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Narrative Ontology
Narrative Ontology
Axel Hutter
Translated by Aaron Shoichet
polity
Originally published in German as Narrative Ontologie © Mohr Siebeck GmbH & Co. KG
Tübingen, 2017
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022
Polity Press
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or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4391-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4392-2 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hutter, Axel, 1961- author. | Schoichet, Aaron, translator.

Title: Narrative ontology / Axel Hutter ; translated by Aaron Schoichet.
Other titles: Narrative Ontologie. English
Description: English edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity Press, [2021]
| “Originally published in German as Narrative Ontologie, Mohr Siebeck GmbH & Co.
KG Tübingen, 2017.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “An
original work of philosophy that highlights the connection between self-understanding
and narrative form”-- Provided by publisher.
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Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the
human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in
any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose
for which it has always been intended. Or is any riddle solved by my
surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life as much of a riddle as our
present life?
Wittgenstein
Foreword
Markus Gabriel
According to a widespread conception which might as well be called

a worldview, reality is intrinsically meaningless. By its very nature, it
is utterly foreign to our human desire to find meaning in our lives, an
opaque in itself, at best explainable in terms of causal, natural-scientific
models. Yet this very worldview raises the issue of how to conceive of our
experience of meaning and value that seems to be constitutive of what it
is to be someone, a subject or a self.
Axel Hutter’s magnificent book questions this worldview by putting
our quest for meaning centre stage. To be someone is not some kind of
illusion hovering over the meaningless ocean of physical reality. Rather,
being someone, a self, is inextricably bound up with our capacity to tell
and understand stories in which we are involved. In short, Hutter redis-
covers the depth of narrations without falling into the trap of accepting
the meaninglessness of the universe only in order to confront it with the
desperate attempt to cover up an existential void with mere myth. In that
important sense, Hutter’s narrative ontology resists the romantic tempta-
tion of accepting the disenchantment by wishing to re-enchant nature.
His starting point is a precise and astonishingly revealing, innova-
tive analysis of the idea of repetition, so prominent in the existentialist
tradition. He bases his insight on a philosophical reading of one of the
most difficult modern novels, Thomas Mann’s late magnum opus, Joseph
and His Brothers. In Narrative Ontology, he manages to demonstrate how
we can overcome nihilism by way of drawing on Mann’s insight that we
always have to tell and retell stories that are transmitted to us so as to
resonate with the core of human subjectivity, i.e., our capacity to lead a
life in light of a conception of ourselves. Subjectivity is the indispensable
starting point of every enterprise of making sense of what it means for us
to exist, which includes the incoherent attempt to reject the very idea of
meaningfulness.
Hutter’s book not only offers a convincing and, in many respects,
pathbreakingly novel account of a narrative ontology of the self, but at
the same time provides the reader with an account of normative self-
viii Foreword
constitution, of what we call ‘Geist’ in our neck of the woods. Narrative

Ontology is a mature and important piece of contemporary philosophy in
Germany, a work that equally addresses issues in the theory of subjectiv-
ity, normativity and general ontology.
Given the importance of the issues dealt with in the pages that follow
and the innovative way of dealing with them, I hope that the book will
receive the reception it deserves also in the English-speaking world.
Preface
The present enquiry devotes itself critically to the three ideas that have
belonged since time immemorial to the heart of philosophical reflection:
freedom, God and immortality. Their inherent connection has disap-
peared from our thought. We barely pay attention to the latter two, and
the inflationary use of the first one (as compensation, as it were) has made
it as vacuous as the others.
This enquiry’s critical aim is thus to remind philosophy of its genuine
task: only in understanding itself as a mode of human self-knowledge that
articulates itself in these three ideas will philosophy do justice to its own
concept.
For the critical discussion of the central ideas of self-knowledge, the
book sees in Thomas Mann an ally whose novel Joseph and His Brothers
has more to say about freedom, God and immortality than does academic
philosophy of the present era. The enquiry places itself between all posi-
tions so that anyone who picks it up can, without difficulty, identify what
it is not. The professional philosopher who expects an academic treatise
on ontology will find fault in the fact that it deals for long stretches with
Thomas Mann’s Joseph novel. The scholar of German studies who expects
an academic treatise on Thomas Mann will find fault with the fact that it
pursues for long stretches speculative – indeed metaphysical – thoughts.
For these reasons, the present work will deliberately refrain from an
explicit treatment of secondary literature. This is because the philosophi-
cal enquiry does not aim to talk about Thomas Mann but, rather, in a
narrative manner, about that which he himself talks about: the thought
that the meaning of human freedom consists in living in similitude.
This thought is admittedly not easy to understand, for understanding
it requires having a justified judgement whether it is true or not. Such an
insight can be gained, however, only within the framework of a philo-
sophical enquiry.
Contents
Foreword by Markus Gabriel vii

Prefaceix
Introduction
The Art of Self-Knowledge 3
Self-Knowledge – The Intangibility of the I – Who’s Speaking?
– Narrative Meaning – Meaning and Being – The Project of a
Narrative Ontology – The Truth of Art – Thomas Mann as Model
– The Enigma of Human Being – Freedom – Selfhood as Character
Part One The Stories of Jacob

1 The Ambiguity of the I 39
The Leitmotif – The Original Scene – Readings – The Unrest
of the Blessing – Identity of Form and Content – The Narrative
Decentring of the I – Coined Archetypes – Isaac’s ‘Blindness’ –
Selfhood as Self-Understanding
2 The World Theatre 55
The Thought-Model of the Actor – The World as Stage – History
– Meaning of Life? – The Author as Narrator and Reader –
Meaning as Happiness or Happiness as Meaning – Connecting
Thoughts – Cain and Abel – The Role of Human Being – The
Dignity of Universality – Humanity in Each Person
3 Narrative Irony 74
Deception and Disappointment – Leah – Day and Night
– Nonsense – Jacob’s Four Deceptions – The Denied Sacrifice –
Dialectic of Spiritual Inheritance – Hope – Joseph’s Gift – Mercy
of the Last Deception
xii Contents
Part Two Time and Meaning

4 The Well of the Past 101
Ontology of Egoism – Self-Respect – Descent into Hell –
Wandering – The Abyss of Time – Desperation of Passing Time
– Memento Mori – Promise and Expectation – Time that Cannot
Be Enumerated – The Feast of the Narrative
5 How Abraham Discovered God 121
Where to Begin? – The Adventure of Self-Knowledge – In the
Image of God – Self-Knowledge and Knowledge of God – The
Courage for Monotheism – Not the Good, but the Whole – God’s
History? – Model and Succession – Theology of Narration
6 What Are Human Beings, that You Are Mindful of Them? 144
Higher Echelons – Human Reason and Language – Evil – On the
Economy of Morality – The Narratable World of What Happens –
Who Narrates? – The Novel of the Soul – Very Serious Jokes – In
Praise of Transience
Part Three The Stories of Joseph

7 The Future 173
Self-Love – Wit in Language – Ambiguity of the Talent –
Knowledge of the Future? – Being on One’s Way – Sympathy
– Certainty of Death – The Dreamer of Dreams – The Catastrophe
8 The Dying Grain 192
The Oracle – The Simile of the Dying Grain – Joseph’s Awakening
– Compassion – The Illusory Character of Individuality – The
Truth of Illusion – At the Empty Grave – The Other Simile –
History in Becoming
9 Only a Simile 218
Joseph in Egypt – Historical and Narrative Attentiveness –
Laban’s Realm – Huya and Tuya – Egypt as Symbol – The
Sphinx – Interpreting Dreams – Pharaoh – Letter and Spirit of
Understanding – Interpretation of God – Historical and Narrative
Truth – Play and Allusion
Conclusion
Making Present 271
Diagnosis of Time – Nihilism as Human Self-Belittlement –
Abraham’s Legacy
Contents xiii
Notes280
References287
Index290
Introduction
The Art of Self-Knowledge
Self-Knowledge – The Intangibility of the I – Who’s Speaking? –

