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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
From ancient philosophy to contemporary theories of fiction, it is a common practice to relegate illusory appearances to the realm of the non-existent, like shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. Contrary to this traditional mode of drawing a metaphysical distinction between reality and fiction, Markus Gabriel argues that the realm of the illusory, fictional, imaginary and conceptually indeterminate is as real as it gets. Being in touch with reality need not and cannot require that we overcome appearances in order to grasp a meaningless reality which exists 'out there', outside and maybe even beyond our minds. Human mindedness (Geist) exists in the mode of fictions through which we achieve self-consciousness. This novel approach provides a fresh perspective on our existence as subjects who lead their lives in the light of self-conceptions. Fictions also develops a social ontology according to which the social unfolds as a constant renegotiation of dissent, of different points of view onto the same reality. Thus we cannot ever hope to ground human society in a fiction-free realm of objective transactions. However, this does not mean that truth and reality are somehow outdated concepts. On the contrary, we need to enlarge our conception of reality so that it fully encompasses ourselves as specifically minded social animals. This major new work of philosophy will be of interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and to anyone interested in contemporary philosophy and social thought.
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Quote
Preface
Notes
Introduction
Notes
Part I Fictional Realism
Notes
§1 Interpretation and Reading
Notes
§2 There Are No Fictional Objects: Against a Philosophical Myth
Notes
§3 Meontology in Ontology of Fields of Sense
Notes
§4 The World Is Not a Fiction: The Incoherence of Borges’s The Aleph
Notes
§5 FOS Is Not a Meinongian Theory of Objects
Notes
Part II Mental Realism
Notes
§6 From Naïve Realism to Illusionism
1 User Illusion
2 Projectivism
3 Ipsundrum
4 Secondary Qualities
5 Fictionalism
6 Optical Illusions
7 UFOs and God
Notes
§7 The Indispensability of Mind
Notes
§8 The Lifeworld of Ontology of Fields of Sense
Notes
§9 Objective Phenomenology
Notes
§10 Ontology of the Imagination: (Alleged) Expressive Barriers of FOS
Notes
§11 Fictive, Imaginary and Intentional Objects
1 Metaphysical Fictionalism
2 Metaphysical Imaginatism
3 Metaphysical Intentionalism
4 Metaphysical Realism
Notes
Part III Social Realism
Notes
§12 The Nature of Social Facts
Notes
§13 Our Survival Form: Intransparent Society
Notes
§14 Rule-Following, Realistically Conceived
Notes
§15 Mythology, Ideology, Fiction
Notes
§16 The Ontology of Social Networks
Notes
§17 The Public Sphere of Mind
Notes
On a Final Note: We Must Chase away the Spectre of the Post-Truth Era
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Quote
Preface
Introduction
Begin Reading
On a Final Note: We Must Chase away the Spectre of the Post-Truth Era
Index
End User License Agreement
Pages
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Fictions
Markus Gabriel
Translated by Wieland Hoban
polity
Originally published in German as Fiktionen © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2020. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2024
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut
Polity Press 65Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4662-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023941416
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Dedication
Dedicated in friendship to Jocelyn Benoist New York City, 31 October 2019
Is My Name Is No One a merry experiment and thus the pure product of a playful spirit, or is it a malevolent attack on the soul of every person who reads it? No one knows for sure, maybe both are true.
Daniel Kehlmann, F: A Novel
Preface
This book owes its existence, as well as its present form, to numerous institutions and individuals. First of all, I would name the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which supported my project about fictional objects as part of the Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship for experienced academics. This was carried out in several research residencies from 2017 to 2019 at the Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne University at the invitation of my host, Jocelyn Benoist. In this context, Jocelyn is the first person I should thank warmly for his philosophical and personal hospitality. Many of the ideas that have entered this book were first presented in Jocelyn’s research seminars on intentional objects and social ontology, and also in lectures at various Parisian universities.1 This is not the place to list all the conceptual details that arose from the wonderful dialogical situation in Paris; some of them are documented in the notes. To do justice to the fact that the traces of our dialogue form a crucial layer of the deep conceptual dimension of the reflections published here, I have dedicated this book to him in friendship.
As well as the Humboldt Foundation, I owe thanks to the CNRS, the Maison Suger and the Collège d’études mondiales (and thus the FMSH too). Since 2017 the CNRS has supported the Bonn–Paris research centre Centre de recherches sur les nouveaux réalismes (CRNR) as part of the excellence initiative LIA (Laboratoire international associé). This research centre is supported both by the University of Bonn and Paris 1-Panthéon Sorbonne, represented by the respective managements. The ceremonial opening took place on 25 September 2017 at the Sorbonne. I am grateful to Prof. Dr Dr h.c. Michael Hoch, head of the University of Bonn, and Prof. George Haddad, president of Paris 1, for their generous support.
The joint meetings of the CRNR in recent years focused on, among other things, the ontology of unicorns, the reality of norms (both promoted with notable posters …) and the relation between perception and reality – which covered the three pillars of the present study. In this context, I extend my warm thanks to those colleagues in Bonn and Paris who are members of the research centre, especially Sandra Laugier, who is advancing the expansion of the LIA in a philosophically, institutionally and personally proactive fashion.
I am grateful to the University of Bonn for generously allowing free research time during my stays in Paris and for the extremely favourable conditions at the International Centre for Philosophy NRW and the Centre for Science and Thought. I would also like to thank the University of Bonn for granting me research semesters, including the one I am currently fortunate to be spending in New York City as the Eberhard Berent Goethe Chair at New York University. For this, I am especially grateful to my colleagues at the German department for their hospitality, as well as the honour of being nominated for this visiting professorship. I am equally grateful to the participants in my graduate course in ‘Fiction and Reality’, which served as the final test run for the now published study, as well as the many conversational partners in New York who provided me with critical queries and pointers.
