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 linguistic 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.
But concrete resistance to the inhumanity of an ontology of meaningless being consists, as has already been shown, precisely not in securing for human beings a small, meaningful ‘niche’ in a still meaningless cosmos of being. Rather, the ironic distancing of human beings has to prove itself not only in the face of its own existence, but just as well in the face of the natural being of the cosmos, in order to initiate a revolution in the way of thinking, which leads from the inhumane ontology of meaninglessness to a humane ontology of meaning.
The thought and work of Thomas Mann, which is dedicated in general to the ‘religious problem’ as a ‘question of humans concerning themselves’, gains clarity also in a formal or compositional respect. It sets for itself in the concrete artistic shaping of language the central task of making the seemingly meaningless reality transparent for spiritual meaning – that is, of making intelligible literal being as a symbol of the idea. For this reason, Thomas Mann says that the art of his main narratives ‘employs the methods of the realistic novel, but actually it is not one. It constantly passes beyond realism by symbolic intensification and by making realism transparent for spiritual and ideal elements’ (1999a, 726). In order to understand properly the narrative unity of meaning of his texts, he thus adds: ‘Only so can one really penetrate and enjoy the musical and ideal complex of relations. The first time, the reader learns the theme; he is then in a position to read the symbolic and allusive formulas both forwards and backwards’ (725). Thomas Mann’s narratives and novels aim at the spiritual, the meta-physical that cannot be ‘traced back’ to literal nature, not so much in isolated passages and lessons but, rather, through the ‘musical and ideal complex of relations’, through the narrative unity of meaning of the whole text. Yet the reader must already be familiar with the metaphysical ‘themes’ of the narrative text so that he or she is able to interpret appropriately the ‘symbolic and allusive formulas’.
Freedom
Appearing as a motto at the beginning of Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man is the Delphic commandment ‘Know thyself!’ as formulated by Goethe: ‘Compare yourself; recognize what you are.’ As much as Thomas Mann as narrator sees his main task to consist in addressing the enigmatic question of human being concerning its self in the form of a genuine narrative of self-knowledge, he likewise strives in the Reflections to account for the philosophical–metaphysical fundamental conviction guiding him with regard to human being. For this reason, one finds in Reflections a passage that amounts to a philosophical confession. He recalls in that happy-serious hour in which he grasped Schopenhauer’s ‘Kantian-based teaching on free will: the truth about freedom, he said, is precisely the opposite of what one has long believed: it does not lie in the operari, but in the esse – thus absolute necessity and determination rule in action, but being is originally and metaphysically free: the human being who commits a crime has of necessity, as an empirical character under the influence of certain motives, acted in this way, but he could have been different – and the pangs of conscience, too, aim at being, not at action. This is the deepest thought I could ever ponder, or rather: it belongs to those I had reflected upon before they were expressly thought out for me, before I had read them’ (1987, 94).
This ‘deepest thought’ that Thomas Mann could ever ponder condenses in a complex manner many motifs of the previous reflections in a concise formulation, which, at first glance, is indeed barely understandable. The task of understanding consists in conceptually working out the single moments and relating them to the idea pursued here, in order to finally comprehend the whole thought in which Thomas Mann, mediated through Schopenhauer, adopts the ‘revolution of the way of thinking’ that began with Kant.
The widespread understanding of freedom that Thomas Mann, with Schopenhauer, takes as his point of departure, is freedom as freedom of action: human beings are free insofar as they are not hindered in doing what they want. Since they often (still) do not know, however, what they want, they understand freedom moreover as ‘leeway’ for options to act: they feel freer when they can choose between five rather than two options, even when they can only perform the one action that they in the end want to perform, and in fact perform. One ascribes to oneself an action that is understood as free in this sense as my action. One finds oneself in the action; one ‘understands’ the action and believes to know why one acted in this way and not in another. By the same token, one doubts whether it was really one’s own action when one can no longer understand the action in retrospect. This is indicated by typical figures of speech: ‘I don’t understand what came over me at the time’; ‘I was not myself when I did this.’
Here, again, the close link between understanding and freedom becomes explicit: one regards oneself as free in those actions one believes to understand, and one believes to understand those actions in which one regards oneself as free. Admittedly, the narrow horizon of attention with which human beings aim at freedom and self-understanding must be apparent, for they take into account isolated actions and, at best, certain consequences of actions. For this reason, Schopenhauer says that freedom is placed in the operari – that is, in the action and production that is oriented to a particular work: namely, an opus. Freedom in the sense of freedom of action is nothing more than a modus operandi.
If attention is directed, however, to the single actions, then the whole of human existence gets pushed to the sidelines. For this reason, one will ordinarily admit, even after some reflection, that one may ‘understand’ this or that action or episode of one’s life, but not one’s life as whole – that is, one’s life story. This also holds, however, quite analogously for the universally widespread understanding of freedom. While one may say of single actions that they are freely chosen, one will not be able to say in the same way, of being, of the character of the actor, that it is freely chosen. This is easily demonstrated with the ‘formula’ of the freedom of action: one