Narrative Meaning – Meaning and Being – The Project of a Narrative
Ontology – The Truth of Art – Thomas Mann as Model – The Enigma of
Human Being – Freedom – Selfhood as Character
Self-Knowledge
‘Know thyself!’ The commandment of the Delphic Oracle has defined the
intellectual development of humanity like no other. To be sure, the enig-
matic adventure that it calls for has long ago disappeared behind a nearly
impenetrable veil of supposed familiarity and self-evidence, such that the
commandment was able to sink into a mere facet of general education,
into a formula one is fond of quoting.
For this reason, an introductory attempt will be made to regain
the original radicality and enigmatic character of the question of self-
knowledge, of human beings enquiring into their selves – a character
that fundamentally distinguishes this question from all other epistemic
questions. Self-knowledge by no means follows the familiar paths of
‘normal’ knowledge, which is at home in our everyday dealings in the
world.
Rather, self-knowledge distinguishes itself specifically from our usual
knowledge, and the enigmatic singularity of this knowledge is concealed
when it is conceived of in analogy to the allegedly familiar knowledge
of objects – and thus misunderstood from the ground up. At first glance,
nothing appears to speak against grasping the ‘self’ in ‘self-knowledge’
as if it simply designated the object of this knowledge. Just as knowing
can aim at a tree, a house or a stone, in the case of self-knowledge it
could aim quite analogously at the self. The expression ‘self-knowledge’
would simply pick out a particular piece of knowledge from the multi-
tude of all possible knowledge by specifying more precisely the object of
knowledge.
4 Narrative Ontology
Seen from this perspective, self-knowledge would be comparable (in

accordance with its form) to all other kinds of human knowledge, all of
which would differ from each other with respect to their different objects
(in accordance with their content). Knowing would then be similar to a
telescope, itself remaining unchanged and serving as a means, in always
the same manner, to behold diverse objects and to bring them ‘closer’.
Knowledge of a tree looks at the tree, knowledge of a house at the house,
and self-knowledge, accordingly, at the self.
Yet the self at issue in self-knowledge is the self that puts itself in ques-
tion. The self that makes self-knowledge into a unique and enigmatic kind
of knowledge is not the object but rather the subject of knowledge. Herein
lies precisely the radical difference between knowledge of something other
and knowledge of oneself; when understood appropriately, this differ-
ence opens up in the first place the possibility of genuine self-knowledge
by making us aware of its incompatibility with other kinds of knowledge.
The tree that is the object of knowledge is obviously not the subject of this
knowledge; by contrast, the self that is to know itself in self-knowledge is
very much indeed the subject.
For this reason, the Delphic commandment aims at a quite peculiar
form of knowledge that, as self-knowledge, distinguishes itself specifi-
cally from the usual knowledge of objects or knowledge of something
other. In self-knowledge, the self ought to know itself precisely as itself,
that is, as subject – a task that would be misguided from the start if the
subject sought to know itself only as object, and thus precisely not to
know itself. A knowledge that takes into account the self only as an object
of knowledge can learn a lot, but none of what it learns may be regarded
as genuine self-knowledge.
This difference between knowledge of something other and knowl-
edge of oneself, which is far from self-evident, is what first makes clear
why ‘Know thyself!’ is uttered as an imperative: the imminent and always
present possibility of fundamentally misunderstanding oneself as a mere
object of knowledge makes self- knowledge into a normative demand,
which one can satisfy but also fall short of satisfying by misunderstand-
ing oneself as an object among objects and forgetting oneself as subject.
Self-knowledge is for this reason not primarily characterized by a certain
‘what’, but rather a certain ‘how’ of knowledge, from which the ‘what’
(the enigmatic reality of the self) results in the first place. One can violate
the commandment of self-knowledge not merely by failing to follow it,
but just as well by confusing the ‘how’ of knowledge of oneself with the
‘how’ of the knowledge of something other, without knowing to distin-
guish between the two.
This art of distinguishing, demanded by the Delphic commandment,
becomes clear in the classical model in which the striving for self-
knowledge in the history of human spirit takes shape. The exemplary
pioneer in embarking on the adventure of a radical distinction between
knowledge of oneself and knowledge of something other is Plato’s
Socrates, speaking in Phaedo: ‘I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription

has it, to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous (γελοῖον), when I do
not yet know that, to investigate irrelevant things’ (1914, 229e–230a).
Obviously, Socrates distinguishes here very precisely between self-
knowledge as it is demanded by the ‘Delphic inscription’, and knowledge
of everything else that is not the subject but the object of knowledge. And
this fundamental difference is understood as a radical difference in rank:
self-knowledge is for Socrates so important and singular that it would be
‘ridiculous’ to be interested in any knowledge of objects as long as the
commandment to know oneself has not been satisfied (which does not
mean that only few people commit such a ‘ridiculous’ mistake, as Socrates
does not tire of pointing out to his fellow citizens).
It is indeed remarkable and highly characteristic of Socrates’ thought
that he understands self-knowledge as the highest form of knowing, but
at the same time emphasizes that he does ‘not know’ himself. In Socratic
not-knowing, maximum and minimum, positing and negating, interlace
in a way that is not easy to understand: on the one hand, self-knowledge
is the most important form of knowledge, and human beings have to
seek it above all else; on the other hand, Socrates is distinguished from
his fellow citizens precisely by his peculiar non-knowledge – that is, by the
knowledge of not knowing what or who he is. Socratic non-knowledge is
thus by no means non-knowledge with respect to any objects, but, rather,
quite pointedly a non-knowledge with respect to the self. It is, then, a fore-
runner and ironic place-maker of the self-knowledge that is sought after.
The Intangibility of the I
The Socratic insight that self-knowledge is a quite peculiar form of knowl-

edge, distinct from ordinary knowledge of objects while constituting its
blind spot, has indeed never been developed into a lasting achievement
in the further course of the history of human thought. This is because the
basic orientation of everyday consciousness to ‘graspable’ things proved
overpowering, pushing itself in front of the enigmatic exceptional nature
of self-knowledge, which consequently fell again into obscurity.
Yet, precisely for this reason, the Delphic commandment of self-
knowledge constitutes the secret source of unrest and irritation in human
thought. Moreover, it is in the exceptional moments of our intellectual
history that the enigmatic non-objectifiable nature of the I is rediscovered
in always original ways and its intangibility brought into paradoxical or
ironic concepts that seek to do justice to the ‘ungraspable’ character of the
I in human self-knowledge.
Such a rediscovery finds expression with David Hume. ‘There are
some philosophers’, Hume writes, ‘who imagine we are every moment
intimately conscious of what we call our Self; that we feel its existence
and its continuance in existence.’ Of all the possible objects of knowledge,
the I, it appears, is a very special one. It is the one that is closest and most
familiar to us, the one that is easiest to comprehend and is immediately
present: there is nothing that we know better than our own self. Of all
the possible kinds of knowledge, self-knowledge would be the one, then,
that we need not demand of anyone since everyone has already achieved
it. Hume’s critique sets a powerful Socratic question mark suitable for
tearing the overly confident human self-consciousness out of its dogmatic
slumber: ‘Unluckily all these positive assertions are contrary to that very
experience, which is pleaded for them, nor have we any idea of self, after
the manner it is here explain’d.’ It must ‘be some one impression, that
gives rise to every real idea. But self or person is not any one impression.’
Consequently, ‘there is no such idea’ (2007, 164).
The I that underlies all grasping as the condition of possibility with-
draws itself (precisely for that reason?) from our conceptual grip. As
Hume observes, it does not allow for a real impression of an objective thing
to which we could trace our conception of an I. In the case of the I, there
is, then, precisely no reference given to an objectively ‘given’ object that
ordinarily lends our everyday knowledge and language a solid founda-
tion. From this it follows, however, that everything that the I grasps is the
object of a knowledge, so that it itself as the subject of knowledge becomes
a blank space of knowledge. The Delphic project of self-knowledge must,
for this reason, highlight anew time and again this peculiar ‘blank space’
of the kind of knowledge sought here (Socratic non-knowledge).
The first ‘result’ that appears in the attempt at self-knowledge is thus
an astonished puzzlement about oneself, which one also finds in Hume’s
Treatise: ‘But upon a more strict review of the section concerning personal
identity, I find 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 – u
nder the presupposition that we are dealing here with an
‘object’ of knowledge – necessarily remains empty, leading into a confus-
ing 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 experi-
ment leads again to the critical result that a self-knowledge carried out
in the mode of object k nowledge – so long as it does not deceive itself
– necessarily leads to a ‘bottomless void’ that reveals negatively to knowl-
edge 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 knowl-
edge of comprehensible objects, they face the unsatisfactory alternative
of either alienating themselves into an object of knowledge or else dis-
missing 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 – t hus 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 knowl-
edge 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 deter-
minations, 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 m entions – 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 n ow – 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 b eing – namely, of being a self or
a subject – fi
nds expression in language. Human self-consciousness articu-
lates 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 h ere – a s will need to be s hown – a grasp-
able 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 name the respective name as soon as I recognize the
person: ‘That is P. M.’; ‘That is K. S.’ In this series, I can then also say:
‘That’s me there!’ What is remarkable here is that I can always also be
mistaken: ‘That’s me there! – oh no, it is K. S., who looks deceptively
similar to me in the photo.’
In contrast to this use of ‘I’ as object that is fundamentally open to error,
the use of ‘I’ as subject is distinguished precisely in that the possibility for
error towards objects is categorically ruled out. According to Wittgenstein,
‘there is no question of recognizing a person when I say I have toothache.
To ask “are you sure that it’s you who have pains?” would be nonsensical.
Now, when in this case no error is possible, it is because the move which
we might be inclined to think of as an error, a “bad move”, is no move of
the game at all’ – in this unique language game, that is, in which ‘I’ is used
not as object but, rather, as subject (67).
Wittgenstein does not tire of pointing out that usual speech veils the
strong difference between the use as object and the use as subject, since it
is primarily directed at weak – that is, ‘objective’ – differences within the
world of objects. For this reason, according to Wittgenstein, we should
take note: ‘The difference between the propositions “I have pain” and “he
has pain” is not that of “L. W. has pain” and “Smith has pain”’ (68). The
difference between ‘L. W.’ and ‘Smith’ designates an objectifiable differ-
ence (analogous to the difference between two different stones or photos),
whereas the difference between ‘I’ and ‘L. W.’ marks in the medium of
language the incomparably more radical difference between knowledge of
oneself and knowledge of something other.
The fact – w
hich at first glance may seem p erplexing – is summarized
by Wittgenstein in two sentences: ‘The word “I” does not mean the same
as “L. W.” even if I am L. W.’; ‘But that doesn’t mean: that “L. W.” and
“I” mean different things’ (67). The first sentence makes once again clear
the strong difference between the use of ‘I’ as subject and its use as object:
it emphasizes that the meaning of ‘I’ when used as subject may not be
confused with the meaning of a name that refers through identification
to the I in the objective sense. For this reason, the second sentence warns
against misunderstanding the strong difference – between that which the
enigmatic meaning of ‘I’ indicates linguistically when it is used as subject
and that which can be recognized and identified as an object – as a weak
difference between different things or objects of knowledge.
This is the mistake made by the widespread opinion that, for each of us,
our I is our closest and most familiar object of knowledge, for it confuses
a relative difference within the world of objects with the absolute differ-
ence between subject and object, between ‘I’ and ‘L. W.’ That I cannot err
in the use of ‘I’ as subject should not be ascribed to a wondrous capacity
to never make a wrong move in the game of objectification, but rather
grasped as the enigmatic phenomenon that no wrong move can be made
because the use of ‘I’ as subject does not even participate in the game of
object knowledge.
The I of the individual human being as the subject of knowledge is for
this reason not simply a different object of knowledge; in fact, it demands
a completely different form of knowledge – namely, self-knowledge. The
I cannot be known like a tree or a s tone – but also not like a psychological
state. Wittgenstein’s decisive place in contemporary thought rests, above
all, on the fact that he has renewed for the present age the Socratic idea
of philosophy as self-knowledge in an original way in the medium of
language analysis. The ordinary understanding of language tends to
overlook the enigmatic unique character of the I and self-knowledge, for in
language countless distinctions can easily be articulated (white or black,
even or odd, he or she), leading one to overlook the incomparably more
difficult distinction between weak and strong distinctions, which is itself
a strong distinction. At the same time, the circumstance that language
threatens to blur certain distinctions can l ikewise – a s Wittgenstein s hows
– be expressed in language, even if this requires a special effort to articu-
late and understand appropriately this critique that thinks with language
against language.
In the end, Wittgenstein’s critique of language remains faithful,
however, to the primarily negative character of Socratic non-knowledge:
‘The kernel of our proposition that that which has pains or sees or thinks
is of a mental nature is only that the word “I” in “I have pains” does not
denote a particular body, for we can’t substitute for “I” a description of a
body’ (74). Yet now the question arises: how is one to recognize the truth
of this negative insight, and at the same time move beyond it? While the
insight into the intangibility of the I is indeed the indispensable beginning
of all genuine self-knowledge, it c annot – f or the reasons just alluded t o –
represent already the whole of a concrete self-knowledge rich in content.
Narrative Meaning
The unrest caused by the Delphic commandment of self-knowledge arises

