Epilog

What practical conclusions can be drawn from this for our lives?

Is constructivism a philosophical digression that may revolutionize the scientific view of the world, but has as little influence on the reality of the individual as the theory of relativity has on the construction of a shed? What does it offer to modern man, who finds himself thrown into an increasingly incomprehensible world, in which the venerable models of earlier epochs have largely lost their meaning and comfort?

For some, constructivism is the other name of Nihilism. Those who are convinced that they cannot live without a final meaning will only be able to see the precursor of decomposition and chaos in the idea that all reality is ultimately invented. The ultimate consequence to be drawn from this, it seems, is Suicide. "I am obliged to document my disbelief" , says the suicide Kirillov in Dostoevsky's Demons. "For me, nothing is higher than the idea that God does not exist. For me the whole history of mankind speaks. Man has done nothing so far but make up a God in order to live without killing himself."

The suicide searches for the meaning of the world, convinces himself at a certain point in time that the meaning does not exist, and then kills himself – not because the world as such has proven not to be livable or worth living in, but because it does not meet his demand to have a final and comprehensible meaning. With this demand, the suicide has constructed a reality that does not fit and therefore causes his ship of life to fail. Nothing is further from the inventor of this deadly reality than the wise modesty of the king in Alice in Wonderland, who reads the poem of the white rabbit, finds it nonsensical and states both relieved and shrugging: "If there is no meaning in it, it saves us a lot of work, because then we don't need to look for one either". Wittgenstein expresses the same fact not essentially differently when he writes in the Logical-Philosophical Treatises (paragraph 6.521): "One notices the solution of the problem of life by the disappearance of this problem".

The counterpart of the Suicide is the Seeker; but the difference between the two is slight. The suicide comes to the conclusion that what he is looking for does not exist, the seeker, on the other hand, that he has not yet searched in the right place. The suicide introduces zero, the seeker infinity into the existential "equation"; every such search is in Karl Popper's meaning self-immunizing and therefore endless. There are an infinite number of possibly "correct" search results. The accusation of nihilism leads itself ad absurdum by proving what it wants to refute: namely, that the postulate of a meaning is the precondition of the supposed discovery of a meaningless world.

But this still says nothing about what reality then constructivism itself constructs. In other words: What would be the world experience of a human being who would be able to see his world as his own construction? This person would be, as Varela already stated (p. 309), above all tolerant. Who has grasped that his world is his own invention, must grant this to the worlds of his fellow men. He who knows that he is not right, but that his view of things fits only right and wrong, will find it difficult to ascribe malice or madness to his fellow men and to persist in the primitive thinking of the Manichean "He who is not for me is against me". The insight that we know nothing as long as we do not know that we know nothing definitively is the precondition of respect for the realities invented by other people. Only when these other realities themselves become intolerant would he claim – again in Karl Popper's meaning – the right not to tolerate intolerance.

This person also felt responsible in a deeply ethical meaning; responsible not only for his dreams and failures, but for his conscious world and his reality-creating, self-fulfilling prophecies. The way out, so comfortable for all of us, into the shifting of guilt to circumstances and to other people would no longer be open to him.

This full responsibility would also mean his full freedom. Who would be fully aware of the circumstance to be the inventor of his reality, would know about the always existing possibility to form it differently. In the most original meaning he would be a heretic, that is, one who knows that he can choose. He would stand where Steppenwolf stands at the end of the novel; in the magic theater that his psychopompos Pablo explains to him with the words:

"My little theater has as many log doors as you want, ten or a hundred or a thousand, and behind each door what you are looking for awaits you. It is a pretty cabinet of pictures, dear friend, but it would do you no good to go through it as you are. You would be inhibited or blinded by what you are used to calling your personality. No doubt you have long since guessed that the overcoming of time, the redemption from reality, and whatever names you may give to your longing, mean nothing else than the desire to become free of your so-called personality. It is the prison in which you sit. And if you entered the theater as you are, you would see everything through the eyes of Harry, everything through the old glasses of Steppenwolf".