In addition to the lectures on topics dealt with in this book given on speaking trips to the USA, Japan, China, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Portugal, Spain and Chile, I received especially profound suggestions from the philosophers, literary scholars, ethnologists and historians who kindly invited me, as the Walker Ames Lecturer, to seminars and lectures and the University of Washington in Seattle and Tacoma. I should give a special mention to Monika Knaup, with whom I had the chance to have intense discussions about the New Realism in philosophy and literary studies.
The person to whom I am most indebted for the reflections culminating in an outline for an objective phenomenology in the second part is Thomas Nagel, with whom, since my postdoctoral studies at NYU (2005–6), I have frequently debated the central question of what form a philosophy of nature would require in order to grasp the spirit as an irreducible manifestation of the universe. His monistic stance will presumably prevent him from agreeing to the present suggestion, but I do offer a diagnosis in the main text to continue the dialogue. Because of this encounter, which was especially important for my philosophical development, I was particularly happy to finish this book at NYU.
I received a veritably eye-opening shock from my encounters with Giulio Tononi, which took place as I was writing the second part. I would therefore like to thank the Chilean government of that time, especially the Senate (represented by Senator Guido Girardi), for the honour of being invited in 2018 to the Congreso Futuro, where I met Giulio for the first time (in the Antarctic, no less), and then, on a remarkable journey from Santiago de Chile to Valparaíso, had the opportunity to explore Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and its relation to New Realism in hours of conversations. This was followed by reciprocal visits to Wisconsin and Bonn. Naturally, this process was also influenced by Christof Koch, with whom I discussed various topics of the book in Wisconsin and Seattle.
In May 2019 in Bonn, Giulio asked after countless rounds of asparagus what current philosophical project posed the greatest challenge for New Realism. The answer: IIT. I was unable to undertake a detailed examination of the empirically informed ontology of consciousness, from which he derives a philosophy of nature that is currently unrivalled, so this will have to wait until a later opportunity.2
Three other people contributed substantially to the orientation of Fictions as the continuation of Sense and Existence through their objections to specific aspects of ontology of fields of sense: Anton Friedrich Koch, Julia Mehlich and Graham Priest. All three presented astute variants, each with their own approach, of an objection that, if true, demonstrated that ontology of fields of sense is reconcilable with a metaphysical fictionalism according to which the world exists in the field of sense of the imagination. In addition, Priest proposed a mereological model that, with a logical sacrifice of well-foundedness, causes the world to appear as an object in the world; he too based this in part on fictions – Borges’s Fictions, to be precise.
As I was concluding work on the manuscript, Jens Rometsch made me realize that, for much of the book, I had had Anton Friedrich Koch in mind as my model reader, which I immediately conceded, even if I had not been consistently aware of it. In fact, my methodological sensibility – combining motifs from German Idealism more analytico with a sufficiently robust (albeit non-metaphysical) realism – was decisively influenced by the very long conversation that took place during the World Cup semi-final between Germany and Italy on 4 July 2006, which was almost impossible not to hear, at the Burse3 in Tübingen, when he took me to task at his research colloquium for my formulation of a generalizable sceptical paradox. Since then, the conversation has steadily continued. I am grateful to Toni for his untiring and perceptive objections, which have led at least to reformulations, if not (yet) to a reformation, of my pluralism.
As always, this book would never have been completed without my outstanding university team, all of whom read every single line of text, commented on it and improved it, as well as doing the diligent work of completing the notes. For this, my thanks go to Philipp Bohlen, Alex Englander, Marin Geier, Mariya Halvadzhieva, Dina Khamis, Georg Oswald, Jens Rometsch, Guofeng Su and Jan Voosholz.
Jens Rometsch has (comme d’habitude for almost twenty years) tirelessly, and sometimes on a daily basis, made suggestions for adjustments in direction and, through his excellent habilitation thesis ‘Freiheit zur Wahrheit’ [Freedom for Truth], not only corrected my image of Descartes but also provided me with the concept of an ‘overall mental state’ (which he himself does not accept), by which I mean the de facto agent of the plurimodal cogito, as elaborated in the text.
Wolfram Hogrebe and Tobias Keiling read the complete manuscript and added critical comments that have hopefully saved me from making overly grave mistakes.
Certainly, it is impossible to retrace with absolute certainty all the textual and oral influences on the development of my thinking as reflected in this sequel to Sense and Existence. Nonetheless, I wish at least to provide an incomplete alphabetical list of important interlocutors not mentioned thus far in order to document which conversations in recent years have had an effect on my argumentation: Clemens Albrecht, Ned Block, Paul Boghossian, Thomas Buchheim, Otávio Bueno, Tyler Burge, Massimo Cacciari, Taylor Carman, Stephen Cave, David Chalmers, James Ferguson Conant, Paulo Cesar Duque Estrada, George Ellis, David Espinet, Armin Falk, Maurizio Ferraris, Günter Figal, Dominik Finkelde, Michael Forster, Manfred Frank, Marcela García, Tristan Garcia, Werner Gephart, Sacha Golob, Wouter Goris, Iain Hamilton Grant, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Jens Halfwassen, Marta Halina, Graham Harman, David Held, Christoph Horn, Axel Hutter, Adrian Johnston, Alexander Kanev, Daniel Kehlmann, Tobias Keiling, Andrea Kern, Paul Kottman, Johannes F. Lehmann, Andrea Le Moli, Jocelyn Maclure, Quentin Meillassoux, Ulf-G. Meissner, Raoul Moati, Hans-Peter Nilles, Yasunori Nomura, Huw Price, Sebastian Rödl, Michael Rosenthal, Karl Schafer, Rainer Schäfer, Gert Scobel, John R. Searle, Umrao Sethi, Paul Snowdon, Nich Stang, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, Dieter Sturma, Raymond Tallis, Amie Thomasson, Clinton Tolley, Charles Travis, Florencia Di Rocco Valdecantos, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Peter Weibel, Elwood Wiggins, David Zapero and Slavoj Žižek.
