Narrative Ontology. Axel Hutter
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in the self-differentiated identity of meaning with being, but rather gives its character shape to begin with. The freedom of reading consists in the deeply enigmatic, and thus deeply human, capacity to grasp being meaningfully and to make the dead letter transparent in terms of the living spirit, which articulates itself in it and thereby makes itself intelligible.
Attention to the narrative ontology of freedom, which is implicit in every act of reading, opens up the possibility in the first place of a truly appropriate understanding of poetry. Such an attention opens the prospect of freeing artistic talk from the misunderstanding that it is illusory talk about nice illusory worlds without thereby promoting the opposing misunderstanding, according to which aesthetic language is simplistically related to the empirical ‘letters’ of reality or to the psychological experiences of the subject. The art of language is thus no longer misconstrued as a successful or unsuccessful form of object knowledge, but rather correctly understood as a form of self-knowledge.
A philosophy that grasps itself as a coherent form of self-knowledge can for this reason form an alliance with art. In clear consciousness of its own task and tradition, philosophy may talk not only about art and literature (which art science and literary studies also do), but rather, and above all, about that which art and literature themselves talk about – namely, about the meaning of selfhood.
Thomas Mann as Model
Each human lives his or her life in the concrete temporal form of a life story. We can understand ourselves only when we understand the respective story that is our life. If this is true, then philosophical self-knowledge must, as it were, ‘take measure’ from the great masters of narrative art. Thus, the present enquiry chooses not only language art as such as its ally, but rather a specific language artist and an exemplary work of narrative art. The project of a narrative ontology should not only be displayed conceptually on a general meta-level, but at the same time carried out in the interpretation of a narrative artwork. The remainder of the introduction will clarify why the choice fell upon Thomas Mann, while only the body of the investigation can provide a justification for having chosen Joseph and His Brothers.
The first reason a philosophical enquiry seeks to connect with Thomas Mann is that he himself accommodates a reciprocal illumination of philosophy and literature by situating his own way of thinking and working in explicit proximity to philosophy. Accordingly, in one of his earlier essays, one reads: ‘The eighteenth, the actual literary century, loved to distinguish the “philosopher” from the “scholar” – a dry and cantankerous being – and it seems that what was meant by this was more or less what we today understand by a literary figure.’ The essential affinity between philosophy and literature is based, then, for Thomas Mann on their common opposition to the ‘scholar’, on a critical alliance against everything dry and pedantic: ‘Everything academic is to be excluded’ (1993, 158–9).
What is meant by this becomes clear once one brings to mind the model Thomas Mann pursues in his essay. In his inaugural lecture in Jena from 1789, Schiller characterizes and defends university freedom in terms of the distinction between the bread-and-butter scholar and the philosophical mind: ‘Quite different are the plans of study which the bread-and-butter scholar and the philosopher lay out for themselves.’ The former ‘puts his intellectual ability to work only in order to improve his material position and to gratify his petty craving for recognition’. For this reason, his most important concern is ‘to separate as completely as possible the fields of study which he calls “professional” from all those which attract the intellect purely for their own sake. Every moment spent on the latter he counts as taken away from his future profession, and never forgives himself this theft’ (1972, 322).
Schiller argues that the bread-and-butter scholar abuses university freedom for private purposes of comfort: ‘How pitiable the man who wants and makes nothing higher with the noblest tools, science and art, than what a day-labourer does with the most common! Who in the realm of perfect freedom carries with him the soul of a slave!’ (323). In the revolutionary spirit of 1789, Schiller opposes such a self-imposed immaturity with the ‘philosopher’, who is distinguished from the scholar not firstly by the content, but rather by the form, of his knowledge: ‘Not what he does but how he does it distinguishes the philosophical mind’ (325).
It is remarkable that Thomas Mann, more than a hundred years later, considers it advisable to use Schiller’s programmatic distinction between scholarship and philosophy as a model for understanding his own intellectual profile. Thomas Mann’s ‘man of letters’, modelled upon the philosophical mind, is accordingly designated as an ‘intellectual buccaneer’ who rebels against the pedantic narrow-mindedness associated with Schiller’s ‘scholar’. Thomas Mann’s most elegant, and at the same time most fitting, expression for the philosophical mind is certainly ‘artist of knowledge’ (1993, 159).
An artist of knowledge is demarcated from two sides. The literary philosopher or philosophical literary figure, on the one hand, whom Thomas Mann takes as a model in his own thought, is distinguished critically, as an artist of knowledge, from the academic pedantry of the scholar; on the other hand, this figure is distinguished just as clearly, however, as an artist of knowledge, ‘from art in the naïve and trusting sense’ – indeed ‘by means of consciousness, spirit, moralism, critique’ (159). The ‘literary gift’ is thus, for Thomas Mann ‘formulated most succinctly’ with the following properties: ‘the will for the unconditional, the disgust for admission and corruption, a derisive or solemnly accusatory and judgemental insistence on the ideal, on freedom, on justice, reason, the good and human dignity’ (158).
While Thomas Mann may thus take as model in his thinking and writing the ‘philosophical’ protest against the textbook figure, the ‘disgust for admission’, the question nonetheless remains concerning why philosophy today for its part may find an ally in the literature of Thomas Mann. Why should the concept of an artist of knowledge, which Thomas Mann develops at the beginning of the twentieth century in the original adaptation of a thought from the eighteenth century, be taken as a model for philosophy at the beginning of the twenty-first century?
The answer lies close at hand, for philosophy is never immune to the pedantry of the academic figure, to the self-righteous narrowness of a banality in conformity with rules. For this reason, it is an ongoing duty for philosophy to take measure, again and again in a new and original way, from the artists of knowledge, in order to be reminded of its own original task. Thomas Mann is a model, moreover, because he at all times maintains an ironic distance from the scholars and the specialists of academic philosophy: ‘I do not know the specialized bourgeois philosopher, I have not read him. I have not got beyond Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – and by my honour, they were not bourgeois’ (1987, 101).
Yet the bourgeois specialism of academic philosophy from which Thomas Mann distances himself ironically and critically stands in a hidden alliance with the hegemony of an ontology of meaningless being. The narrow-minded insistence on things according to the rule and the academic is beholden to silent and meaningless being, which, while it may not be understandable, can be categorized. For this reason, the bourgeois philosopher (like Schiller’s bread-and-butter scholar) is instinctively hostile to the ‘artist of knowledge’ since the latter is devoted to the intellectual adventure of freedom and meaning, which by nature can hardly be ‘fixated’, and thus cannot become an object of a regulated school lesson.
Precisely for this reason, the alliance with a ‘literature of knowledge’ can remind philosophy of its original form and task. Kant characterizes this form and task as the cosmopolitan concept of philosophy, which he distinguishes from its mere academic concept. According to its cosmopolitan concept, ‘philosophy is the science of the relation of all cognition to the essential ends of human reason (teleologia rationis humanae)’. In other words, ‘A cosmopolitan concept here means one that concerns that which necessarily interests everyone’ – and this is ‘nothing other than the entire vocation of human beings’ (1998, 694–5). Philosophy in accordance with its cosmopolitan concept is thus essentially human self-knowledge.
Schopenhauer’s