Episode #232 ... Byung Chul Han - The Crisis of Narration

Hello everyone. I'm Steven West. This is philosophize this. patreon.com/f philosophize this.

Philosophical writing on Substack at Philosophize this on there. I hope you love the show today. So, Bangchilhan is a bit of a fan favorite on this podcast. Lots of emails sent almost two years ago when we did a couple episodes on his work and since then he's released a couple more books.

The one today is called The Crisis of Narration. And as your philosophical sherpa, here's my take on how to best approach this book. To me, it seems there's two big pieces of his argument. One is a description of something big that's changed about the world we live in.

And the other is the existential cost that people have to pay living in this new world, the people there being us. That's how I'm going to structure this episode today. I'll kind of swap between first describing the world he depicts, and then I'll explain the cost of it. Just know that throughout all of this, Bjong Cho Han is setting his sights on what he sees as an absolutely sickening decline of storytelling.

a decline that has changed what it is to be a person in today's world. Hence the name of the book, The Crisis of Narration. So, out of respect to your time, I'll get right into it. Human beings are often described as narrative creatures.

We've all heard this before. For our entire history, stories have been a huge part of the way we relate to the world around us. From tribal elders that would pass wisdom down from generation to generation to the stories they tell about the origins of their tribe, where their people descend from. Fast forward and you have religious stories that root people in their place in the universe and the afterlife.

You can see this in polytheism all the way up to the Abrahamic religions. We even have stories of the lore that binds a particular area of people together under one heading. I am a Spartan, people will say, for example, and that means something to me in terms of where I come from and what I am now. Stories have been and still are a critical piece of what it is to be a person.

But something happened to our stories right about the beginning of the 20th century. Bjang Chilhan ...