from the antinomy of a double impossibility: the impossibility of defining
the I in positive terms like an object, and the impossibility of being satis-
fied with a purely negative definition. The second impossibility should
not tempt one simply to ignore and push aside the critical insight into the
fundamental ‘intangibility’ of the I from Socrates to Wittgenstein. This
insight must, on the contrary, remain permanently present in human self-
knowledge. More specifically, the task consists precisely in finding a form
of expression and representation that is appropriate to the unrepresentable
character of the I, a form of concretely addressing the self and articulating
its radically non-objectifiable character.
For this purpose, one can draw on the insight recently outlined, namely,
that there is a peculiar reciprocal dependence between the I and language.
While it is indeed correct that the predominantly objective orientation
of our everyday understanding of language leads us to conceive of the
meaning of ‘I’ in analogy to the meaning of words such as ‘stone’ or
‘house’, it is nonetheless possible, by means of a critical effort of thought,
to become aware that there is a double aspect to the meaning of the word
‘I’, which is overlooked in the superficial understanding of language.
Language has available an alternative dimension of meaning that cannot
be understood as reference to an object and that, for this very reason, may
offer a means to express and represent self-knowledge concretely.
This alternative dimension of meaning of language can be clarified quite
precisely – and here is the main thought of the following investigation –
by attending to the overall meaning of a text, as opposed to attending to
isolated words. What this means for human self-knowledge, then, is that
this knowledge is accordingly not concerned with an isolated reality, but
rather with the peculiar overall meaning or unity of meaning of human
existence: not with isolated events, but rather with the whole of the life story.
The peculiar context of meaning of a life story cannot be fixed purely as a
present ‘object’, but rather can only be narrated within the epic extension
of time and understood in this genuinely narrative form.
Human striving for self-knowledge is, for this reason, to be grasped
concretely as a basic striving to understand oneself, the meaning of one’s
individual life story in which the self articulates itself temporally, in
the same way in which we understand a narrative, in which a narrative
meaning unfolds. Yet the fact that we seek this self-understanding makes
unmistakably clear that, in our life story, we firstly and for the most
part do not understand ourselves. Thus, standing since Socrates at the
beginning of all self-knowledge is the honest admission that we do not
know o urselves – that is, that we do not understand the meaning of our
individual life story.
If one admits, however, that one does not understand oneself in one’s
individual life story, then one must at least have some idea of what it
means to understand oneself. Otherwise, the non-understanding would

not appear as a deficiency to the one who lacks understanding, and the
unrest of self-knowledge could not be awakened. It is language that displays
for human beings this important initial clue of the self-understanding that
is sought, the ‘preschool’, as it were, of self-knowledge that understands:
seeking to understand oneself in the entirety of one’s life story means
having trained one’s desire to understand with the understanding of nar-
rative contexts of meaning. It is just as impossible to understand narrative
meaning as it is to understand the life story of a person in a simple,
instantaneous grasp – i ndeed, narrative meaning can only be understood
by patiently examining the unity of narration in its genuinely temporal
organization.
What does it mean, though, to understand the narrative meaning of a
narrative or a story? How is narrative understanding itself to be under-
stood? These questions make clear that the understanding of linguistic
meaning is by no means so ‘simple’ and self-evident as it may appear at
first glance, and in the usual context of a well-rehearsed communication. It
also holds here that one can find, lying behind the veil of presumed famili-
arity and self-evidence, an enigmatic adventure. Corresponding directly
to the art of self-knowledge is thus an art of understanding. The peculiar
elective affinity between self-knowledge and understanding stems from
the fact that understanding a complex narrative unity of meaning and the
understanding of one’s own life sought in self-knowledge are in agree-
ment: what they are directed at can be articulated only in time.
Thus, the usual account of understanding a word, according to which
one is able to point to the object to which the word refers, is of little help for
the art of understanding that is sought here.1 If the context of meaning of
a complex text evidently means more, and something other, than the sum
of its single words, what, then, does it refer to? Important for the concrete
context of meaning is how the words in the sentence, and the sentences in
the text, follow each other temporally. This peculiar dimension of meaning
of language that is articulated in the temporal organization of its parts
may, for good reason, be called the narrative dimension of meaning of
language, for the narrative represents, as it were, the primordial form
of a linguistic context of meaning. In this form, the meaning that is to be
understood comes down, above a ll – besides and independent of all par-
ticulars in their isolation – to their temporal composition and sequence.2
Now the same holds, though, for the life story of a human being, for
understanding single actions and events is only one aspect of our life,
while it is a thoroughly different and more important aspect to under-
stand the narrative unity of one’s own life story. For this reason, it is
precisely the narrative-historical dimension of meaning of our life that
we actually seek to understand and about which we are in the first place
clueless, as versed as we may be in ‘understanding’ individual events of
our life. The fact that the unity of meaning means something more and
something other than the sum of all its particulars must not lead to divorc-
ing the context from its particulars entirely. In both cases, in the case of a
narrative and in the case of a life story, the following holds: we must first
learn to spell before we can read. This is immediately clear when we do
not have a good command of the language in which a text (for instance,
a novel) is written. Here, we are still struggling so much with the details
of the language that w e – to use a telling p
hrase – do not ‘enter into’ the
actual story, that is, into the overarching narrative unity of meaning.
Similarly, it is not until later in life, once the single ‘letters’ of human
existence are sufficiently familiar for the question concerning the over-
arching unity of meaning to be awakened, that the Socratic need for
self-knowledge stirs in us. Yet one can also observe how the initial inabil-
ity to understand the meaning of one’s own life story can lead one to
devote new, exaggerated and cramped attention to the single letters in
order to distract oneself from the daunting emptiness and meaningless-
ness of the life as a whole that one has still not understood.
Successfully spelling out a text, correctly comprehending the individual
linguistic components, is necessary for properly understanding its context
of meaning, but by no means to be equated with it. Quite the contrary,
one can say that we have not really understood a particular episode, a
particular detail of a narrative, until we have understood the story as a
whole. For this reason, it is questionable whether we can really understand
a single event of our life appropriately if we remain clueless concerning
the meaning of our life story as a whole. This cluelessness character-
izes, however, the starting place of human self-knowledge because we
precisely do not understand ourselves, our own existence in its temporal-
narrative dimension as a life story. We believe, indeed, to understand this
or that in life, but what this actually means in the context of our life s tory
– that we do not understand (which means we do not actually understand
this or that, either).
Socratic non-knowledge concerning the Delphic commandment of
self-knowledge can, for this reason, be grasped more concretely and
determinately as non-understanding concerning the peculiar dimension of
meaning of one’s own life story. Just as the art of self-knowledge responds
to an initial human non-knowledge about what or who one is, so the art of
narrating reacts to the initial cluelessness of human being concerning how
the story of one’s life is to be understood. For this reason, what is to be
understood in self-knowledge is in a sense understanding itself. In under-
standing, the non-objectifiable form of being of the subject manifests itself
exemplarily. Being a subject means being able to understand a nd – p erhaps
even more fundamentally – wanting to understand. Self-knowledge is
thus an understanding of understanding. Wanting to understand oneself
means wanting to understand not merely one’s own existence in time
but, equally, the enigmatic capacity of self-understanding as such, which
guides self-knowledge and makes the questioning subject into a subject or
an I in the first place.
Meaning and Being
What hinders us from grasping the basic thought pursued h ere – o

