

























12 

2 

WHAT SAYEST THOU OF THYSELF? SOME 

REMARKS ON THE ENTANGLEMENT OF 

LIFE AND NARRATION AND ITS ETHICAL 

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PHILOSOPHICAL 

CANON 
 

Björn FRETER, Ph.D 
Independent Scholar, 

Knoxville, Tennessee, United States of America 
bfreterb@gmail.com 

 
I. Life and Narration 
When we are asked who we are, we often answer in stories. Let us take a 
look at an example, namely at the answer given to that very question by 
John the Baptist as told to us by the John the Evangelist1. The Evangelist 
has the Baptist answer the question posed by the Jewish priests and 
Levites “Who art thou?” – “Σὺ τíς εἶ;” as follows: 

I am not the Christ [Ἐγὼ οὐκ εἰμὶ ὁ χριστóς] (John 1:20). 
The learned men do not understand this cryptic reply. They 

continue to interrogate John the Baptist:  
What then? Art thou Elias? (John 1:21) 
John the Baptist responds:  
I am not [Οὐκ εἰμί] (John 1:21). 
And a third question follows:  
Art thou that prophet? (John 1:21) 
John responds and, for the third time, only provides a negative 

confession: “No [Οὔ]” (John 1:21). The inquisitors become impatient:  
Who art thou? […] What sayest thou of thyself? (John 1:22) 
“What sayest thou of thyself?” – “τí λέγεις περὶ σεαυτοῦ;” That is a 

wonderful explication of the initial question “Who art thou?”. Who John 
the Baptist is, είναι, is what he has to say, λέγειν, about himself. One 
could argue that at times the same can hold true for us: Who we are is 
what we have to say about ourselves and, of course, what others have to 
say about us. We are our stories. We can express who we are by telling – 



 Commissioned Papers    13 

even, as John does, in a highly condensed way – our story. In fact, it 
seems we have to express ourselves in stories, it seems to be a specific 
and rather necessary way of being alive as a human being, in other words, 
using Odo Marquard’s phrase, “narrare necesse est” – “to narrate is 
necessary” (Marquard 2003, 56, 60, 64, 71). 

Let us turn back to the Evangelists’ narration. After his negative 
confession to Christ John the Baptist eventually determines himself 
positively: 

I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness, Make straight the way 
of the Lord, as said the prophet Esaias (John 1:23).2 

The inquisition is still not over. Now the Pharisees proceed to 
question why John baptizes, if he is not the Messiah, nor Elijah, nor the 
Prophet. John replies: 

I baptize with water: but there standeth one among you, whom ye 
know not; 

He it is, who coming after me is preferred before me, whose shoe's 
latchet I am not worthy to unloose (John 1:26-27). 

This is what John the Baptist wanted and had –  narrare necesse est (to 
narrate is necessary) – to say about himself – “τí λέγεις περὶ σεαυτοῦ” 
(John 1:22): Initially it is vital to him to make his story distinguishable 
from the story of the one who is of the foremost importance. He is not 
the prophet; he is not Elias and – most notably – he is not Jesus. “Οὐκ 
εἰμί” – “I am not” is stated by John the Evangelist in strict opposition to 
the many times he records Jesus saying: “ἐγώ εἰμι …“ – “I am …”3.  

Eventually John the Baptist declares who he is positively: He is the 
one who announces Jesus. Even this positive confession is a conscious 
redirection from himself and towards Jesus, the one who is coming after 
– “ὀπίσω” – him. John is the “voice of one crying” – “φωνὴ βοῶντος”, 
he is announcing the one “whom ye know not;” – “μέσος ὑμῶν στήκει 
ὃν ὑμεῖς οὐκ οἴδατε”. This story is who John the Baptist is. The story of 
John the herald of Jesus Christ is John. This story, John is convinced, is 
precisely what any person who wishes to know who he is must learn 
about him. John encounters himself through his story and he tells this 
story to those who wish to know him. Thus those – be it the Jewish 
priests, Levites, Pharisees or the reader of the story in the present day – 
need this story to understand him as the human being he understood 
himself as to be. “To comprehend anything human”, Spanish 
philosopher Ortega y Gasset observed, “be it personal or collective, one 
must tell its history” (Gasset 1941, 214) – “Para comprender algo 
humano, personal o colectivo, es preciso contar una historia” (Gasset 
1970, 49). And that means nothing else but: one must make accessible 
our stories.  



14 Formation of the Human Person in the 21st Century 

Human beings attempting to comprehend other human beings need 
to learn about the other’s life stories. Here we see that life and narration 
are, as Edmund Husserl’s earliest disciples, Wilhelm Schapp described, 
entangled (Schapp 1953). 

