Narrative Ontology. Axel Hutter
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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