f under-
standing narrative meaning as a systematic guide for the enlightenment
of human self-knowledge – is the prejudice that the originary phenom-
enon of understanding meaning is not only unnecessary for knowledge
of reality, but even misleading. The crucial difference between reality
and a fictional narrative, so it seems, is that only the latter is character-
ized by the necessity of being meaningful. If fictional contexts were not
meaningful, they would not exist at all. In stark contrast to fiction, factual
reality (thus, also, one’s own life reality) is characterized precisely by
having no meaning. For the common understanding of being, this is their
fundamental difference: fiction has meaning; reality, not.
When one says ‘that is too good to be true’, one commonly means
it is too meaningful to be real. If we perceive a purpose, a recogniz-
able meaning, in reality, then we are immediately suspicious that we are
dealing not at all with ‘objective’ reality but instead merely a ‘subjective’
enactment. One senses purpose and it makes one cross. Because of the
traceable meaning, one is compelled to suspect that one is dealing not
with solid, meaningless being but, rather, with beingless m eaning – that
is, mere fiction. For reality is precisely that which is meaningless: what is
meaningless is reality.
If being is identified in this way with what is meaningless, then the
question of course remains how it is possible in the first place for there
to be an irritation by meaning. If what is real is meaningless in being real,
then it is not clear how, under this condition, the irritating illusion of
meaning is at all possible. How does the illusion of meaning enter being
that is taken in itself to be meaningless? The answer ordinarily reads as
follows: by human being. We ourselves are the ones, then, who introduce
the illusion of meaning into the solid, objective, thoroughly meaning-free
reality of being, whether it be by psychic projection, social construction or
other means. In each case, it is the very dubious privilege of human beings
to infuse reality with the appearance of meaning and, at the same time,
to be the lonely consumer of their own product they call ‘meaning’, for
objective being is defined in being strictly separated from meaning and
fully indifferent towards it. Such meaningless being can at best be known,
but not – l ike the meaning of a narrative – be understood.
Both dimensions of human existence, being and meaning, are in this
way dualistically torn apart. The one half forms the basis of a knowledge
of being exonerated of the demand of understanding, while the other half,
in turn, forms the basis of the market of illusory meanings, exonerated of
the demand of truth. Yet a meaning projected by a human being onto the
meaningless world can in the end be nothing more than an ineffective
consolation, or even an ideological concealment of the incurable despair
that an ontology of meaningless being necessarily has ready for someone
who, in understanding, is oriented towards meaning.
In the context of an ontology of meaningless being, humans must appear

to themselves as incomprehensible strangers in the midst of a reality radi-
cally indifferent to them. The meaning they refer to in understanding – in
listening as in s peaking – may be grasped more specifically as a moral
postulate, 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, excep-
tion 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 mean-
ingless. Humans must accordingly grasp their own existence as an
absurd chance event, while their demand for a comprehensive under-
standing 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 ‘sub-
jectivity’ 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 meaning-
less being, and thus ought to be exposed as ultimately untenable and
illusory ways of speaking. Both half-measures – the production of con-
venient meanings exonerated of the demand of truth, and the production
of useful knowledge exonerated of the demand of u nderstanding – 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 posi-
tion 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 char-
acter 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 ‘objec-
tive’ 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 b eing – 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 expres-
sion 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 e arth . . .
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 p oint – n
amely, 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 c riticize – w ith 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 col-
oured 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 in the phenomenon and veiled
in its forms, that which is related to the phenomenon as the thought or
idea is to the words’ (1969b, 183–4).
Thus, humans adopt two positions towards reality, which, in turn, exhib-
its 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 know-
able 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 some-
thing 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 fun-
damental 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 uncom-
promisingly, is at the same time the transcendental ideality of ‘precisely the
same’ being. Yet, in this way, the critical path is opened to a transcenden-
tal 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 o ssified – o
ne. 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 for-
gotten 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 liveli-
ness 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 o bjects – t hat 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 u s – 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’ knowl-
edge 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 of a fixed – a nd, for
this reason, meaningless – being, he emphasizes the radical temporality of
a linguistic – and thus meaningful – b eing. 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 subjec-
tive projection that slips away powerlessly from the ‘hard’ facts of reality.
This is why Kant and Schopenhauer emphasize by contrast the objec-
tive 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, tempo-
rally 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 mis-
understandings that amount to a forgetting of its original impetus. This
enquiry looks to make a contribution to a critical ontology of meaning fol-
lowing 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 c ompensation – ultimately, a withdrawal
from the world.
The meaning of art constitutes, then, its own realm of beautiful ‘appear-
ance’, 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 c onsciousness – 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 r eality – 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 understand-
ing must orient itself to the ‘normal case’ of the meaninglessness of being.
That in this way both art and human being appear, under the hegem-
ony 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 under-
standing 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 pri-
mordial 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 recog-
nize separately, are in the first instance, on the literal level of r eality – t hat
is, isolated from an overarching unity, nothing more than what they are. In
such a consideration and recognition, they make no sense, because every-
thing 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 becom-
ing transparent towards meaning.
Not only is empirical reality of being compatible with the transcenden-
tal 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.
Meaning is certainly distinct from being, yet at the same time, in this distinc-
tion, strictly related to being; meaning does not lose its unique character
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 mean-
ingfully 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 pros-
pect 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 simplisti-
cally related to the empirical ‘letters’ of reality or to the p sychological
e xperiences of the subject. The art of language is thus no longer mis-

construed 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 litera-
ture (which art science and literary studies also do), but rather, and above
all, about that which art and literature themselves talk a bout – 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 respec-
tive 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 con-
ceptually 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 phi-
losophy 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 cantanker-
ous 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 intel-
lect 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 revo-
lutionary 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 buc-
caneer’ 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 phi-
losopher 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 phi-
losophy 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 main-
tains 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 bour-
geois philosopher (like Schiller’s bread-and-butter scholar) is instinctively
hostile to the ‘artist of knowledge’ since the latter is devoted to the intel-
lectual 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 cosmo-
politan 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 famous polemic against the philosophical bread-and-
butter scholar and university instructor of his time takes up this central
fundamental Kantian distinction by accusing the academic philosopher of
being indifferent towards the specific austerity of human self-knowledge
required by the cosmopolitan concept of philosophy: ‘For normally a
teacher of philosophy would be the last person to whom it would occur
that philosophy could in effect be dead earnest.’ The actual earnestness of
philosophy lies for Schopenhauer, however, not in fixating a being, but
rather in the interpretative understanding of a meaning: ‘in seeking a key
to our – as enigmatic as it is precarious – existence’ (2014, 127).
Precisely because the ‘bread- and-
butter scholar’ grasps everything
intellectual from the bourgeois viewpoint of success, of social recognition
and convenience, subjectivity cannot appear in his science since he grasps
this science from the outset not in the Socratic sense of self-knowledge but,
rather exclusively in the selfish sense of private narrow-mindedness, and
thus obscures it. As an intellectual buccaneer, Nietzsche sticks his finger
right in this wound of bourgeois scholarship when he characterizes his
own philosophy by the freedom of self-knowledge – that is, by the ‘lack
of ability to keep silent about the universal secret, and the irresponsible
tendency to see what no one wants to see – himself’ (1986, 44). Precisely
this ‘irresponsibility’ is the only responsible way to follow the Delphic

