is, the beginning of a true self-understanding can for this reason, according to Kant, not be achieved ‘gradually, but only, as it were, by an explosion which happens one time as a result of weariness at the unstable condition of instinct. Perhaps there are only a few who have attempted this revolution before the age of thirty, and fewer still who have firmly established it before they are forty’ (194).
Kant’s last remark is especially insightful for the line of thought pursued here, for it draws attention to the extent to which human beings, in their self-understanding, are dependent on having a past that serves as a basis, as it were, as a ‘text’ of understanding. Right here, a new definition of human freedom as narrative can begin – namely, by opposing the erroneous idea that human beings are free, at most, despite their past, which they can no longer change through action; on the contrary, human beings are free purely on the basis of their history and thanks to their past. If human beings had no past, then they would not be free from the outset, because they would not at all know how to understand themselves.
This also renders intelligible the conclusion of Thomas Mann’s ‘philosophical confession’ that the ‘deepest thought’ that he could ever ponder ‘belongs to those I had reflected upon before they were expressly thought out for me, before I had read them’ – for the ‘deepest’ thinking is here evidently understood as reflecting, because it is always already walking in traces that have been thought before, in ‘footsteps’ and models of the past. But the point of this concluding expression is that thinking loses no freedom or originality through its reference to the past in its reflecting, but on the contrary gains ‘depth’ in the first place. Actual contemplation and understanding begins for Thomas Mann in becoming aware of how that which always seemed plausible to him in an unclear way had already been thought by Schopenhauer. Originality is for him not only the marking of the first understanding, but equally – and even more so – the marking of the later understanding.
It is thus appropriate to provide a reflective interpretation of that which so pointedly calls for one – which ought to ensue in the present enquiry by reflecting upon Thomas Mann’s narrative reflection in a philosophical manner and with a philosophical intent. This enquiry thus sets for itself the goal of clarifying the peculiar narrative self-knowledge that underlies his thought and work. This is only possible, though – as the introduction has shown – when one at the same time makes explicit the conception of a narrative ontology that enables such a self-knowledge in the first place.
Notes
1 1. Upon closer examination, one can see that this account is also not always of help with single words. While it may make sense at first glance to clarify the meaning of the word ‘tree’ by pointing to a tree, with words such as ‘time’ or ‘or’ this approach faces insurmountable difficulties.
2 2. Basically, the primordial phenomenon of understanding the unity of meaning can be clarified with every demanding text, whether it be a poem, a play or a narrative. A narrative is distinguished here from all other linguistic forms simply because it incorporates most clearly the historical-narrative constitution of human existence into the organization of its own sense of language. For this reason, we speak of the life story of a person when we want to gain a view of the temporal whole of a human existence, and only in exceptional cases of a life drama, and barely at all of a life poem. Nevertheless, the art of understanding can be practised not only on a narrative but, just as well, on a play, a poem or a sonata. For this reason, Wittgenstein states that ‘Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think’ (1953, 121, §527).
3 3. ‘Ces deux modes de regard sont indépéndants, l’un de l’autre. Le texte vu, le texte lu sont choses toutes distinctes, puisque l’attention donnée à l’une exclut l’attention donnée à l’autre.’
4 4. ‘En se reportant à ce qui précède, on pourrait dire que la lisibilité est la qualité d’un texte qui en prévoit et en facilite la consommation, la destruction par l’esprit, la transsubstantiation en événements de l’esprit.’
1 The Ambiguity of the I
3 Readings
5 Identity of Form and Content
6 The Narrative Decentring of the I
9 Selfhood as Self-Understanding
The Leitmotif
The leitmotif of the following line of thought is a sentence from Thomas Mann’s Joseph novel. It reads: ‘For anyone can say I, but what matters is who says it’ (166).
The phrase ‘anyone can say I’ points in its peculiar ambiguity to the central philosophical problem. With the little word ‘I’, we mean – whatever else we might want to say with it – firstly and above all ‘I’ and no one else: we mean ‘I’ as this particular individual, here and now, distinguished from the rest of the world.
The fact that literally anyone can say this little word, with which we so emphatically seek to express individuality and singularity, points, to be sure, to a fundamental question about the human I, giving rise to manifold confusions.
The leitmotif responds to this ambiguity of the I by explicitly highlighting, in its second part marked with a ‘but’, the particularity that is implicitly claimed in saying ‘I’. The sentence does not remain, then, with the indifference of saying ‘I’; rather, what really matters is who says ‘I’.
Thus, it appears at first glance as though the demanded particularity of the I that matters stood in opposition to the undifferentiated universality of saying ‘I’. It seems that it is first by demarcating from what everyone can equally say – that is, from the universal – that the I is made into a particular, individual or personal I.
Here, the leitmotif is initially grasped in this, as it were, ‘natural’ meaning that immediately imposes itself, and which at first glance the sentence and the word ‘I’ seem to exhibit. In the following, it will emerge, however, that the specific meaning of the I that matters is not in opposition to universality, but instead exhibits precisely
