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 familiarity 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 agreement: 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 all – besides and independent of all particulars 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 understand 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 divorcing 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 we – to use a telling phrase – 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 overarching unity of meaning to be awakened, that the Socratic need for self-knowledge stirs in us. Yet one can also observe how the initial inability 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 meaninglessness 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 characterizes, 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 story – 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 understanding, the non-objectifiable form of being of the subject manifests itself exemplarily. Being a subject means being able to understand and – perhaps 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 here – of understanding narrative meaning as a systematic guide for the enlightenment of human self-knowledge – is the prejudice that the originary phenomenon 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 characterized 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 recognizable 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 meaning – 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 – like 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 radically indifferent to them. The meaning they refer to in understanding – in listening as in speaking – 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.