commandment and to leave the bridge behind – or, still more, to leave the land
behind.
Thomas Mann, who places importance on not having ‘got beyond’
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, can for this reason serve as a model for
a philosophy that seeks to emancipate itself from its mere academic
concept. He is a model artist of knowledge less as a result of what he does
than of how he treats what he does. A philosophical critique of reason and
language can achieve its aim of fundamentally shifting our understanding
of the world and ourselves only insofar as it first succeeds, as a precondi-
tion for everything further, in shifting how something is understood to
begin with. For this reason, the decision to turn to Thomas Mann for
orientation is by no means extrinsic to the philosophical path of thought,
but rather a methodological consequence of the intent to revolutionize a
‘way of thinking’ by orienting to the ‘how’ of the linguistic and narrative
understanding of meaning.
The Enigma of Human Being
The second reason this philosophical enquiry seeks to connect with

Thomas Mann is that he accommodates a narrative ontology of meaning
by contemplating, in his way, the same fundamental question. That is why
the present essay will have less to say about Thomas Mann and his work
and more about what Thomas Mann himself seeks to speak about: critical
resistance to an ontology of meaningless being and the project of a narra-
tive ontology of meaning in the interest of human self-knowledge.
On numerous occasions, he declares that there is one question around
which his thinking and writing constantly revolve. As prepared as he
is, though, to address this one question as a ‘question of faith’, he main-
tains a distance to the traditional concepts of belief and disbelief: ‘Belief?
Disbelief? I barely know what the one is and what the other is’; ‘Deepest
scepticism regarding both, so-called belief and so-called disbelief, is my
only identification if one catechizes me’ (1994, 297). One can see here a
fundamental feature of Thomas Mann’s intellectual physiognomy. He
maintains equal sceptical distance to belief and disbelief because he sus-
pects that both lack sceptical distance by taking their own matter, whether
it be disbelief or belief, too literally. In this way, they fail to gain that
peculiar freedom of understanding which always presupposes a sceptical
and ironic distance to what is literally given. For this reason, Thomas
Mann believes this belief, which distances itself equally from ‘so-called’
disbelief and belief – both of which, in their unfree fixation on the literal,
fail entirely to understand what they ‘disbelievingly’ deny or ‘believingly’
affirm – is to be found precisely in this freedom of understanding.
The sceptical and ironic freedom towards literal being, characteristic
for Thomas Mann, is made exemplarily clear in his decisive rejection of
every ‘piety’, starting from the given world: ‘But what does one demand
that I believe? A “God” that the Einsteinian universe created and for this
demands prostration, worship, unlimited subjugation? Why indeed. The
Einsteinian universe could be still much greater and more complicated
as it obviously is and would still allow me a posture completely free of
enthusiasm towards its creator’ (297). According to Thomas Mann, God
does not reveal Himself in any being of any kind, however great and
complicated it may be. God reveals Himself at most in meaning, and
indeed not in this or that meaning but rather in meaning as such – t hat is,
in the primordial phenomenon of being intelligible and in the enigmatic
capacity of humans being able to distance themselves sceptically and
ironically from all being in the desire for understanding. In other words,
God reveals Himself at best in that enigmatic freedom that allows what
is sensually given to become a question to human beings, to become the
letter of a text that they are not to affirm or deny blindly, but rather to
understand.
Thomas Mann expresses this conviction as follows: ‘We are so densely
surrounded by the eternal enigma that one would have to be an animal
to drive it out of one’s mind merely for one day’ (297). The sentence is at
the same time an example of the fact that Thomas Mann’s remarks can be
understood correctly only when one succeeds in allowing the string on
which the respective remark is ‘tuned’ to resonate in the resonance body
of the history of spirit and philosophy. In the present case it is – a s it often
is – a comment by Schopenhauer that Thomas Mann varies and adapts.
Schopenhauer’s comment reads as follows: ‘No beings, with the
exception of man, feel surprised at their own existence’ (1969b, 160). The
difference between human beings and animals consists, then, precisely in
this enigmatic freedom – that is, that human beings do not simply accept
the self-evidence of being as given, but instead become themselves a ques-
tion, an enigma. And yet human being is no ordinary enigma that does
not know, itself, that it is one; on the contrary, the enigma of human being
consists precisely in that human beings become an enigma to themselves,
that they wonder at their capacity to wonder, that they want to under-
stand their desire to understand.
The wonder with which Schopenhauer, like Plato and Aristotle, situ-
ates the beginning of philosophy is not directed at an enigma separate
from the wonder; rather, the wonder itself is the enigma. The enigma
of human beings is a capacity to wonder, which radically distinguishes
them from all natural beings. In the enigmatic capacity to wonder at being
in general and at one’s own existence in particular, there lies an ironic
distance to being. This freedom awakens the question concerning the
meaning of being, and with it the almost even more enigmatic capacity
of humans for language, to interpret, to read the literal with a view to
understanding the meaning.
It is now possible to articulate much more definitely the thesis men-
tioned at the beginning that the human self is no object but rather a
subject: I, as a human being, am what I am as an ‘I’ by relating to myself,

becoming an enigma to myself and seeking to interpret myself. Or, in
other words, the enigma of human being consists in the fact that we are
beings who seek to understand themselves, and yet in the first instance
fail to understand themselves.
For this reason, for Thomas Mann, the question of humans concerning
themselves is the clear sign for the fact ‘that humans are beings that
share in spirit and that the religious element lies enacted in them, in their
duality of nature and spirit. Their position in the cosmos, their begin-
ning, their origin, their aim – that is the great mystery, and the religious
problem is the human problem, the question of humans concerning them-
selves’ (1994, 297). Human being’s unique position in the cosmos consists
precisely in that this position is a position towards the cosmos. Human
being is not only an object within the world, but equally a subject that
faces the world as such insofar as the world is an enigma and the meaning
of the world is something one enquires into. The peculiar dialectic in the
way human being takes an ironic distance towards the literal being of
the world consists, however, in that it is firstly in this distance from being
that the possibility of a genuine proximity towards being is opened up: the
proximity of understanding.
The enigmatic freedom of the human desire to understand, together
with the sceptical and ironic distance to the literal being of nature, is for
this reason the question that occupies Thomas Mann in his thinking and
writing: ‘If I call a conviction or a religio my own, then it is the conviction
that there has never been a stage at which humans were only nature and not yet
spirit. The fashionable tendency to “trace them back” to such a stage, the
mockery of ideas of the time, is most deeply abhorrent to me. Humans
have never begun and never stopped to take aim at the absolute, the idea,
out of the antinomies of their spiritual and carnal double being’ (298).
Distance to all being, which distinguishes human beings in their linguis-
tic freedom, finds expression, then, for Thomas Mann, especially in one’s
ironic self-distancing from ‘carnal’ being as thus and so; this self-distancing
makes human being into a carnal–spiritual or being–meaningful double
being that, in the free understanding of meaning, takes aim at that which
there is to understand in the understood meaning: the idea or the absolute.
For this reason, the tendency ‘to trace back’ the human double being to the
literal being of nature is for Thomas Mann at the same time a mockery of
ideas and a mockery of human being – that is, fundamentally inhuman,
indeed the actual root of all inhumanity. An ontology of meaningless
being that traces the fundamental double aspect of reality, the inherently
differentiated unity of being and meaning – as it is experienced in each
interpretation, each act of reading and understanding – one-sidedly to
the dead letter thus amounts to destroying human being. And, given that
such an ontology of meaningless being can itself be drafted by humans as
the ‘meaning’ of being, it is the unsettling proof of the human capacity for
self-alienation from oneself, going as far as self-destruction.
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quartermaster and other officials, who listened to the complaints very
serenely. When they had heard all I had to say the quartermaster
said,—
“You only gave us one hundred bushels of potatoes; how long did
you think they would last?”
“About a month I thought.”
“We have ten companies of one hundred men each. Every company
got ten bushels. That divided among one hundred men would only
give them about two messes apiece.”
“That is so,” I confessed with some confusion.
“I see,” he continued, “that you are not accustomed to feeding
armies.”
“If that is the way they eat, I don’t want the task of feeding them. I
accept your explanation, and beg you to excuse my ignorance in
these matters.”
And so we parted. I had a few minutes later, as the boys gathered
about me at the landing, the privilege of explaining why they did not
get more than two or three messes of potatoes,—that there were too
many of them. That if there had been ten men and one hundred
bushels of potatoes, instead of one thousand men and one hundred
bushels of potatoes, they would have fared better.
SAVED BY LEMONADE.
THE many-colored signal lights of the fleet of steamers at Milliken’s

