‘precarious position’ in which a thinking being, which does not want to deceive itself from the outset, sees itself having been placed. In this way, they awaken consciousness from the dogmatic slumber of its lazy compromises and convenient inconsistencies.

Kant confronts the demand of humans to be ‘the final purpose of creation’ with the whole of being understood as nature (the cosmos), so that the earth becomes a ‘mere dot in the universe’ and reality as such becomes a ‘vast tomb’ that engulfs all life, ‘the abyss of the purposeless chaos’ in which every demand of meaning and reason perishes. And yet this radical questioning and disillusionment of the human demand for freedom, meaning and dignity is not presented in the tone of a sceptical resignation that seeks to arrange itself as conveniently as possible in that which cannot be altered. On the contrary, Kant’s entire thinking is coloured by the critical protest against an ontology of meaninglessness, a protest which he himself calls a revolution of the way of thinking.

Schopenhauer joins Kant explicitly: ‘I admit entirely Kant’s doctrine that the world of experience is mere phenomenon’, and ‘I add that, precisely as phenomenal appearance, it is the manifestation of that which appears, and with him I call that which appears the thing-in-itself. Therefore, this thing-in-itself must express its inner nature and character in the world of experience.’ Accordingly, for Schopenhauer, ‘philosophy is nothing but the correct and universal understanding of experience itself, the true interpretation of its meaning and content. This is the metaphysical, in other words, that which is merely clothed in the phenomenon and veiled in its forms, that which is related to the phenomenon as the thought or idea is to the words’ (1969b, 183–4).

Thus, humans adopt two positions towards reality, which, in turn, exhibits a fundamental double aspect. On the one hand, they objectify reality into the world of experience of nature, in which there is a multitude of knowable objects and states of affairs in time and space. On the other hand, they read the world of experience as text in order to understand the meaning that is spelled out in experience. What is designated in the tradition of philosophy somewhat misleadingly as ‘meta-physics’ can be renewed critically in the wake of Kant and Schopenhauer by conceiving it as the meaning that lies not beyond but, rather, within the human experience of the world and of the self, waiting to be interpreted and understood.

The idea of a meta-physical ‘beyond’ may be crucially corrected in light of the model of the meaning of a text that is located not beyond, behind or above it, but rather ‘in’ it. Talk of a meaning that lies ‘in’ the literal fabric of the text may be misleading, though, if it is understood dualistically, so that again being and meaning (like outer husk and ‘inner’ kernel) are dualistically divorced. Here, spatial differentiations (beyond, behind, above, in) are fundamentally mistaken, for the meaning does not lie, strictly speaking, in the text, but rather the text itself is meaningful. When we understand a text, we understand the text itself and not something beyond, behind, above or in it: it is one and the same text that we on one occasion (without understanding) spell out, and on another occasion read for its meaning with understanding.

Accordingly, Kant defines the crucial point of his transcendental critique of reason to be ‘the distinction between things as objects of experience and the very same things as things in themselves, which our critique has made necessary’. The point of the critique of reason, Kant continues, lies in ‘that the object should be taken in a twofold meaning, namely as appearance or thing in itself’ (1998, 115–16). Kant’s critical fundamental distinction does not imply, then, any dualism (whatever kind that may be), but rather the double aspect of one reality that can be known in a twofold form – as being and as meaning – so that both aspects belong strictly together, and only together do they constitute and make intelligible what it is as one meaningful reality.

The line of thinking up to now has already made clear how this fundamental transcendental distinction is to be understood more concretely and determinately. The demand to take the object in ‘a twofold meaning’ means more precisely, on the one hand, recognizing it as literal being (appearance) and, on the other, understanding it as the meaning of the literal being (thing in itself). Kant’s ‘revolution of the way of thinking’ is understood here more specifically as a Copernican turn in the relation between being and meaning, which is no longer grasped as a dualist separation: the empirical reality of being, which one adheres to uncompromisingly, is at the same time the transcendental ideality of ‘precisely the same’ being. Yet, in this way, the critical path is opened to a transcendental realism of meaning.

This systematic foundation of the transcendental critique of reason admittedly reveals itself to still be clearly shaped by precisely that logic of objectifying knowledge of something other, to which Kant wants to draw a limit with his critique. The distinction between ‘appearance’ and ‘thing in itself’, which Schopenhauer adopts from Kant, makes use, of all expressions, of ‘thing in itself’ precisely for that which is to be critically demarcated from the level of objects as the mere letters of the text – as if the meaning of the letters of a text were merely the ‘letter in itself’ rather than something entirely different from a letter.