I would like to thank Philipp Hölzing for his thorough and clarifying editing, and of course Eva Gilmer for including the book in Suhrkamp Verlag’s main academic roster.
The most important acknowledgement comes last: every book project is carried by the support of my small family. Without Stefanie, Marisa Lux and Leona Maya, things would lose their colour.
Notes
1.
See, with more specific indications of the respective context, Markus Gabriel,
Propos réalistes
(Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2019). Regarding the state of discussion within New Realism between the ontology of fields of sense and Benoist’s contextualism, see Jocelyn Benoist,
L’adresse du réel
(Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 2017) and Markus Gabriel, ‘Être vrai’,
Philosophiques
, 45/1 (2018): 239–47, as well as the special issue of
Critique: Revue générale des publications françaises et étrangères
, 72/862 (2019) devoted to Jocelyn Benoist containing my statement ‘Concepts et objects dans les “nouveaux réalismes”’, pp. 202–14.
2.
A first step will be taken in Markus Gabriel,
The Reality of the Universe
(forthcoming).
3.
A historical building in Tübingen used as a centre for philosophical studies since it was built in 1482 (Trans.).
Introduction
Semblance is being. We cannot escape reality by deluding ourselves or being deluded, for the real is that which cannot be kept at a distance. Any attempt to flee reality is stymied by the fact that we bring ourselves along with us, meaning that the thing we seek to escape – reality – is at most altered by our imagination. No thought or action causes reality to disappear. We cannot be at a distance from being.
In a given historical context, the zeitgeist is the prevailing constellation of a semblance that legitimizes certain errors and inconsistences that dissolve upon closer philosophical inspection. One of the central tasks of philosophy is thus to grasp and criticize the zeitgeist.
The ideas expressed in this book are all based on the assumption that the zeitgeist it sets out to criticize rests on a skewed conception of the difference between being and semblance: semblance (in its manifold modes of appearance in the forms of illusion, delusion, error, being wrong, ideology, manipulation, falsity, fiction and so on) is wrongly associated with non-existence, which renders its distinctive effectiveness invisible. The implicit recognition of the existence of semblance (as semblance) results in the hopeless attempt to cleanse existence of anything merely semblant, to isolate a foundational layer of reality that is entirely free of semblance, pure being, existence, or reality. Yet the details of this very manoeuvre only give rise to a new form of semblance, one that needs to be seen for what it is and removed. Philosophy’s reflection on our basic ontological concepts thereby offers hope of progress.
A familiar version of the problem of semblance and being concerns what are currently termed fictional objects, paradigmatic examples of which are the dramatis personae of our aesthetic encounters with literary art works, such as Gretchen, Mephistopheles, Macbeth, Anna Karenina and Jed Martin (the protagonist of Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory). Fictional places such as Middle Earth and fictional times such as the imagined pasts and futures of science fiction also belong to this ontologically troublesome category. As soon as any allowance is made for their existence, it seems that we have to restrict and reduce that existence to the space of our imagination, or to some other mental aspect of our aesthetic practices. In this way, defenders of the zeitgeist can hope to deny the existence of fictional objects thus construed by relegating them to a realm of pure figments of the imagination or socially complex games of make-believe.
The naturalistic pressure of the current ‘scientific’ worldview demands at least one further reduction: even if our imaginations or aesthetic practices themselves exist in the full sense of the term, there still remains a gulf between our subjectivity, on the one hand, and the reality of the universe that can be described and explained by the natural sciences, on the other. For this reason, the human situation is generally subjected to a further metaphysical simplification. The source of fictions, known variously as ‘mind’, ‘consciousness’, ‘intentionality’ or ‘subjectivity’, itself falls under the suspicion of being an illusion. It is to be replaced by the alleged insight that only things which are unambiguous objects of a causal, experimental intervention genuinely exist. Demonstrable measurability by the tools of natural science becomes the metaphysical criterion of reality. Whatever does not satisfy this condition finds itself relegated to the carelessly described category of fiction, which ex hypothesi falls outside the jurisdiction of scientists.
In an age in which the academic enterprise is subject to repeated and demonstrative underfunding, familiar methods have been applied to marginalize the humanistic self-awareness of semblance and make us forget that, in addition to the natural and technological sciences, there are also the social sciences and humanities, or even philosophy, disciplines that have studied the ever-developing relation between being and semblance ever since the pre-Socratics. This self-awareness is said to be of little use, for, even when it succeeds on its own terms, it makes no immediate contribution to the economization and digitalization of our lifeworld advanced and applauded by all relevant decision-makers.1
To be sure, blame for the current crisis facing knowledge outside the natural sciences cannot be placed solely at the door of the apparatchiks controlling research. The exaggerated application of ideology critique to their own disciplines – as practised in the small historical timeframe known as ‘postmodernity’ – also bears a not inconsiderable share of the responsibility for knowledge in the social sciences and humanities having first come under epistemological pressures within the walls of the university itself and then under socioeconomic pressures in the public eye.2
If every knowledge claim is essentially suspected of ideological motivation (however unconvincingly this suspicion is articulated), it can be tempting to take refuge in technological progress; at least natural scientific knowledge, we might assure ourselves, can enjoy the honorific title of objectivity. It does not advance ideology critique to subject this objectivity to yet further science-historical restrictions.3 After all, pointing out that the current conditions of objectivity of our scientific and technological practices themselves have a genealogy does not, in fact, lead in any rationally acceptable fashion to their objectivity being undermined. If a device functions, then the specific formats of self-discipline its inventors had to exercise in order to put it on the market at most play a secondary part. Pointing out that subjectivity is involved in the production of scientific and technological knowledge alone does nothing to undermine its objectivity.