Bend, and the bright camp-fires on the land, that glowed with such
unwonted splendor in the gloaming, soon all faded out of sight as our
boat steamed away toward St. Louis; and soon the black curtain of
night shut us in with its thick heavy folds like a funeral pall, and our
fight with disease and death began in earnest.
Never before in the history of wars, so full of untold agonies, did the
timbers of a steamer bear up such a burden of pain, despair, and
death, as did the City of Memphis as she steamed away from
Sherman’s army. Wherever there was room for a sick or wounded
soldier, on the cabin floor without mattress or pillow, in the
staterooms, under the stateroom berths, out on the guards, on the
top, or hurricane deck, on the lower deck, every space was filled with
sore, weary, aching human bodies, mangled or fever-smitten. Of the
seven hundred and fifty sick and wounded on board, about twenty-
five were delirious; and their pitiful cries mingled with the whirr of the
wheels, and the splash of the waters, as the monster boat, with its
heart of fire and its breath of steam, pulled heavily against the mighty
tides of the Mississippi River, were heart-breaking. No one who was
on that boat can ever forget that first night out. Nor can I be charged
with over-drawing the picture. No pencil can paint it black enough.
Nothing has ever haunted my waking and sleeping dreams, not even
the ghastly scenes of the battle-field, as the memory of the
concentrated horrors of that journey. The groans and cries of the
wounded and dying still ring through my soul; and from feelings of
compassion I draw the curtain over the darkest scenes, that even at
this distance make me shudder, and give to my readers only the
more pleasant incidents of the journey, which was in truth a funeral
march.
One man lying on the floor of the ladies’ cabin on his blanket, with
his fever-racked head on his knapsack, gave me such an appealing
look that I went to him.
“What can I do for you?” I inquired.
“You can write to my wife if you get through alive, and tell her I died
on the City of Memphis.”
“While there is life there is hope. You are not dead yet, and may not
die.”
“Oh, yes, I will! there is no chance for me. Now take down her
name,” and he gave me the name and address of his wife.
“Now I must do something to help you,” I said. “Could you drink a
cup of tea?”
“No, nothing—it’s too late.”
“Could you drink a glass of lemonade?”
How his face brightened! “Where could you get it?” he asked
eagerly.
“Make it. I have lemons and sugar, and there is a whole river full of
water at hand.”
The poor man cried with joy; and others wept, too, as they drank the
refreshing beverage, for, providentially, I had a heavy lot of lemons
with me.
The patient began to mend at once, and by the time we reached
Cairo was able to sit up.
Years afterwards I was on a Mississippi River steamer bound for St.
Louis, when I noticed a lady and gentleman regarding me with some
interest, and heard the gentleman say,—
“I am sure it is she.”
The lady came directly to me, with the question,—
“Did you come up the Mississippi River on the City of Memphis with
the wounded after Sherman’s defeat?”
“Yes, I did.”
“It’s she! It’s she!” the lady exclaimed joyfully, much to the
amusement of some of the passengers who had not heard the
question.
The gentleman joined us, and made himself known as the man who
started the lemonade treat on that doleful night. “That saved my life,”
he said reverently.
“I want you to know,” said his wife, with tears on her face, “that we
have never for a day forgotten you, though we did not know your
name. We prayed for you as the unknown lady; and the children
were taught to end their evening prayer with, ‘and God bless the
unknown lady that saved papa’s life.’”
It was a very happy and pleasant meeting, although purely
accidental.
NOT TIME TO SEND FOR THE
COLONEL.
CLINTON B. FISK was chosen colonel of a regiment made up

largely of ministers and religious men. The morality of the regiment
was a matter of favorable comment, not only in the camp where they
were drilled before leaving the State, but also as they advanced
down the Mississippi River. Some one suggested that Colonel Fisk
should do the swearing of the regiment, as he was “as religious as a
preacher.”
The colonel, who was not to be nonplussed by such a proposition,
readily accepted the duty, the men all assenting.
“Soldiers,” he said, with great gravity, “if there is any necessary
swearing to be done in this regiment, call on your colonel.”
Weeks passed, during which not an oath was heard in camp. The
first hard camping-place was at Helena, Ark. The regiment pitched
their tents on the bluff back of the town, on yellow clay, which after a
rain became like putty. It was more than a mile to the steamboat-
landing; and all the supplies had to be hauled through the miry
streets of the town and over the corduroy road,—a road made of
logs firmly fastened together,—and then up a long, steep hill, where
the mud-like yellow putty gathered upon the wheels and upon the
feet of men and beasts.
Colonel Fisk sat in his tent one day attending to official business,
when he heard one of his men, a teamster, swearing like a Hessian.
He recognized his voice, and determined to reprove the man at the
first opportunity. He had not long to wait. “John,” he called, “come
here.” John responded with a military salute, and stood before his
colonel unflinchingly.
“John, did I not hear some one swearing dreadfully down the hill a
little while ago?”
“Yes, Colonel, that was me.”
“You, John? I am surprised. Don’t you remember that I was to do the
swearing for this regiment?”
“Yes, Colonel, I know; but, you see, I was coming up the hill with a
big load, and the breeching broke. The swearing had to be done
right away, and you weren’t there to do it.” And the teamster made
the military salute and retired.
Many of the other privates were so full of wit that it was almost
impossible for the officers to reprove them. General Fisk, years
afterward, used to say laughingly, that it was little worth while to try
to argue a question with John, his teamster, as he always got the
best of the argument.
A VISIT TO PARSON BROWNLOW.
THE Confederates had been driven back from Chattanooga and

Knoxville, and the lines of railroad travel had been re-established. I
had occasion at that time to go to Knoxville. The journey was a
dangerous one; but the mission was important, and I took the
chances. I was delighted to learn, after reaching Knoxville, that
Parson Brownlow, the hero of East Tennessee, was at home. It was
afterward arranged that I should meet him at his own house.
He dwelt in an unpretentious, two-story frame structure, having a
little portico in front. Firmly attached to the little portico was a tall
flagstaff, from which floated a large Union flag. This flag had been
put up at the beginning of the war, and had never been hauled down.
Parson Brownlow was tall, lithe, and sinewy in form. His hair was
black and abundant. He was a quiet talker while conversing on
ordinary subjects; but when the war, the causes which led to it, the
plotting and scheming by which the loyal sentiment of East
Tennessee was silenced, was the theme, his eyes flashed fire, his
wit, sarcasm, and denunciation flowed in electric currents. His
sentences were short, terse, and emphatic. One could better
understand, looking into his face when he straightened himself up to
his full height and poured out his torrent of accusations, why men
whom he charged with treason and falsehood, and arraigned before
God and men, should fall back in fear and shame.
He pointed out to me the little prison, with its iron-barred windows, in
which he was for a time confined as a prisoner. The jail stood on the
bank of the River Holstein, and he was put into a cell which
overlooked the river and forest beyond. For a time his enemies had
possession of the town, and he was placed where he could see
nothing that was going on, and it was well. Many of his neighbors
who had assumed to be loyal brought out Confederate flags, which
they had kept concealed in flour-barrels, and flung them to the
breeze. But there was one Union flag which did not come down, and
that was the broad standard which floated over the little portico of
Parson Brownlow’s house.
Mrs. Brownlow, a quiet, lovely little woman, added a word in
explanation now and then; but when her boys were spoken of, she
sighed heavily as though her heartstrings would snap asunder. And
yet she had, in defence of the flag, shown uncommon courage.
There were only two children at home; one a young lady, the other a
girl of about ten or twelve years. We all stood out on the little portico,
and Miss Brownlow described to me her heroic defence of the flag
which was waving above us. She was a beautiful and stately woman;
and as she stood there that day describing the scene, when with
drawn pistol she challenged the men sent to take down that flag, she
was the most perfect personification of the Goddess of Liberty I ever
saw. As her eyes flashed fire, and her words rang out clear, full, and
emphatic, we could well understand why the men retired.
The flag was watched and defended until a Union force came to their
relief. The little force advanced carefully, until the head of the column
reached the crest of the hill which environs the place. Looking out
over the town, which was quietly sleeping in the gray of the morning,
they saw among the Confederate flags the Stars and Stripes waving
from one pole. It was like an inspiration. They made an impetuous
charge, and captured the town. The flag over Parson Brownlow’s
house never came down.
The influence of Parson Brownlow on Tennessee, and especially
East Tennessee, still lives, and will live for ages. He was a man of
great soul, of intense convictions, and of courage equal to his
convictions. If he had been a coward, his blood would have watered
the soil of Tennessee. But his courage, his wonderful mastery of the
English language, and the fearful majesty of his presence, cowed his
enemies; and those who had planned to take his life were glad to
send him away out of their presence.
My visit to Parson Brownlow, his burning words, and the story of the
flag, can never be forgotten. He was by far the ablest man
Tennessee has ever produced.
A RICH REWARD FOR SERVICES.
Saving the Life of a Brother.
I WENT out to Sedalia, which was in the heart of the State of

