From the Redemption of Meaning to Subjectivism

In today's public discussion and everyday language, the word "narrative" is undergoing an unprecedented inflation. Whether it is the "brand narrative" that businesses tell, the "personal-narrative" crafted on social platforms, or the "grand narrative" and "counter-narrative" that keep appearing at the macro level, we seem to have entered an age where "everything is narrative."

Yet when everything is defined as "narrative," we may be unknowingly walking down a road Western society has already traveled and found flawed: downgrading objective reality into pure linguistic construction, and from there sliding into an extreme "subjectivism" and voluntarism.

The West's stretch of road was not long. From the rise of the "narrative turn" to its backlash, it took only a few decades. And why a current of thought that already paid its price over there can spread even faster here — that is what follows tries to work out.

1. The Western experience: how the narrative turn walked toward the "subjectivist trap"

"Narrative," as an academic and social current, did not exist in the West from ancient times. It was the product of postmodernism's deconstruction of "objective truth" in the second half of the twentieth century.

1.1 From "discovering truth" to "inventing stories"

In early modernity, people believed the world had objective laws, and humanity's task was to "discover" them. But by the 1960s and 70s, with the rise of structuralism and post-structuralism (represented by Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, and others), grand narratives — ultimate truth, historical inevitability — came under attack. Lyotard went so far as to define the postmodern as distrust of meta-narratives.

Western academia then went through the famous "narrative turn": people began to realize that history is not a cold, objective pile of evidence, but a "story" organized by human language; psychology, too, began to hold that the self is not a fixed entity, but something continually pieced together through "self-narrative." But this apparatus was originally built for people who had no voice. Once everyone learned to use it, the cost of speaking dropped to nearly zero — think back to the last time you lost an argument: was it that you were wrong, or that the other person simply told it more smoothly?

1.2 Sliding into subjectivism: the erasure of the line between fact and interpretation

The "narrative turn" initially had a positive, liberating meaning — it broke absolute authority and gave the weak and marginalized the legitimacy to tell their own stories. But when the logic is pushed to its extreme, a crisis follows.

The most quoted slogan is "there are no facts, only interpretations." It is attributed to Nietzsche and has become common sense in popular culture.

But there are two things about this sentence that are rarely mentioned together. First, it is not something Nietzsche published: it comes from his private notebooks of late 1886 to spring 1887, never published in his lifetime, and was compiled into The Will to Power by his sister Elisabeth after his death — a book he never finished, with the 1906 edition carrying serious tampering of the manuscripts. Second, in the very same note, immediately after, he argues against it himself:

"'Everything is subjective,' you say; but this itself is an interpretation."

A sentence the man himself dismissed on the spot ended up becoming a banner. That is less like "hermeneutics" and more like a misreading so successful that no one ever fact-checked it.

Once a misreading spreads, the consequences are concrete: if everything is narrative, then real poverty, the oppression of power, and the objective laws of physics no longer matter — what matters is "how you narrate it." Taken to its endpoint, this subjectivism becomes the "post-truth era" and the frenzy of identity politics that plague Western society today — facts no longer matter; emotion, position, and the subjective narrative of "what I feel I am" override all objective physical laws and biological facts. Have you ever had this moment: you were right there when something happened, and the version you heard later didn't match what you remembered, and you just nodded and couldn't be bothered to correct it?

2. Contemporary China: compressed "postmodern narrative" and the prevalence of surface work

The abuse of the word "narrative" in contemporary Chinese society is precisely this Western trajectory, compressed to an extreme degree and given a local form. And the reason it can compress this fast may lie not in intellectual circles but in the growth curve.

2.1 "Searching for cognitive frameworks" under real anxiety

Over the past few decades, China has gone through rapid modernization. During a period of fast economic growth, people didn't need to talk about "narrative" often, because the future was clear and certain: upward mobility, wealth accumulation — the explanatory framework was ready-made. But when society enters structural adjustment and uncertainty rises, the old causal logic is no longer enough to explain the present predicament — just as postmodern currents erupted in the West after the postwar boom ended, today's young people urgently need an explanatory tool to place their situation. "Narrative" answered the call: people try to regain a sense of control through "renaming" and "finding new frameworks."