The same should be said about the humanities and social sciences which paradigmatically deal with artefacts and, thus, with objects whose meaning is constitutive for their being. Subjectivity makes its appearance in the domain of objects of those disciplines. Yet, this by itself does not pose a threat to their epistemic objectivity.
It is therefore imperative to take up the discursive formation that, until recently, united philosophy with the humanities and social sciences and challenged it to track down the sources of error embedded within the zeitgeist and describe and explain them by the means available. For, without this form of reflection, unfettered scientific and technological progress will not lead to any kind of automatic and appropriate attitude in dealing with the resulting socioeconomic innovations.
In the past century, this was illustrated by the now classic debate on the connection between physics and the atomic bomb. Today, in light of what is colloquially referred to as the ‘digital revolution’, we must once again question the legitimacy of transformations that are presented in the zeitgeist as processes of automation that befall us inevitably, like revelations of humanity’s fate. Yet technological progress is not fate; it is the consequence of numerous decisions and strategies that hide behind the widespread contemporary mythology of self-propelling digitalization.
The self-harm perpetrated by modern subjectivity in both its naturalistic and postmodern forms must be overcome. Despite its poor reputation, modern subjectivity is by no means the metaphysical driving force behind the ecological crisis, as many have thought in the wake of Heidegger’s influential critique of Cartesianism. The problem is not the distinction between subject and object, mind and nature, but rather the elimination of the subject, the mind-pole of this correlation, without having first rethought the correlation as such.4
In place of a division of some supposed overall reality into mind and world, representation and causation, is and ought, culture and nature, subject and object, system and environment, and so forth, this book advocates a humanistic irreducibility thesis. According to this thesis, the human as a specifically minded being is the irreducible starting point of every ontological investigation. All theory construction starts out from our preontological, pre-scientific experience. This experience is itself something real that comes into contact with other real things. The real reveals itself to us pre-ontologically in the mode of perception – because perception itself is something real. I will argue that perception is always attended by an element of illusion that enables it to be objective – that is, truth-apt. Only someone who can err can grasp the truth. Objectivity cannot exist without sources of error; this does not, however, undermine its claims.
The path to being (to the facts) cannot bypass semblance. A neuroscientist setting up an experiment must rely on their sensory perception just like the physicist who compiles data from a particle accelerator and presents them at a scientific congress. They will hardly dispute the existence of the audience or the approaching coffee break.
In this book, the humanities and social sciences will be accorded their full ontological dignity. What these disciplines investigate, I will argue, are the various ways in which humans view their own standpoint. Their object of examination is the human being in its discovery of self-images in all their historical variability and extraordinary synchronic and diachronic differentiation.
An essential task of contemporary philosophy is systematically overcoming the off-the-shelf naturalism that so many professional academics have unfortunately embraced. With its roots in university and education policy in the anglophone world, this tendency has led in recent decades to a decoupling of philosophy from the discourses of other humanities and the social sciences, with fatal methodological consequences for all concerned.
Attempts to lend philosophical and humanistic projects the sheen of scientific research – through scientoid publication formats, more or less well-worked-out formalizations of arguments, and even experimental ‘methods’ – fail to the extent that few who do not directly profit from these research projects takes any notice of them. Experiments in the humanities such as connecting narratology to cognitive or neuroscience soon reveal themselves as passing fads, in that they achieve little beyond verifying that we must possess appropriate psychological dispositions for a successful reception of narrative patterns – dispositions that presumably cannot be realized without neurological structures of some kind.
This is not to deny the real need to counteract the fragmentation of scientific activity by bringing into conversation all the academic disciplines that jointly constitute the idea of a university.5 Yet genuine cooperation across disciplines presupposes a common object of investigation. The object common to all disciplines is the human standpoint, from which we investigate all other objects. To be sure, thanks to the progress made by individual disciplines, we have been able to weed out various human, all-too-human interference effects from this or that research project. But this should not seduce us into the nonsensical belief that we could leave the human being entirely behind us as both the goal and starting point of any investigation of reality.
To develop a common basis for all scientific, methodologically directed truth claims, we need a coherent ontology and epistemology to underpin a corresponding philosophical anthropology and philosophy of mind. Only on such a basis can we hope to legitimate a transdisciplinary format that is not simply geared towards the transfer of foundational research to the economy, but whose goal is human self-awareness and thus the potential moral progress of humanity; all advances in natural science and technology must be subordinated to moral progress if we are to prevent them from leading sooner or later to the complete self-destruction of our life form.
An ontological investigation is generally concerned with the question of what constitutes existence, and in particular with whether a specific type of object that has come under conceptual pressure really exists. An important touchstone of any given ontology is its meontology – that is, its theory of non-existence (μὴ ὄν). It is only once we have a stable conceptual framework, one that provides a comprehensible model for deciding questions of existence, that we can determine the ontological status of semblance in its relation to non-existence.