Nietzsche responds by explicitly distancing himself from the distinction between ‘appearance’ and ‘thing in itself’. ‘“Appearance” is a word that contains many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as possible’ (1990, 86). He understands the distinction between being and meaning instead in terms of language as a difference between dead and living metaphors. Indeed, ‘we believe we know something about the things themselves when we speak of trees, colours, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors for things’ (82–3). Being, which, according to common prejudice, is abstractly opposed to meaning and presupposed by it, is thus itself a form of meaning and, indeed, a derivative – more specifically, a dead and ossified – one. The seemingly ‘objective’ being of reality is thus for Nietzsche the essence of those ‘metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins’ (84). But, precisely for this reason, the illusion emerges that we are dealing here with ‘objects’ whose being has nothing in common with meaning and language.

Nietzsche opposes this illusion with his own critique of reason as a critique of language that articulates itself as a critical destruction of an ontology of meaningless and speechless being. That which we grasp as the ‘naked’ objectivity of things, preceding the subject and its language and independent of both, turns out to be a product of the subject and its faculty of speech, indeed a product of the mode of forgetting – for the human being, according to Nietzsche, ‘forgets that the original perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves’ (86).

The origin of being in meaning, the rootedness of the fiction of a firm objectivity in the dynamic of the happening of language, is ordinarily forgotten and suppressed by human beings because they seek to evade the unrest of self-knowledge, the desperate cluelessness one faces in view of one’s own life story: ‘only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating subject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his “self-consciousness” would be immediately destroyed’ (86).

Nietzsche’s ‘revolution of the way of thinking’ consists, then, in the reversal of the questionable character of meaning and being. He no longer asks how meaning (as exception) comes into being (the rule), but, on the contrary, how the dead rigidity of being comes into the primordial liveliness of meaning. His answer is that being is the product of a forgetting, of a self-forgetting of the subject. As soon as the subject forgets itself in its original ability to understand and create language, this subject is faced with the foreign object in the fictional context of a meaningless reality. For this reason, Nietzsche places the ‘self-consciousness’ of such a self-forgotten human being in quotation marks, since this subject no longer understands itself as subject, but rather as object among objects – that is, it precisely does not understand itself.

In order to awaken this self-forgotten non-understanding from its comfortable sleep, Nietzsche, following Kant and Schopenhauer, invents that ‘fable’ of the meaninglessness of being, which he places at the beginning of his reflections. It is supposed to make clear the existential and intellectual task, as understanding self and meaning, placed before every human being in self-knowledge – that is, the task of remembering oneself as the living subject of language and of understanding and thus of breaking the hegemony of a dead ontology of meaningless being. The truth in the understanding of meaning and the possibility of human self-knowledge can be rescued only by opposing the hegemony of an ontology of meaninglessness – and not by acknowledging this hegemony, openly or secretly.

Such a genealogy of meaningless being with a critical intent lays open the ground that accounts for why humans forget themselves as subjects: a pusillanimous willingness to renounce one’s own freedom for the sake of greater security. Meaningless being may be dead and ossified, but in its dead rigidity nonetheless offers timid humans a solid footing. Nietzsche sets against it the distinct freedom of a linguistic thinking that bestows to meaning its fitting primacy over ‘rigid’ being: ‘We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us – indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us’ (1974, §124, 180).

Nietzsche opposes such an understanding of the world and the self that is oriented to the ideal of ‘statement’ – that is, the idea of a ‘fixed’ knowledge of objects, thereby forgetting the adventure of self-knowledge. He opposes at the same time, however, a meta-physics that rigidifies what is intelligible to a ‘higher’ objectivity. Against both forms of a fixed – and, for this reason, meaningless – being, he emphasizes the radical temporality of a linguistic – and thus meaningful – being. He thus accepts, of course, the risk of misunderstanding: that what he articulates metaphorically and in ever new approaches is merely an illusion without binding force, a subjective projection that slips away powerlessly from the ‘hard’ facts of reality.

This is why Kant and Schopenhauer emphasize by contrast the objective being of what is intelligible as the ‘thing in itself’ – out of suspicion that that which is intelligible, to which no ‘object that experience can give’ could ever be ‘congruent’, might be misunderstood as a ‘figment of the brain’, that is, as a beingless illusion (Kant 1998, 395–6). In this way, they avoid the misunderstanding that Nietzsche faces, but only to expose themselves to the other misunderstanding that Nietzsche seeks to avoid: the misunderstanding that the transcendental distinction between appearance and the thing in itself results in a two-world doctrine that withdraws from the world.

The project pursued here, of a narrative ontology, attempts to navigate between the dangers of both misunderstandings. As narrative ontology, it takes up Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s project of a critical transcendental ontology, protecting itself at the same time, however, from the seductions of the expression ‘thing in itself’ by choosing the non-objective, temporally articulated, historical dynamic of the narrative form as its systematic leitmotif. As narrative ontology, it connects to Nietzsche’s transformation of the critique of reason into the critique of language, while protecting itself, however, from the seductions of elegant aphorisms by emphasizing the strict logic unique to the narrative unity of meaning, selecting it as the sober, universally accessible reference point for its line of thought. Kant’s Copernican turn and his doctrine of the primacy of practical reason is in this way taken up, and at the same time thought anew as the primacy of meaning before being.