Knowledge and Narrative: An Aesthetic-Phenomenological Account

Abstract

In this article, I reconstruct Ferdinand Fellmann's account of the relation between knowledge and narrative within his broader understanding of phenomenology as an aesthetic theory. I argue that narrative plays a constitutive role in mediating the relation between subjectivity, world, and meaning. From this perspective, Fellmann's position can be understood as a narrative reworking of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology, developed through a critical engagement with Wilhelm Schapp's theory of entanglement in hi/stories. While the latter offers a critique of the central assumptions of classical phenomenology through a narrative approach that excludes any form of reconciliation with it, Fellmann's position, drawing on the historical and aesthetic roots of phenomenology itself, proposes a narrative retrieval of its transcendental claims. Through the fiction of hi/stories, the subject enacts a form of derealization of reality in which the very modes through which consciousness understands itself and the world are preserved, thereby allowing the phenomenological investigation of the universal to proceed without suspending the historical and factual conditions of lived experience, and thus, for Fellmann, revealing narrative as an immanent development of the phenomenological movement itself.