To this end, I will be mobilizing the concept of fictions. If we are to do justice to the fact that the mental and spiritual life of human beings takes place in dimensions that reach far beyond our presence in environments of sensory stimulation, we require an ontologically improved theory of fictions. Fictions are enactments in the space of this transcendence.6
More precisely, fictions are mental events that inhabit the interstices of our reference to the objects in scenes of our lives. At every moment of our conscious lives, we enact scenes.7 We continually sift through our consciously experienced sensory environment in relation to objects that appear to us under various conditions of relevance. In this respect, the reality we perceive always bears our signature. A scene change takes place at every moment; both subjective and objective perceptual fields are constantly changing. Nevertheless, we are entitled to work on the assumption that there are stable objects (whatever these might be in a given case). What holds the indefinitely many scenes together are fictions: partially explicable assumptions about how the environment of our perceptual field that lies beyond our experience is equipped.8 The way in which we scan – and thus modify – our perceptual field at any given moment depends on how we imagine the (retentional and protential) connections. Only this transcendence of the given enables us to classify the given as real. Stanley Cavell encapsulates this idea as follows:
It is a poor idea of fantasy which takes it to be a world apart from reality, a world clearly showing its unreality. Fantasy is precisely what reality can be confused with. It is through fantasy that our conviction of the worth of reality is established; to forgo our fantasies would be to forgo our touch with the world.9
Generally speaking, fictional objects are objects to which we refer in the mode of their absence. They are currently present because we experience our perceptual episodes not only as a mental flow but as more or less stably arranged; this means we move beyond whatever is directly accessible to us as real in the mode of intuition. Not all fictional objects are also fictive – that is, objects of aesthetic experience that exist essentially in the mode of interpretation.
Fictive objects are performance-dependent: the way they are essentially depends upon how we imagine them to be – which, as we shall see, does not mean that there are no objective criteria for how we ought to imagine them. The relevant contrast between fiction and reality consists in how fictive objects, unlike non-fictive fictional objects, do not fill in the gaps in our perception of their own accord, so to speak. For example, what occurs between two different film scenes showing the actions of a certain character is filled in by aesthetic experience – that is, through exercises of the imagination.
This does not make fictive objects incomplete; however, they exist essentially in interpretations, which is what distinguishes them from non-fictive fictional objects. Our perceptual reality is populated by fictional (specifically: imaginary) objects; yet they must nevertheless bear a sufficient resemblance to those objects, in respects relevant to our survival and cognition, to fill in the gaps of our direct perceptions. What fills in these gaps so successfully does not usually depend on how we interpret it. The fact that my laptop remains in front of me, even when I briefly close my eyes and imagine it, means that it does not remain sitting there because I thus imagine it. By contrast, the fact that Gretchen has certain properties not explicitly ascribed to her in the text of Faust depends, among other factors, on how I imagine her. If I had imagined her differently, she would have had different properties.
Fictive objects are a subspecies of fictional objects, which divide into fictive and imaginary ones. One should note that not all intentional objects – that is, not all objects of truth-apt reference – are fictional. The objects of direct perception are certainly intentional (they are given to us in a particular sense-specific way), but they are not fictional in the sense deployed here, even though we cannot perceive them without recourse to fictional elements of our mental lives. Every perceptual scene involves a surplus that is not directly perceived, but rather connects us to manifold fictional objects without which direct perception and, thus, intentionality dealing with non-fictional objects would not be possible. Under what we experience as the normal conditions of our conscious perception, thanks to fictions we are not confined to isolated perceptual episodes.
When it comes to the emergence of semblance, our signature as human beings is central in so far as we transcend every sensory episode. Our lives are never led purely within the narrow confines of the here and now, restricted to solving the problems of survival or seeking momentary respite, like a predator exhausted by the hunt. Rather, each of us possesses a more or less individual picture of our overall situation as humans whereby we classify the episodes of our pre-ontological experience. What happens to us here and now belongs to each of our individual autobiographies, whose narrative and fictional elaborations we work on day by day.
We can neither circumvent this situation nor eliminate it via some scientistically optimized reprogramming of the human animal. The idea that progress in neuroscience, for example, would lead us to transcend our transcendence, so that we might finally shake off our tiresome consciousness with its ‘pre-scientific’ ideas, is merely one particularly incoherent case of human self-objectification. Our situation does not change one iota if we speak of cognition rather than knowledge, or of information processing rather than perception, and so forth. Nor would it make any difference if we articulated the elements of our mental life in a different code from the natural languages that are ideally suited to this purpose. No scientific reconstruction of our human mindedness will make the semblance constitutive of the human condition disappear.
The imagination is inescapably central to our self-determination. For there is no visible or scientifically identifiable property we can point to in order to establish who or what the human being really is. Who we are and who we want to be arises exclusively within the historically, synchronically and diachronically extremely variable concert of our self-representations.
Even in this age of increasing (and ultimately unchecked) domination of digital media over our self-portraits, we continue to objectify ourselves anyway by means of fictions. The innovation of social networks consists in having developed business models for the publication and exploitation of our capacity for developing self-images, most notably in the form of a platform economy. I will investigate this self-objectification in the form of the thesis that the mind is public, which leads us to recall the dialectic of the public sphere paradigmatically diagnosed by Jürgen Habermas. This can help reveal the emancipatory potential of a critical response to our self-digitalization.10
The conceptual epicentre of this study is the Eleatic puzzle of non-existence. This is the ur-trigger for the distinction between being and seeming, and thus of philosophy as the science of this differentiation. The puzzle stems from our being able to make truth-apt (that is, true or false) statements about objects while simultaneously believing that some of them do not exist. We can thus speak truthfully about things that do not exist.
We must not renounce our claim to this capacity, if only because without it we could not judge that a given object (be it the present king of France, Zeus, Minerva, numbers, moral values, qualia, mesoscopic everyday objects such as tables, or whatever one deems ontologically questionable) does not exist. In short, the Eleat puzzle is this: If one speaks the truth about an object O when one judges that it does not exist, then it is true of O that it does not exist. But, if something is true of O, how can it not exist?
It is questionable, however, whether one ever has occasion to say of an O only that it does not exist without, at the same time, considering many other O-related statements to be true, such as that O occupies a certain place in the Greek pantheon, that Homer has provided us with relevant descriptions of O, and so on. Yet if one can only truthfully deny O’s existence by ascribing to it other characterizing properties, how can one then avoid taking an object named Faust, who seems to be a man, to be at once both existent and non-existent in addition to having many other individuating properties?