Missouri, with supplies.
It was a crisp winter morning in January when the train reached the
place. I went directly to a large hospital near the railroad station.
Visitors were not received at that hour; but a pass from Mr. Stanton,
Secretary of War, unbarred the door which opened from the vestibule
into a large, long room filled with cots. On each cot lay a sick or
wounded soldier.
Breakfast was being served by the attendants. Glancing down the
room, I saw one of my own brothers, a lad of sixteen, who, fired with
the war spirit, had gained consent to go. I had thought that he was a
hundred miles or more away. There was a look of utter disgust on his
face as he rejected the breakfast and waved the attendant away.
“If you can’t eat this you’ll have to do without; there is nothing else,”
was the attendant’s discouraging response. On a dingy-looking
wooden tray was a tin cup full of black, strong coffee; beside it was a
leaden-looking tin platter, on which was a piece of fried fat bacon,
swimming in its own grease, and a slice of bread. Could anything be
more disgusting and injurious to fever-stricken and wounded
patients?
And nearly every soldier in that hospital was prostrated by fever or
severe wounds; yet this was the daily diet, with little variation.
Typhoid fever and acute dysentery was the verdict of a conference of
physicians that consulted in regard to my brother.
There was little hope of his recovery. An old, experienced physician
said, “If he can have good care and nursing his recovery is possible,
but not probable.” And the sad news was telegraphed to the dear old
home. The surgeon removed him into a little inner room, and my
fight with death began in earnest.
Oh! those dreadful days and nights of watching; no joys of earth can
ever obliterate their memory.
The restless tossing of the fever-stricken ones in the adjoining room,
the groans of the wounded, the drip, drip, drip, of the leaking vessels
hung above the worst wounded ones to drop water on the bandages
and keep them cool and moist, put every nerve on the rack, and
pulsated through heart and brain till it seemed as though I should go
wild. It was an inside view of the hospitals that made me hate war as
I had never known how to hate it before.
The pitiful cry of helpless ones calling, “Nurse, nurse! water, water!”
and the weary, sleepy nurses making no response—sitting, perhaps,
fast asleep, yet willing to do their duty when I aroused them, still
rings in my ears.
The surgeon in charge and all the attendants were kind and
respectful, coming into our room on tiptoe lest their rude steps and
ways might jostle a soul, hanging by a thread, out of life. Each day a
telegram was sent to those who watched and prayed far away: “No
better—sinking.”
But a new anxiety disturbed me. The acting medical director, who
visited the hospital each day, coming in reeling drunk on the second
day, ordered that I should only be admitted for an hour each day, in
the afternoon.
No one in the hospital was ready to enforce such a brutal order.
Immediately the chief officers at Sedalia and St. Louis were advised
of the state of affairs.
The next day, when the acting medical director came into the
hospital, he was too drunk to talk plainly, or to walk without
staggering, and yet his word was law. He was not too drunk to notice
my presence when he staggered into that little room, however. He
said,—
“Madam, it’s against my rules to have any ladies in my hospitals, and
you must leave here.”
“The devotion of a sister is stronger than all hospital rules,” I
answered calmly.
“You can’t stay in this hospital. I’m boss here.” I made no answer.
One or the other of us must certainly leave that hospital. Letters and
telegrams poured in upon the chief officers at St. Louis, from all the
leading officers and surgeons in the army at Sedalia, and he was
relieved from duty before the rising of another sun. And as he was
only acting medical director, not yet having been mustered in, he
was dismissed from the service, and I never saw his face again.
There was general rejoicing throughout the hospital, the camp, and
the town, for the man had been a disgrace to the army. After this,
there were only disease and death to fight. The powers of human
endurance are wonderful. For seven days and nights I never closed
my eyes to sleep, only as I leaned my head down on the side of the
cot on which the one lay who was hovering between life and death.
My eldest brother, Dr. William H. Turner, who was a surgeon in the
Union army, came up on a leave; but as the forces were ordered on
the expedition against Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, he received a
telegram to join his command the very next day. He had little hope of
ever seeing his brother’s face again; but good nursing brought him,
and many others in that hospital, through to health again. He not
only recovered, but he returned to the army; and when his term for
three years had expired, he re-enlisted and served till the close of
the war.
He is still living. He has a ranch and a placer gold mine, with first
water rights, near Helena, Mon., where he lives with his family.
In the corner near our little room lay a fair-faced boy of sixteen. The
surgeons had given him up to die. When we looked into each other’s
faces I asked the question, “Can I do anything for you?” The tears
came welling up into his great brown eyes; and after a moment’s
struggle, he burst into tears, sobbing like a child. I laid my face down
on the pillow and cried too. No one laughed and called him babyish.
Poor boy! sick and homesick, and needing so much care and love,
and yet getting so little; lingering on the borderland, with no hand to
help, and no voice to cheer him. No wonder he cried aloud; great
stalwart men, stricken down in the midst of the fight, wounded, sick,
and sore, understood it; and tears were on many a bronzed face as,
taking his thin hands in my own, I cried with him.
As soon as he could command himself he said, “If only I could go
home, mother could nurse me up in a little while.”
“You shall go home. I’ll get you a furlough as soon as you get well
enough,” I answered hopefully.
From that hour there was a marked improvement in that patient’s
symptoms, and many other overcharged hearts were relieved by this
outburst of feeling. In less than two weeks this boy, closely wrapped
in blankets, was helped to the train, for he was going home on a
furlough. Friends were to meet him at St. Louis, and accompany him
to his home and his mother in Denmark, Iowa.
And she did nurse him up; and he returned well and strong, to beat
the drum for the rallying of the serried ranks of men, who, with set
faces and glittering steel, marched to battle.
Never was a mother more grateful than that Iowa mother was for the
little kindnesses shown to her suffering boy. I afterwards met him in
the ranks; for he came down to the Sanitary boat to meet me. He
was well and strong, and very grateful for the little help I had
rendered him.
SAVED BY A BIRD.
THE surgeon in one of the Nashville hospitals said, pointing to one