But the Steppenwolf fails to take off his glasses and is therefore condemned "to the penalty of eternal life. This reversal of the meaning of life and death is far more than a successful play on words. The reports of people who escaped death by a hair's breadth (e.g., note 6) repeatedly mention a kind of breakthrough experience into a reality that is much more real than anything experienced so far, and in which one is "more me than I" in a meaning that cannot be relived later. Once all constructions have collapsed, all glasses have been discarded, "we are back at the starting point and will grasp this place for the first time".

Dostoevsky, the epileptic, lets his prince Myshkin say in the Idiot about the aura (the second preceding the grand mal): "At that moment I somehow seem to understand the meaning of that unusual word, that henceforth there shall be no more time". Koestler, condemned to death, experiences this state at the window of his prison cell in Seville:

… Then I felt as if I were gliding, lying on my back, in a river of peace under bridges of silence. I came from nowhere and drifted nowhere. Then neither the river was there anymore, nor I. The I had ceased to be. [...] When I say, "the I had ceased to be," I refer to a concrete experience that is as little expressible in words as the sensations triggered by a piano concerto, but which is just as real-no, much more real. In fact, its most important characteristic is the impression that this state is much more real than any ever experienced before.

Countless soldiers may have experienced something similar at the front. Robert Musil, whose novel character, the pupil Törless - as already mentioned - asks his mathematics professor in vain about the meaning of the imaginary number i, seems to have had such an experience and to have described it in the story Der Fliegerpfeil, apparently without being aware of the possibility that the answer to Törless' question lay here:

… It [the whizzing of the flying arrow] was a thin, singing, simple high-pitched sound, like when the edge of a glass is made to sound; but there was something unreal about it; you have never heard that before, I said to myself. And this sound was directed at me; I was in connection with this sound and did not doubt in the least that something decisive was going to happen to me. Not a single thought in me was of the kind that is supposed to occur in the moments of parting with life, but everything I felt was directed toward the future; and I simply must say, I was sure to feel God's nearness near my body in the next minute. [...] My heart beat broadly and calmly; I could not have been frightened even for a fraction of a second; not the smallest particle of time was missing from my life. [At that moment, a hot feeling of gratitude washed over me, and I think that I blushed all over my body. If someone had said that God had entered my body, I would not have laughed. But I would not have believed it either.

But all these anthological references and possible parallels, all these ultimately vague, subjective descriptions sound exalted and "mystical" in the bad meaning of the word. And yet, by their very nature, one cannot deny their mystical character, since in them the subject-object split obviously closes - even if only for seconds. The problem is only their description. The so-called mystics either fall into silence - as Wittgenstein recommends - or they are forced to use the language of the great models of their respective epoch; religion, mythology, philosophy and the like. In the incomparable simplicity of his style, Lao-tzu expresses this dilemma in the first sentence of the Tao Te King: "The meaning that can be conceived is not the eternal meaning; the name that can be named is not the eternal name." Whoever is able to write such a sentence knows about the relativity and the subjective origin of every meaning and every name. He knows that every attribution of meaning and every naming creates a very particular reality. But in order to arrive at this knowledge, he had to catch himself, so to speak, in the act of inventing a reality. In other words: He had to discover how he first created a world "in his image", remained unconscious of the act of his creation, and then experienced it as the world life "out there" independent of him - the world of the counter-states (objects) - out of whose so-being he then constructed himself back-referentially. The senselessness of the search thus proves to be meaningful in its necessity. The wrong way must be taken in order to prove to be a wrong way. Wittgenstein must have had similar meanings when he wrote:

WATZLAWICK, Paul (ed.), 1985. Die erfundene Wirklichkeit: wie wissen wir, was wir zu wissen glauben?; Beiträge zum Konstruktivismus. 14. Aufl. Februar 2002. München Zürich: Piper. Serie Piper, 373. ISBN 978-3-492-20373-9.