– and thus meaningful – being. He thus accepts, of course, the risk of misunderstanding: that what he articulates metaphorically and in ever new approaches is merely an illusion without binding force, a subjective projection that slips away powerlessly from the ‘hard’ facts of reality.
This is why Kant and Schopenhauer emphasize by contrast the objective being of what is intelligible as the ‘thing in itself’ – out of suspicion that that which is intelligible, to which no ‘object that experience can give’ could ever be ‘congruent’, might be misunderstood as a ‘figment of the brain’, that is, as a beingless illusion (Kant 1998, 395–6). In this way, they avoid the misunderstanding that Nietzsche faces, but only to expose themselves to the other misunderstanding that Nietzsche seeks to avoid: the misunderstanding that the transcendental distinction between appearance and the thing in itself results in a two-world doctrine that withdraws from the world.
The project pursued here, of a narrative ontology, attempts to navigate between the dangers of both misunderstandings. As narrative ontology, it takes up Kant’s and Schopenhauer’s project of a critical transcendental ontology, protecting itself at the same time, however, from the seductions of the expression ‘thing in itself’ by choosing the non-objective, temporally articulated, historical dynamic of the narrative form as its systematic leitmotif. As narrative ontology, it connects to Nietzsche’s transformation of the critique of reason into the critique of language, while protecting itself, however, from the seductions of elegant aphorisms by emphasizing the strict logic unique to the narrative unity of meaning, selecting it as the sober, universally accessible reference point for its line of thought. Kant’s Copernican turn and his doctrine of the primacy of practical reason is in this way taken up, and at the same time thought anew as the primacy of meaning before being.
The Truth of Art
The present enquiry takes up and transforms the Socratic aim of philosophy, the striving for self-knowledge, and defends it against misunderstandings that amount to a forgetting of its original impetus. This enquiry looks to make a contribution to a critical ontology of meaning following Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. For this reason, it chooses art – specifically, the art of language – as an ally to help to remind philosophy of its central question and task.
The initially exposed dualism of being and meaning is a threat also to the unique truth of art. According to the common understanding of reality, art has only to do with semblance, the beautiful appearance of meaning, which nonetheless is regretfully only appearance and not being. Thus, the artist works on beautiful illusions, and art prepares at best a nice hiatus from the hopeless despair of existence so that one may forget for a moment one’s factually meaningless existence. But, strictly speaking, this is no more than an impotent compensation – ultimately, a withdrawal from the world.
The meaning of art constitutes, then, its own realm of beautiful ‘appearance’, which may not be confused with the ‘severity’ of meaningless reality. This strict separation of meaning and being (and thus also of art and truth) is, as has already been shown, characteristic of the essence of everyday consciousness – which, for this reason, may indeed admire art, may even find in it a ‘respite’, possibly an ‘exaltation’, but it cannot really understand it under the conditions of an ontology of meaningless being.
So long as one draws a division between being as meaningless and meaning as beingless, one is at most in a position to talk about art but not about that which art itself talks about, because then art cannot be conferred its own claim to knowledge and truth. A genuine claim to knowledge and truth in art would reveal that knowledge and truth do not refer exclusively, in the mode of object knowledge, to literally ‘naked’ being, but, equally in the mode of self-knowledge, to the complex double aspect of reality – that is, to the unity of being and meaning that is differentiated in itself. If such a strict division is drawn between both dimensions of human existence, between being and meaning, as required by a consistent ontology of meaninglessness, then art (like human being) becomes an absurd exception to the rule of meaningless being, and cannot be authoritative for the understanding of reality because this understanding must orient itself to the ‘normal case’ of the meaninglessness of being.
That in this way both art and human being appear, under the hegemony of an ontology of meaninglessness, as ‘exceptions’, which may briefly jar thinking but must remain in the end insignificant for the universal understanding of being and the world, forges between them a peculiar relationship. One may presume that the enigma of the human double essence of being – that one is at home both in being and in meaning – reappears in the enigma of art. For this reason, one can anticipate that a deeper understanding of the specific truth of art will open up our understanding of the specific truth and dignity of human existence.
One can illustrate the extent to which aesthetic experience deviates from the norm of an ontology of meaninglessness again with the primordial phenomenon of understanding a text. When reading a poem or a novel, one is occupied primarily with the meaning of what is read. While the meaning is indeed accessible only by means of the being of a certain book with certain physical properties, by means of certain pages of paper with letters formed in such and such a way, competent reading may emancipate itself from these literal starting conditions to devote itself entirely to the adventure of understanding the meaning. No less a figure than Paul Valéry compared for this reason the essence of poetry with the peculiar art of reading. Poetry suffers the fate, namely, of being ‘judged by many people who have not the slightest idea of the musical qualities of speech, and who do not know how to read [qui ne savent pas lire]’ (1960, 176). To counter this, Valéry refers to the fundamental difference between the text that is merely looked at and the text that is actually read (le texte vu, le texte lu): ‘These two modes of looking are independent of each other. The text looked at and the text read are two completely different things, for the attention given to the one excludes the attention given to the other’ (1957/60, 1247).3
Whoever looks at a text directs attention to its objective properties: colour and the quality of the paper, the spatial shape of the black figures, including their arrangement in smaller and larger groups. While much is accessible to this person, one thing is not: the meaning of the text, which discloses itself only to the one who does not look at the text but rather reads it, and thus ‘annihilates’ the objective properties of the text, as Valéry says. This is because readability is the ‘quality of a text that prepares and facilitates its consumption, its annihilation by the spirit, its transubstantiation in events of the spirit’ (1247).4
Empirical particulars of a text, each of which I can consider and recognize separately, are in the first instance, on the literal level of reality – that is, isolated from an overarching unity, nothing more than what they are. In such a consideration and recognition, they make no sense, because everything isolated is meaningless in its isolation. Meaning always entails an overarching unity of meaning because the unity determines the meaning of the individual, while meaning is what it is – that is, it means what it means – only in and through this unity. The art of reading in the sense of understanding thus presupposes the power to emancipate oneself from the literal immediacy of the visually given details in order to place them in a context. And so the adventure of freedom and of understanding may begin.
It is important to point out here that the literal being of the world is not simply crossed out in reading once this being is understood within the scope of a narrative ontology of meaning. Rather, letters are precisely the things that need to be interpreted and understood in the context. The meaning of the text is its meaning in its literalness. Letters thus constitute the empirical reality of a text. They must be carefully considered, and at the same time transcended, in order for one to become aware of the meaning manifest in a fundamental change in aspect of reality, in becoming transparent towards meaning.
Not only is empirical reality of being compatible with the transcendental reality of meaning (which implies a transcendental ideality of being); more than that, literalness and meaning stand in a strict relation to one another. In this way, the fatal dualism of being and meaning is overcome.