And there the problem begins. Try to recall: over the past six months, when you used the word "narrative," were you describing something you understood clearly, or explaining something you couldn't explain?

2.2 The subjectivist slide: surface work and "concept-minting"

The problem is that today's "narrative" has badly drifted from its original purpose as a cognitive tool, and turned into a subjectivist performance of surface work.

In business and the workplace, when real product innovation or revenue growth hits a ceiling, people start feverishly talking about "underlying logic" and "narrative stories." Reality hasn't changed, but swap in a new set of words and it feels as if the problem is solved. The meetings keep happening, the vocabulary rotates three times, and the numbers on the report don't move an inch. At the personal level, people frantically build their own "personal narrative" — persona, track, label — and, to make the story smooth and coherent, will cut their feet to fit the shoes, slicing away the messy, painful, illogical but precious scraps of real life.

More insidious is the third kind: this tendency quietly spreads an illusion — "as long as I change the narrative frame through which I see the problem, the real predicament ceases to exist." This excessive psychological construction is, at bottom, an evasion of objective reality, a spiritual Ah Q-ism. The last time you swapped out a phrase, was it because your thinking really changed, or because the old phrase could no longer hold up?

3. Where it goes: the bursting of the narrative bubble and "the return of realism"

Drawing on the West's post-carnival reflection, we can roughly infer where China's "narrative fever" may be headed.

3.1 Narrative inflation and the crisis of trust (short term)

When everyone is minting words and everyone is telling narratives, "narrative inflation" is inevitable. It usually takes only a few years for a word to go from everyone grabbing at it to everyone treating it as a joke: the people who stood on stage talking about "ecosystem" two years ago are now talking about "long-termism" — and beneath both phrases is often the very same business. The public develops a strong immunity to and fatigue with any carefully crafted story, persona, or grand framework — just as the Western public pushed back against politically correct narratives; the "abstract culture" that dissolves and deconstructs everything will spread further. By then, a person who refuses to believe anything looks the freest — but what does he make his decisions with?

3.2 Subjectivism hits the wall and reality pushes back (medium term)

Subjectivist narrative construction ultimately cannot get past the hard wall of objective laws. Economic laws, physiological limits, concrete material conditions of survival — none of these will vanish just because you swapped in a new "narrative." When overemphasizing subjective narrative makes society's operating costs too high and communication breaks down, people will realize anew: some things exist objectively, and do not change with how we express them.

Still, the hard wall doesn't speak immediately. The debt is always paid, but the one who signs and the one who pays are rarely the same person — when was the last time you paid the price for someone else's story?

3.3 Rebuilding balance: from "subjectivist dictatorship" back to "body and mind in one" (long term)

After the two extremes of forced narrative and total deconstruction, social attitudes will eventually settle into a rebuilt balance. The philosopher Galen Strawson, in "Against Narrativity," published in Ratio in 2004, distinguished between diachronic and episodic self-experience, arguing the latter is equally legitimate: one need not force one's life into a novel with a beginning, middle, and end that echoes itself. Accepting the fragmentary, discontinuous, and chaotic nature of life is the first step in resisting subjectivism's hold.

Narrative will also return to its proper place — an auxiliary tool for communication, exchange, and periodic summing-up, not reality itself. Real lived experience is always larger than any carefully packaged story. It's just — a life that was never tidied up, never told into a coherent shape, does it still count?

Conclusion

Placing the popularity of "narrative" in contemporary China within the long river of modern Western intellectual evolution, we see that it is both an inevitable stage after high development and awakened individual consciousness, and a visible philosophical slide. Tool and excuse — the same word.

So, in an age saturated with narrative, when we so eagerly tell stories about ourselves — is it because the stories really work, or because looking directly at those rough, real fragments is too painful?