One path out of the Eleatic labyrinth is to gather together those objects that do not exist with those that do in an overall domain that could be termed ‘being’. Then both the existent and the non-existent objects would belong to being. Then non-existing objects are (something) without existing. This variation is derived from Alexius Meinong’s much discussed and mostly repudiated ontology – though recently, in the guise of Neo-Meinongianism, it has astute defenders again, most notably Graham Priest.11
In my Fields of Sense [Sinn und Existenz] I have already argued at length that there is no such overall metaphysical domain encompassing all objects, a domain that, in the second act, one could split into a domain of existence on the one hand and a domain of non-existence on the other.12Being does not exist. I replace a metaphysical overview of all reality with an ontology of fields of sense (henceforth FOS). This assigns objects to fields of sense, which are arrangements of objects subject to a system of rules. Fields of sense always include some objects and exclude others that appear in their immediate or distant surroundings. Since there is no all-encompassing field of sense, both the catchment area and the forecourt of a given field are restricted.
This framework lends itself to an obvious meontology: whatever does not exist exists somewhere else, as it is excluded from one field of sense and assigned to another. This does not create a field of everything that does not exist, however, such that one could once again collect two fundamental classes of objects – the existent and the non-existent – in one overall picture. For whatever does not exist is excluded from a field of sense under specific conditions. Objects that are impossible in one field of sense (such as round squares in a Euclidian geometry or contradictory objects with attributes that are mutually incompatible within a given logically consistent inferential order) exhibit an entirely different kind of non-existence from, for example, fictive objects such as Mephistopheles. The latter do not exist in the sense that they appear only indirectly in our domain of the real – that is, only embedded within a fictional field of sense they cannot leave. And hallucinations, or products of social imagination (such as only seemingly well-delineated social identities such as ‘race’ or even less tangible notions such as ‘society’, ‘neoliberalism’, ‘capitalism’, and so on), do not exist in yet another way.13
Fictions cannot be fenced off once and for all, because they are expressions of our free and minded life, whose historical and variable self-determination is impossible to grasp once and for all in some form of overview. By contrast, the formal invariant of the genesis of fictions cannot be historicized; it is what I call human mindedness (or Geist), i.e., the human capacity to generate self-images.14 Human beings live their lives in light of a representation of who or what they are.
Heidegger provides a concise formulation of this thought in his Contributions to Philosophy: ‘Self-being is the finding that already lies in the seeking.’15 To be someone paradigmatically means forming a conception of who one is and who one wants to be. Our actions realize self-images, which are modified by various factors, including others’ commentary on this process. The structure of subjectivity and intersubjectivity grounded in the exercise of our imaginations is the undeniable point of departure for our situatedness, which I therefore call – in a distant echo of Rilke’s Hiersein – being-here.16 Every epistemological and ontological coordinate system that we use to attribute or deny existence to entities is rooted in being-here – a fact one can lose sight of if one’s self-determination takes a putatively scientifically supported detour into ‘cosmic exile’.17
In an age of naturalist worldviews, it seems obvious that we should locate the human being by largely abstracting from our subjectivity and regarding ourselves as ‘earthlings’, creatures in which a momentary insight into their own insignificance emerges against the background of the smallest and the greatest cosmological scales. Yet this scenario overlooks that it itself represents an exercise of the imagination with which advanced physical cosmology in particular has hardly dispensed. This is because a naturalistic worldview is by no means a mere collection of data, but rather a constructed world picture that comes into being only once we have abstracted from ourselves in the material-energetic universe’s favour.18 Yet physics cannot give an adequate account of how physicists – and thus, as far as we know, particular human beings – exist – that is, beings who take their own position in the cosmos into account in order to develop a scale that allows them to embed the mesoscopic affairs of daily life in relationships that can be observed only indirectly (through experiment, theory construction and the cognitive expansion through technology that results from these). Neither the measurement problem of quantum physics nor the self-awareness of consciousness can so far count with any certainty as problems for which we have found physical solutions in the narrow sense.19 The attempts at metaphysical railroading through an ontological reduction or elimination of those human phenomena that stand in the way of subjectivity’s self-abolition should therefore be seen for what they are: poor fictions.
The three parts of this book cover various dimensions of human fictions without making any claim to exhaustiveness. The reason for thematizing these dimensions in particular is itself historical – that is, determined by the historical circumstances of the book’s composition, circumstances in which the question of non-existence poses itself in a specific way. To the extent that the systematic answers I offer are true, ‘transcendence’ has been achieved – that is, insight into historically invariant facts.
The first part develops a fictional realism. This cannot be straightforwardly located on the map of standard positions regarding so-called fictional objects. The basic idea of this section is, rather, that the very question of whether ‘fictional objects’ exist is largely misguided, since at least two kinds of object tend to be conflated and thus melded into the equivocal ‘concept’ of ‘fictional objects’. I call these two kinds of object hermeneutical and meta-hermeneutical respectively. Hermeneutical objects are those that are essentially interpretation-dependent. They exist in those fields of sense in which we speak and think about them only because we imagine them to be a certain way in the context of a specific imaginative occasion (an art work) (§§ 1–2). This imagining consists in constructing, based on our factual situation, a field of sense in which the hermeneutical objects (which I shall call ‘fictive’) appear.
By ‘interpretation’ I do not mean anything like the scholarly dissection of a literary text, for example, but rather the performance of a field of sense and the objects appearing within it on the mental ‘stage’ of a recipient triggered by an encounter with fictional objects presented within an art work.
This process can then become the object of what I will call a ‘reading’. This reading constitutes the ensemble of investigations in the humanities and social sciences into aesthetic experience and its underlying materiality. This includes not only texts, sculptures, tape recordings and digital copies but also the psychologically and sociologically analysable types of aesthetic experience that can be expected of recipients in a given time and society. How one images Gretchen is not a private metaphysical affair but a process that can be explored from both internal and external perspectives.
