Narrative Ontology. Axel Hutter
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myself involv’d in such a labyrinth, that, I must confess, I neither know how to correct my former opinions, nor how to render them consistent’ (398–9). For this reason, the specific peculiarity of self-knowledge cannot initially at all be elucidated directly and positively, but rather only indirectly and negatively, and indeed by means of the critical demonstration, carried out as concisely as possible, that all knowledge of a self or an I – under the presupposition that we are dealing here with an ‘object’ of knowledge – necessarily remains empty, leading into a confusing labyrinth of contradictions.
In this negative manner, Schopenhauer, too, formulated the critique of the dogma of a positive comprehensibility of the human I in an especially compelling thought experiment. If the self were, namely, a special object among other objects of knowledge, then ‘it would be possible for us to be conscious of ourselves in ourselves and independently of the objects of knowing and willing. Now we simply cannot do this, but as soon as we enter into ourselves in order to attempt it, and wish for once to know ourselves fully by directing our knowledge inwards, we lose ourselves in a bottomless void; we find ourselves like a hollow glass globe, from the emptiness of which a voice speaks. But the cause of this voice is not to be found in the globe, and since we want to comprehend ourselves, we grasp with a shudder nothing but an insubstantial ghost’ (1969a, 278 explanatory note).
Here, Schopenhauer takes alleged human ‘self-knowledge’ oriented to knowledge of objects at its word: it misunderstands the self as a special object of knowledge and, as a consequence, seeks this self ‘inwardly’ in human beings. He thus inspects the concrete accessibility of a graspable self that would lend to self-knowledge that objective ‘footing’ (Hume: impression) that ordinary object knowledge invokes. This thought experiment leads again to the critical result that a self-knowledge carried out in the mode of object knowledge – so long as it does not deceive itself – necessarily leads to a ‘bottomless void’ that reveals negatively to knowledge that the required self-knowledge cannot have the form of ‘other knowledge’, i.e. knowledge of a graspable object.
The commandment of self-knowledge leads in this way into a labyrinth of aporias, which question from within the overly naïve and uncritically accepted paradigm of everyday knowledge that is primarily interested in stable objects. They are thus suitable to wake human consciousness out of its dogmatic slumber of self-forgetfulness that it enjoys in the arms of familiar object knowledge. So long as human beings orient themselves in self-knowledge unquestioningly and uncritically to the mode of knowledge of comprehensible objects, they face the unsatisfactory alternative of either alienating themselves into an object of knowledge or else dismissing the peculiar ‘ungraspable’ I as a mere illusion, because it cannot be sensually objectified. Human beings are threatened with their own I becoming a comprehensible yet foreign object, in which their subjectivity is forgotten, or an incomprehensible nothing that is not knowable in the way we know things – thus vanishing into a ‘ghost’.
The I, the self that is to each our own, is for us not the closest and most familiar, but rather the most distant and most alien. As fitting as it was at the outset to call object knowledge a ‘knowledge of something other’ because it does not concern our selves, it is now fitting to designate self-knowledge in a completely different sense as ‘other knowledge’, because it demands of us a form of knowledge that is entirely distant and alien to us: in everyday life, only knowledge of objects is familiar and close to us.
Yet the peculiar otherness of the knowledge required here frees the project of self-knowledge from the suspicion of pursuing only a narrow and selfish ‘self-interest’. This is because the selfish character of an overly narrow self-interest consists precisely – as will still need to be shown – in the self-deception that one is closest and most familiar to oneself. If the self is the radically other and unfamiliar, then the effort to understand oneself is not the effort of a narcissistic home-body, not a lazy self-absorption, but rather an adventure of abandoning the familiar shores of object knowledge in order to venture out onto the open sea of self-knowledge.
Who’s Speaking?
As the introductory reflections have made clear, emancipation of human self-knowledge from the monopoly of object knowledge cannot be achieved simply with the ‘wave of a hand’. This is also evident in how inappropriate the concepts are that have been used thus far, for talk of a ‘subject’ that distinguishes itself from the objects that it knowingly faces is at least prone to being misunderstood. By facing the objects, the subject itself seems to become a ‘special object’ in relation to the other object, so ultimately the I would only be another object, rather than something completely different from an object.
For a human self-knowledge rich in content, it is, then, not adequate to define the peculiarity of the self only negatively, because in this way the I threatens to wither into vagueness, the indeterminacy of which is then once again (out of embarrassment) filled with objective determinations, alienating the I into an object. For this reason, for a human self-understanding rich in content it is necessary that one find in each case a concretization of one’s own selfhood that enables a determinate and concrete self-knowledge without thereby alienating the I into an object.
For this purpose, Schopenhauer’s reflection quoted above contains an important cue, for it mentions – in passing as it were – language as the ultimate limit which humans come up against in their attempt to become comprehensible to themselves: ‘we find ourselves like a hollow glass globe, from the emptiness out of which a voice speaks. But the cause of this voice is not to be found in the globe.’ The question of human self-knowledge thus takes on a more determinate form because it relates to the concrete primordial phenomenon of language: ‘What or who is actually speaking when a voice is speaking in me?’
To be sure, this turn of attention only makes explicit what was already implicitly at work in the considerations up to now – namely, language. In the word ‘I’ that has so far been used as a matter of course, the basic and ineluctable self-consciousness of human being – namely, of being a self or a subject – finds expression in language. Human self-consciousness articulates itself in saying I, for which the ‘I’ performs a linguistic concretization of the I, without thereby alienating it immediately into an object, for the expression ‘I’ does not designate here – as will need to be shown – a graspable being, an object. For this reason, the question is to be specified: ‘Who is actually speaking when I am speaking?’
Turning to language makes it necessary to exhibit the ambiguity of the I (as both the object and subject of knowledge), which has thus far been discussed primarily in epistemological concepts, in an equally succinct manner as a linguistic ambiguity of the expression ‘I’. In other words, if it is true that language offers human self-knowledge an outstanding medium in which this knowledge may articulate itself concretely, then it must be possible for the distinction that has been elaborated thus far between knowledge of something other and knowledge of oneself to be defined in terms of philosophy of language: as a concrete distinction between the use of the word ‘I’ as object and as subject. The fundamental difference between the objects of knowledge, on the one hand, and the subject of knowledge on the other, would thereby acquire support in language and provide a basis for further considerations.
The sought-after difference between an objective and a subjective use of the word ‘I’ is made clear by Wittgenstein in an exemplary manner: ‘There are two different cases in the use of the word “I” (or “my”) which I might call “the use as object” and “the use as subject”. Examples of the first kind of use are these: “My arm is broken”, “I have grown six inches”, “I have a bump on my forehead”, “The wind blows my hair about”. Examples of the second kind are: “I see so-and-so”, “I hear so-and-so”, “I try to lift my arm”, “I think it will rain”, “I have toothache”’ (1958, 66–7).
At first glance, Wittgenstein’s distinction may appear innocuous. It becomes more serious, however, once one brings to mind the following situation in order to clarify the use of ‘I’ as object. Photos of people are shown to me and I