Narrative Ontology. Axel Hutter
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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.
The Project of a Narrative Ontology
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