An important manoeuvre in Part I is meontological isolationism. This maintains that we are screened off from fictive objects by virtue of their existing in fields of sense in which we fundamentally cannot exist, and vice versa.20 Gretchen exists in those fields of sense that are opened up through the texts and interpretations of Faust (Urfaust + Faust I + Faust II). To be precise, these are infinitely many, because all legitimate interpretations (all actual and still possible receptions) present fields of sense in which Gretchen exists. What is true of Gretchen can be ascertained only by imagining her, which is what one does when one interprets an edition (what I will call a ‘score’) of Faust.
The materiality of the art work places limits on the imagination: not anything and everything that someone associates with ‘Gretchen’ is a legitimate interpretation. What is a legitimate interpretation is determined by an interplay of interpretation and reading, since even the most sober Goethe scholar has to imagine Gretchen to be some way in order to understand whose reception history he intends to describe.
We are ontologically isolated from fictive objects (and vice versa). They appear only in fields of sense that are produced, in part, by exercises of the imagination triggered by the presence of the material side of art works. These fields of sense are fictional, as opposed to fictive, because they exist here, with us, as exercises of our imaginative powers occasioned by an aesthetic experience that imposes limits on those powers.
Fictive objects are embedded in facts: some things about them are true, others false. These facts are relational; it does not follow from the fact that something is true of Gretchen in Faust that it is true of Gretchen elsewhere. From ‘In Fiction F it is true that p’, it does not follow tout court that p. Gretchen is a human being in Faust, but not in Leipzig. Because facts concern objects, which can only ever exist in fields of sense, there is no more a metaphysical totality of facts than there is a world as a totality of things.21 It is simply not true that everything hangs together with everything else; there is no all-encompassing context such that a fact in one field of sense automatically conflicts with another if they are (seemingly) expressible in contradictory propositions.
This will be spelled out in §3 in the form of a meontological position, whereby something can both exist and not-exist. Whatever exists appears in (at least) one field of sense and is thus excluded from other fields of sense, in which it consequently does not exist. Gretchen existsin-Faust-performances and Gretchen does not existin-London. Performances of Faust do exist in London, of course, yet Gretchen herself does not thereby attain any ontological civil rights in my field of sense.22
Both existence and non-existence are instantiated in the form of relations. According to FOS, the existence relation is an ordering function (sense) of a domain of objects. An object domain that is factually set up in such and such a way is a field of sense.23 The property of existing thus consists in a certain object or objects being assigned to a given field of sense. Under the auspices of negation, the same goes for non-existence. What does not exist in one field of sense is referred to a different location and accordingly exists in another field of sense.
If one disputes the existence of unicorns, for example, this still leaves the film The Last Unicorn unaffected; its interpretations manifest a field of sense in which unicorns certainly do exist. According to the meontology of FOS, to say of the unicorns that confront us in art works that they do not exist is to make an assertion to the effect that unicorns exist elsewhere but not here (for example, in the cinema or the universe). The unicorns that appear to us in the medium of aesthetic experience therefore exist in some places but not others.
There is no more such a thing as non-existence tout court – that is, as a property pertaining to a (thereby) determinate object independently of its membership in a field of sense – than there is such a thing as existence tout court. This provides the solution to the Eleatic puzzle, for the statement that a certain object O or a kind of object Ko does not exist does not attribute any property to O or Ko that can be instantiated only if the object exists in the field of sense in which one intends to establish its absence.
This model risks undermining FOS’s no-world-view which ultimately finds expression in the slogan that the world does not exist, which raises the question of whether it might not then exist elsewhere, such as in our imagination. In §4, I discuss this issue in the context of the Mehlich–Koch objection, supplemented by a suggestion from Graham Priest, who, as well as taking recourse to Jorge Luis Borges’s The Aleph (in which the world seems to exist embedded in a fiction), proposes adopting the (heterodox) logical form of a non-well-founded mereology, which seems to make room for the world’s appearing as a genuine part of itself. If the combination of the Mehlich–Koch objection and Priest’s logical proposal were correct, FOS would be converted into a heterodox metaphysics. Both its anti-naturalist thrust and its ontological pluralism would be retained.
However, this combination of commitments is incompatible with the specific neutral realism of FOS, which contrasts with (neo-) Meinongianism (§5). The latter is based on a theory of objects that assumes an object is simply whatever we can designate linguistically or mention. According to this model, there is nothing that is not an object (with the paradoxical exception of nothingness, as Priest explains).24 This commits neo-Meinongianism to an ontological idealism or anti-realism, at least in so far as its operative category of an ‘object’ depends on the existence of linguistic reference. If the concept of an object is tied to language, this means that objects would not be objects without language. The pitfalls of this manoeuvre can be avoided, but only at the metaphysical cost that we generate a totality of objects (the world as a maximal whole) which at least in part is mind-dependent such that we move the issue of idealism to a metaphysical level.
This topic is taken up in the second part, which defends a mental realism. Generally speaking, mental realism is a commitment to the irreducible existence of the mind along with some of its modules. By a module of the mind I mean a capacity (for example a sense modality, such as sight, hearing, phenomenal consciousness, self-consciousness, the understanding, intelligence, and so on) that we ascribe to ourselves and others in the context of action explanation. We explain both our own actions and those of others by compiling a portfolio of mental states whose overall structure, it should be noted, is not available in any single scientifically objectified model. The mentalistic vocabulary with which we specify our mental capacities is constitutively historical; it varies both diachronically and synchronically, and we could never uncover any ahistorical criterion (such as the notion of a ‘folk psychology’) that would allow us to compile a definitive catalogue of mindedness.
