Han always riffs on similar themes—the end of ritual, the decay of culture, and the effects of modernity. This short treatise revolves around the topic of narration and the purpose of stories in shaping man. Han suggests, “We live in a post-narrative time…. In the post-narrative era, the calendar is de-narrativized; it becomes a meaningless schedule of appointments…. Without a narrative, there are no festivities, no festive times—no festive moods with their intensified feeling of being. All that is left are work and free time, production and consumption…. Ultimately, a narrative is an expression of the mood of a time…. Narration is a concluding form. It creates a closed order that founds meaning and identity…. Narratives create a community…. Wisdom is embedded in life as narrative.”
Narrative is an essential component of humanity. It is how we make sense of our world. Han states, “Human beings do not exist from one moment to the next. They are not momentary beings. Their existence comprises the whole temporal range that opens up between birth and death. In the absence of external orientation and a narrative anchoring in being, the energy to contract the time between birth and death into a living unity that encapsulates all events and occurrences must come from the self. The continuity of being is guaranteed by the continuity of the self.” The Self is made up of episodic memories, not an all-encompassing span. “Human memory is selective. This is how it differs from a database. It is narrative…. A narrative depends on a selection and connection of events. It proceeds in a selective fashion…. The narrated or remembered life is necessarily incomplete…. Remembrance is not a mechanical repetition of an earlier experience but a narrative that must be recounted again and again. Memories necessarily have gaps…. To be able to narrate or remember, one must be able to forget or leave out a great deal.”
This book would not be a Han treatise if he did not explicitly condemn modern life. Han opines, “Life in late modernity is utterly naked. It lacks narrative imagination. Pieces of information cannot be tied together into a narrative…. The coherence from which events derive their meaning gives way to a meaningless side-by-side and one-after-the-other…. By establishing strong connections between events, a narrative overcomes the emptiness and fleetingness of time. Narrative time does not pass…. It is through narrative that we escape the contingency of life…. The eye of the modern city dweller is overburdened with protective tasks. It unlearns contemplative lingering…. Stories create social cohesion. They offer meaning and bear values that create community…. Myths are ritually staged shared narratives…. Shared action, the we, is based on narrative.”
Han espouses the essentiality of theory to cut through the thickets of modern data. “Correlations are the most primitive form of knowledge. They do not allow us to understand anything…. As a narrative, theory designs an order of things…. It develops conceptual contexts that make things intelligible…. Theory is a form of closure that takes hold of things and thereby makes them graspable…. The end of theory ultimately means the end of concept as spirit [Begriff als Geist]…. Only spirit is capable of a reordering of things, of creating a new narrative…. Data-knowledge marks the degree zero of spirit. In a world saturated with data and information, our narrative capacity withers…. Philosophy, in the form of ‘poetry’ (mythos), takes a risk, a noble risk. It narrates—even risks to suggest—a new form of life and being…. New narratives allow for new forms of perception…. The world is, so to speak, re-narrated, and as a result we see it with fresh eyes…. Once philosophy claims to be a science, an exact science even, decay sets in. Conceived as a science, philosophy denies its original narrative character and it loses its language. Philosophy falls silent…. We lack the courage for philosophy, the courage for theory, that is, the courage to create a narrative. We must always bear in mind that, in the final analysis, thinking is also a narrating that progresses in narrative steps.”
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