Читать книгу Narrative Ontology - Axel Hutter - Страница 19

Appearing as a motto at the beginning of Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man is the Delphic commandment ‘Know thyself!’ as formulated by Goethe: ‘Compare yourself; recognize what you are.’ As much as Thomas Mann as narrator sees his main task to consist in addressing the enigmatic question of human being concerning its self in the form of a genuine narrative of self-knowledge, he likewise strives in the Reflections to account for the philosophical–metaphysical fundamental conviction guiding him with regard to human being. For this reason, one finds in Reflections a passage that amounts to a philosophical confession. He recalls in that happy-serious hour in which he grasped Schopenhauer’s ‘Kantian-based teaching on free will: the truth about freedom, he said, is precisely the opposite of what one has long believed: it does not lie in the operari, but in the esse – thus absolute necessity and determination rule in action, but being is originally and metaphysically free: the human being who commits a crime has of necessity, as an empirical character under the influence of certain motives, acted in this way, but he could have been different – and the pangs of conscience, too, aim at being, not at action. This is the deepest thought I could ever ponder, or rather: it belongs to those I had reflected upon before they were expressly thought out for me, before I had read them’ (1987, 94).

This ‘deepest thought’ that Thomas Mann could ever ponder condenses in a complex manner many motifs of the previous reflections in a concise formulation, which, at first glance, is indeed barely understandable. The task of understanding consists in conceptually working out the single moments and relating them to the idea pursued here, in order to finally comprehend the whole thought in which Thomas Mann, mediated through Schopenhauer, adopts the ‘revolution of the way of thinking’ that began with Kant.

The widespread understanding of freedom that Thomas Mann, with Schopenhauer, takes as his point of departure, is freedom as freedom of action: human beings are free insofar as they are not hindered in doing what they want. Since they often (still) do not know, however, what they want, they understand freedom moreover as ‘leeway’ for options to act: they feel freer when they can choose between five rather than two options, even when they can only perform the one action that they in the end want to perform, and in fact perform. One ascribes to oneself an action that is understood as free in this sense as my action. One finds oneself in the action; one ‘understands’ the action and believes to know why one acted in this way and not in another. By the same token, one doubts whether it was really one’s own action when one can no longer understand the action in retrospect. This is indicated by typical figures of speech: ‘I don’t understand what came over me at the time’; ‘I was not myself when I did this.’

Here, again, the close link between understanding and freedom becomes explicit: one regards oneself as free in those actions one believes to understand, and one believes to understand those actions in which one regards oneself as free. Admittedly, the narrow horizon of attention with which human beings aim at freedom and self-understanding must be apparent, for they take into account isolated actions and, at best, certain consequences of actions. For this reason, Schopenhauer says that freedom is placed in the operari – that is, in the action and production that is oriented to a particular work: namely, an opus. Freedom in the sense of freedom of action is nothing more than a modus operandi.

If attention is directed, however, to the single actions, then the whole of human existence gets pushed to the sidelines. For this reason, one will ordinarily admit, even after some reflection, that one may ‘understand’ this or that action or episode of one’s life, but not one’s life as whole – that is, one’s life story. This also holds, however, quite analogously for the universally widespread understanding of freedom. While one may say of single actions that they are freely chosen, one will not be able to say in the same way, of being, of the character of the actor, that it is freely chosen. This is easily demonstrated with the ‘formula’ of the freedom of action: one is free insofar as one is not hindered in doing what one wants. Or, to put it more succinctly: I am free insofar as I can do what I want. Evidently, everything depends here on the last word, on wanting. Supposing that I want to do this or that, then I am free if I can also do it. But why do I want this or that? Am I free to want to want this or that? My character determines what I want: am I free to choose my character, my own concrete selfhood? What would it even mean to be free – in this respect, and not in action?

One does not become immediately aware of this fundamental difference between the freedom of action and the freedom of the will, because one is easily misled by language that makes ‘doing’ and ‘wanting’ appear equally as particular human actions: I can do this or that; I can want this or that. That the case is in truth quite different is also indicated, to be sure, by language. If, in place of the ‘doing’, one places the ‘wanting’ in the formula of freedom of action (I am free if I can do what I want), then one arrives at the paradoxical formula: I am free insofar as I can want what I want. What results is evidently an idle circular movement that everyday consciousness does not ordinarily make clear, for this movement indicates the blind spot of its understanding of freedom.

The blind spot of the alleged freedom of action is thus the freedom of the will, for the freedom of action presupposes a freedom of wanting, which cannot, however, for fundamental reasons, be understood within the paradigm of the freedom of action. Here, the bridge is formed in a systematic sense to the distinction between object knowledge and self-knowledge. Just as humans cannot recognize themselves as subjects so long as they alienate themselves as objects of knowledge in accordance with that paradigm of knowledge, neither can they understand themselves in their freedom so long as they misunderstand freedom as a property of objectifiable single actions in accordance with the paradigm of the operari.

But if one misunderstands one’s freedom, one is not free. Freedom does not concern an objectifiable property of human being, which one may have without understanding it – indeed, without knowing anything about it. Rather, freedom concerns the selfhood of human being as subject or I, which is what it is only insofar as one performs it with (self) understanding. For this reason, human beings are free only insofar as they understand their freedom. As equal as they are in being inherently free, they differ in terms of how they each understand concretely their freedom for themselves. Their respective being is their respective self-understanding. Precisely for this reason, they are free not in operari, but rather in esse.