This precisely does not imply that we can attain the goal of complete self-knowledge by eliminating the mind, or whichever modules are currently considered central (consciousness, intentionality). I will therefore show first of all that both naïve realism and illusionism fail (§6). Mind is neither an ahistorically accessible apprehension of reality, such that we can withdraw to a maximally self-transparent cogito, nor therefore an illusion, as illusionism maintains with equal falsity.
Against this constellation of extreme positions, §§ 7–8 expand on the aforementioned irreducibility thesis, which states that the human standpoint contains an invariant core (the anthropological constant): our capacity for generating self-images, the fact that, through the elaboration of self-portraits, we locate ourselves in contexts that transcend every sensory episode. We can call this core simply ‘human mindedness’ (or Geist). Human mindedness is connected to a potential for illusion, including the fundamental illusion of metaphysics, namely that there is an all-encompassing whole to which we belong. Because we rightly locate ourselves in contexts that indefinitely exceed everything sensorily given, the false impression arises that there is an all-encompassing whole (the world, reality as a whole) in which we are located.
Mind is the whole in which we implicitly locate everything we cognize, meaning that the necessary natural conditions of our existence (including our central nervous system, which is essentially embedded in an organism and enables cognition) from the standpoint of epistemology are parts of the mind and not vice versa.25 The brain is part of the mind; but the mind is not part of the brain. This circumstance is trivially compatible with supervenience, in so far as there is room for the (by no means empirically verified!) assumption that, whenever there are variations in the mind, there are also corresponding variations in the brain. What is excluded, however, is an identity theory (of any form) which stipulates that all mental states (or types of state) are identical to something neuronal.
§8 introduces the concept of mind in order to avoid the error of hypostatizing the lifeworld [Lebenswelt] into a culturally specific habitat [Lebensraum] – a mistake that led Husserl in The Crisis of European Sciences to adopt an ethically dubious attitude to the question of what it might mean to recognize a multiplicity of lifeworlds. In FOS, the lifeworld is indefinitely ontologically differentiated, such that, even at this level, there is no all-encompassing unity such as a ‘culture’ or an overarching ‘society’.
§9 develops a theory of perception that replaces the foundational phenomenological concept of adumbration [Abschattung] with that of irradiation [Abstrahlung]. This theory boils down to FOS’s variant of direct realism. Perception, as something real, is an overlapping of fields of sense whose nature as a medium allows us to grasp realities directly, without their being mediated through something unreal (such as epiphenomenal representations) that intervenes between us and the objects of perception. Perception is its own mediation, as it were, it does not require an additional veil, filter, or interface that takes place within our mind.
To avoid regressing into a brusquely naturalistic reading of this claim, I develop an objective phenomenology that portrays our overall mental states in acts of perception as irreducibly causal – indeed, as paradigms of causality. The concept of a cause stems from our perception, which is thus not only a case of causation in general but the reason why we have a concept of cause to begin with, one that we can justifiably extend beyond the horizons of our perception and into the universe, which we can then explore by means of natural science.
In §10, I return to the objection that the imagination has the potential to bring about the manifestation of the world, then countering it on the basis of an elaborated ontology of the mental. This ontology delivers decisive reasons for avoiding the (neo-)Meinongian theory of objects.
The discussion comes full circle in §11, which distinguishes between fictive, imaginary and intentional objects in order to explain in detail why the world as a totality of objects cannot be meaningfully depicted in terms of any of these categories. The attempt to bring back the world into the realm of the mental thus fails three times, each time for a different reason.
The third and concluding part of the book turns to the remnants of constructivism scattered across the discursive landscape of New Realism, specifically in the domain of social ontology. I reject the idea, whose prominent advocates include John Searle and Maurizio Ferraris, that the social is constructed while the rest of the universe (nature) remains untouched by it. Taking aim at this constellation of analytically improved social constructivism, which has recently enjoyed increasing popularity not least thanks to the analytical interventions of Sally Haslanger and others, §12 argues for the incoherence of constructivism as such. To determine the nature of specifically human social facts – that is, their ontology – we must consider, firstly, how minded beings qua beings of a certain kind are socially produced and, secondly, how they thus come to possess mental states that essentially need correction. It is no coincidence that human beings emerge under conditions of reproduction that are already social, by means of which a habitus is inscribed in their bodies that is already formed in the womb. Humans do not grow on trees but emerge through the coordination of human actions. Humans are thus social products, whereby the process of social production is ‘real’ in every conceivable sense and a legitimate object of realist theorizing. The social production of living beings is not ‘in the eye of the beholder’ in any relevant sense, and is thus not bound to parameters for which the (in any case questionable) analytical category of ‘social construction’ would be recommended in the first place.
Yet we can go further: even the dimension frequently emphasized within recognition-based theories of the social turns out to be realistically constituted. The basic human need for recognition is in fact socio-ontologically anchored; when we take something to be true that others consider false, we are confronted with our own fallibility. Fallibility as such only appears in factual dissent. To counterbalance factual disagreement, it is not sufficient to establish intrinsic belief mechanisms that subject future participants in our discourses to some particular training, for disagreement is a property of joint holding-to-be-true, and thus tied to truth and freedom.26 The social participation in holding-to-be-true consists in how others put us on the right track by making us aware of facts we had not previously considered. Whether or not these facts obtain determines the nature of our holding-to-be-true. In the paradigmatic successful case of knowledge, we take something to be true because it is both true and non-coincidentally justified.27 Since one does not necessarily know that one knows something, others are in a position to unsettle even our epistemic successes.
Socio-ontologically speaking, institutions can then be understood as balancing systems that neutralize factual disagreement by making judgements when they cannot take all the facts into account. Against this background, the paradigmatically social facts discussed in the social ontology of the human community are already social products of a balance whose foundation is the social.
In §13