of his patients, “There is a young man slowly starving to death. His
fever is broken, and he might get well, but we cannot get him to eat
anything. If you can tempt him to eat he may recover.”
I went over and stood beside his cot. “I am glad to see you looking
so much better,” I said enthusiastically. He shook his head. “Oh, yes
you are; and now what can I bring you to eat? I’ll bring you
something real nice; what shall it be?”
“Nothing.” And he turned his face away in disgust.
“I’ll tell you what you can eat;” for I suddenly remembered that I had
seen a lot of birds hanging in a meat-shop as I came down to that
hospital; “you can eat a nice broiled bird.”
He looked up in surprise with a ghost of a smile on his face. “Maybe I
could.”
“Why, of course you could; and I will go right away and get one for
you.”
“It will be too much trouble.”
“No, it will not be a bit of trouble. You lie still and think what good
eating a bird is till it comes.”
I hurried away lest he should change his mind, bought some birds,
and took them to the Christian Commission Home, where there was
an excellent cook.
“Aunt Debby,” I said, as I marched into the kitchen with the birds, “I
want you to broil two of these birds the very best you can. A soldier’s
life depends upon them.”
“Laws, missus! You ’most scare me to death talking dat way. I’ze
weak as a rag, and ken do nuthen.”
“But you’ll do it right, and then the soldier will get well. I’ll help you.”
In a very short time two birds nicely broiled, and dressed with a little
fresh butter and a pinch of salt and pepper, lay in the bottom of a hot
covered dish. A card with the name of the hospital, the name of the
soldier, and the number of his cot, was attached to the basket; and a
half-grown colored boy in service at the house was intrusted with it,
and bore it away in haste.
“Take notice, Ben, what he does and says, so you can tell us when
you come back,” was my last injunction.
In due time Ben came back, laughing. “Did he eat them?” I
questioned eagerly.
“O missus, you o’ter ’a’ seen ’im. I sot don the basket and tooked off
de cover and held the birds up close tu ’im; an’ my, but it did smell
good! He jus’ gim it one look, den he grab one an’ begun to eat. But I
wus a-holden de dish dar, an’ he seed t’other bird, and he grabbed
dat, an’ he dove his han’ dow under ’is piller an’ brung out an ole
newspaper, and he wrapped up t’other bird and chucked it down
under his piller, and den he went on eaten as fast as he could. Oh,
golly, but wusent he hungry!” And Ben doubled himself up and
laughed as only a colored boy can laugh.
The next day I was called away to Chattanooga, and so I left all my
work in other hands. While in Chattanooga, General Hood marched
northward and broke the lines of communication between Nashville
and Chattanooga, and I was detained there several weeks. The very
day after my return I was on the streets of Nashville, and a soldier
met me with great cordiality.
“I don’t believe you know me,” he said.
“No, I don’t remember to have ever met you before,” I replied.
“I’m the man you sent the birds to.”
“I am glad to see you. How is it that you are up and out so soon?”
“Well, you see, there wasn’t anything the matter with me, but I did
not know it. I thought I was going to die, but the birds did the
business. I never did taste anything quite so nice as they were, and I
have been eating ever since, anything I could lay my hands on. And
now I am well, and am going to join my regiment.”
After a few cordial thanks and good wishes we separated, and I have
never seen him since. If these lines fall under his notice, I would like
to hear from him.
HOW MOTHER BICKERDYKE CUT
RED TAPE.
THE battle of Corinth had raged from early morning till late in the
afternoon, and then General Price was checked and forced to
retreat. The struggle had been a bloody one, and the ground was
covered with the wounded and the dead.
The Confederates made a desperate struggle to capture Fort
Robbinette. General Rogers, or “Texas Rogers” as he was usually
called, led the charge against the fort. Splendidly mounted, with a
flag in one hand and a pistol in the other, he rode up to the very
mouth of the cannon, all the while beckoning his men onward.
Reaching the ramparts, he planted the Confederate flag there, and
the next moment fell dead. But his troops surged up after him,
although the cannon of the fort mowed down great swaths of
marching men, as with set faces and bowed heads they followed
their leader.
The scenes that followed were indescribable. The human avalanche
surged up into the fort, and men, hand to hand, contended for the
mastery.
The Confederate flag waved only for a moment. Then it was torn
away, and the men who had climbed up over the ramparts were
hurled back. But still fresh relays came on. When there was not time
to reload their guns, the invaders used them as clubs, and the
fragments of many a shattered musket were left upon the field.
Texas Rogers’s horse, which had gone back riderless, came dashing
up again when the next charge was made, as though guided by
human hands, and once more turned and went back. After the
bloody conflict ended, it was found that forty-two men lay dead in a
heap where “Texas Rogers” planted his flag and died.
Hungry and utterly exhausted as were the men, who, without food or
rest, had fought all day, their first duty was to their wounded
comrades. Every available building, and every church but one, was
taken for hospital purposes; and long rows of tents were put up on
the grounds of the Ladies’ College. But there was a lack of supplies.
There were no cots or pillows—only the bare ground.
Among the heroic workers there, was Mother Bickerdyke, who could
always find supplies if they were within reach. She took some
wagons and a squad of men, and went down to the quartermaster’s
storehouse. “Come on, boys,” she said; “we will see if we can find
anything to make the wounded comfortable.”
The quartermaster was there to receive her, and to say, “We have no
hospital supplies; they are all given out.”
“Then, I’ll have to take what I can get. Boys, roll out some of those
bales of hay and cotton! They will make better beds than the
ground.”
“You must bring me an order, madam.”
“I have no time to hunt up officers to get orders.”
“But I am responsible for these supplies, and cannot let them go
without proper orders.”
The wagons were soon loaded up, and the bales of hay and cotton
were soon at the hospital tents. An axe cut the hoops, and the hay
went flying into the tents in long even rows with the help of ready
hands. An armful of cotton made a good pillow. All night long the
work went on. Some with lanterns were searching among the dead
for the wounded and bringing them in; others dressing the wounds.
No one was idle. The utmost of strength and energy must be put
forth at such a time.
But the quartermaster must make his accounts all right, and of
course had to enter complaint against Mother Bickerdyke. She was
summoned to meet the charge, which she did when she found time
to go.
“Mrs. Bickerdyke, you are charged with taking quartermaster’s stores
without proper orders and over his protest.”
“Who ordered the tents put up on the college grounds?”
“I did.”
“What were they put up for?”
“To shelter the wounded men, of course.”
“Did you expect these wounded men to lie on the ground?”
“You should have obtained orders.”
“I had no time to go for orders. Why didn’t you order in the hay and
the cotton?”
“I did not think of it.”
“Well, I did, and used all I needed; and now all you have to do is to
draw an order for them and give it to the quartermaster.”
She bade the officers good-day and returned to her work, and no
one thought of arresting her. Indeed, she had the best of the
argument.
Mrs. Mary A. Bickerdyke, or “Mother Bickerdyke” as the boys used to
call her, was one of the most energetic and faithful workers of the
war. Her fidelity to duty, and her untiring efforts for the comfort of the
sick and wounded, have endeared her to her co-laborers and to the
old soldiers whom she blessed. She now, 1894, lives in quiet and
comfort with her son, Professor Bickerdyke, Russell, Kan.
A FIGHTING EDITOR.
IN the spring of 1861, Dr. Charles Elliott edited The Central Christian
Advocate, in the third story of a business block in St. Louis, Mo.
The Southern Christian Advocate, which represented the views of
the South, was at the time published in the second story of the same
building.
The two editors, who had always been personally friendly to each
other, were wide apart on the great question of disunion, which was
stirring the hearts of the people.
Dr. Elliott was a genial Irishman of great ability and courage. He was
one of the most learned men in the country. It is a remarkable fact
that he had never been in a college until he was chosen president of
one of the finest Western institutions of learning, yet he was master
of all the highest university studies taught. Sanscrit, Latin, Greek,
Hebrew, French, German, Spanish, and many other languages, were
as familiar to him as the English, and he was profoundly versed in
the natural sciences and mathematics. He was a thorough scholar,
and made a good college president. But the church needed a strong,
loyal man, with the courage to stand for the truth, at this outpost; and
Dr. Elliott was chosen.
Both editors were able and fearless men, and they fought many a
hard battle with their pens before the bombardment of Fort Sumter.
After the fall of Sumter, the excitement in St. Louis ran high. The city
was about evenly divided in sentiment, and no one dared to predict
what a day or an hour would bring forth. The Stars and Stripes,
symbolizing the Union cause, and the State flag, representing the
disunion cause, floated here and there side by side on adjoining
buildings. The two editors grew more intense in feeling as the conflict

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According to a widespread conception which might as well be called

constitution, of what we call ‘Geist’ in our neck of the woods. Narrative

Foreword by Markus Gabriel vii

Part One The Stories of Jacob

Part Two Time and Meaning

Part Three The Stories of Joseph

Self-Knowledge – The Intangibility of the I – Who’s Speaking? –

Seen from this perspective, self-­knowledge would be comparable (in

Socrates, speaking in Phaedo: ‘I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription

The Intangibility of the I

The Socratic insight that self-­knowledge is a quite peculiar form of knowl-

a shudder nothing but an insubstantial ghost’ (1969a, 278 explanatory

As the introductory reflections have made clear, emancipation of human

defined in terms of philosophy of language: as a concrete distinction between

The unrest caused by the Delphic commandment of self-­knowledge arises

means to understand oneself. Otherwise, the non-­understanding would

Meaning and Being

What hinders us from grasping the basic thought pursued h ­ ere – o

In the context of an ontology of meaningless being, humans must appear

(like illusionism), is only a means for human beings to suppress their

The Project of a Narrative Ontology

Schopenhauer radicalizes Kant’s thought: ‘In endless space countless

Nietzsche’s ‘revolution of the way of thinking’ consists, then, in the

give’ could ever be ‘congruent’, might be misunderstood as a ‘figment

The Truth of Art

The present enquiry takes up and transforms the Socratic aim of

may even find in it a ‘respite’, possibly an ‘exaltation’, but it cannot really

including their arrangement in smaller and larger groups. While much

e­ xperiences of the subject. The art of language is thus no longer mis-

Thomas Mann as Model

from the artists of knowledge, in order to be reminded of its own original

this ‘irresponsibility’ is the only responsible way to follow the Delphic

The Enigma of Human Being

The second reason this philosophical enquiry seeks to connect with

subject: I, as a human being, am what I am as an ‘I’ by relating to myself,

THE many-colored signal lights of the fleet of steamers at Milliken’s

CLINTON B. FISK was chosen colonel of a regiment made up

THE Confederates had been driven back from Chattanooga and

I WENT out to Sedalia, which was in the heart of the State of

THE surgeon in one of the Nashville hospitals said, pointing to one

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Foreword by Markus Gabriel vii

Seen from this perspective, self-knowledge would be comparable (in

The Socratic insight that self-knowledge is a quite peculiar form of knowl-

The unrest caused by the Delphic commandment of self-knowledge arises

means to understand oneself. Otherwise, the non-understanding would

What hinders us from grasping the basic thought pursued h ere – o

e xperiences of the subject. The art of language is thus no longer mis-