Not only are our histories vital for comprehending the other and that 
our lives and the stories we tell inextricable, even the stories tell do not 
necessarily have to be factual. Returning to our example, it does not even 
matter if we consider John the Baptist to be a factual or fictious person, 
the real herald of Christ or not. As Paul Ricœur states, “fiction is quasi-
historical, just as much as history is quasi-fictive” (Ricœur 1990, 190). 
German novelist Siegfried Lenz notes we have to learn that even those 
experiences ‘made’ by fictious personal still hold relevance for us. Our 
being or vitality is very much alive in the fictitious experience. Lenz 
explains: 

“Experiences made by the invented person do not only 
concern them; they are transferable experiences. Novel 
characters would never challenge our interest in this way 
if we did not feel that our matter was being negotiated; 
we stop and say: that is how it will be. […] At such 
moments it becomes clear that we need the invented 
person if we want to give expression to the general or to 
find the hidden law that underlies human existence.” 
(Lenz 1981, 437-438)4 

From this we expand the essential nature of stories from being 
necessary for understanding others and a fundamental part of our lives to 
incorporate stories of both fact and fiction that bring vitality to our 
experiences and our understanding of ourselves and others. We could 
say, narration is being alive. It seems we would not be able to eradicate our 
aliveness out of narration, even if we wanted to. When the human being 
narrates it inevitably add its humanity or vitality into the narration. When 
the human being narrates it implicitly speaks – λέγειν – of the human 
being – ἄνθρωπος – in general. Conversely, narrating – λέγειν – implies 
to tell about the human - ἄνθρωπος. Anthropology implies narration as 
narration implies anthropology. Our aliveness remains alive when it is 
spoken, written, or sung, in any the narrative form. Indeed, we 
encounter narration as a form extracorporal human vitality. 

Not only are we able to convey this vitality, we are in need of this 
vitality. It allows us to understand our story, it allows us to be 
understood and furthermore to understand other human beings. 
Interconnected human life itself comes to reality in stories just as stories 
come to reality in human life. Schapp even insisted, that access to the 
human being is “only possible through stories, only possible through his 
[her/their] stories” (Schapp 1953, 100)5.  



 Commissioned Papers    15 

Being alive is narrative. The telling of stories at all, is possible, because we 
are alive in a narrative sense. It can be said that stories enable our existence, 
and our existence enables stories. Maybe we can even say that the telling of 
stories enables the living of stories, and the living of stories enables the telling of 
stories. Life is always life’s story and life’s story is always something living, 
something living in which we see our vitality reflected back to us. 
Returning to John the Baptist we see he is who he is, and he can tell his 
story because he is his story and he is his story because he can tell it. Life 
is narration and narration is alive. 

This makes the story of John the Baptist being asked who he is a 
story that can affect us all, whether we understand him to be a herald of 
Christ or something entirely different. Certainly, we hear the story of the 
herald of Christ, but we find a human being narratively self-determining 
himself. This self-determination can speak to any human being. And 
here the significance of our telling the stories of ourselves takes on 
crucial importance: The question of “Who am I?” is connected at the 
very foundations of our existence with the question of “What ought I 
do?”. These questions converge so dramatically at the foundations of 
existence that they seem to form only one single question: work on the 
question “Who am I?” seems to be the same work as that concerning the 
question “What should I do?”. Martin Luther understood the Baptist in 
precisely this sense in a sermon on the Gospel according to John. He has 
John the Baptist say: 

I know neither how to help nor how to advise you [scil. the 
inquiring scholars], nor indeed myself; but I know of one who can help 
me and you alike. […] [F]ollow [Christ], I and will do so as well 
(Luther 2002, 31).6 

Follow Christ – that is what is to be done here. While we may know 
the story of John only in its outline, we know not only his actions, his 
being, but also his “Why?”, his practical answer to the question “What 
ought I do?”. We know John’s ought-to-be: to be a follower – or a 
precursor – of Christ. This connection between being and ought, 
between what I am and what I ought to be is present in John’s story in 
concreto, but it is present in abstracto, as the fight for self-determination, for 
anyone who comes across this narration.  

When we hear the story of John, we also hear – without this having 
to be expressly spoken of – his normative narrative. A story, as we would 
like to put it, thus concerns the genesis of action and the reasons for it, 
or, put into philosophical terminology, is and ought and the connection 
between the two at the foundations of existence. Our biographical 
narrative is not an objective narration. In the biographical narrative, in 
the understanding of the world and oneself according to this biographical 
narrative, our normative understanding of the world is also reflected. 



16 Formation of the Human Person in the 21st Century 

The biographical narrative tells not only of our being, but also of who we 
are, and this self-determination necessarily includes the ought to which 
we subject this being. 

Let us summarize our findings: We are our stories. Being alive 
implies being entangled in stories, implies tell one’s story – or at least 
desiring to have a story – and to deal with stories of other human beings. 
A hermeneutic of human life needs cannot be complete without taking 
into account that being alive happens qua narration. An epistemology of 
human understanding that disregards stories, as far as we can tell, will 
necessarily be an ignorant reductive epistemology. We have to take 
stories seriously as a part of the expressivity of human life. Ricœur 
remarked that “the novel occupied a still vacant place in the realm of 
human sciences” (Ricœur 1990, 191) – “le roman occupait ici une place 
encore vacante dans l'empire des sciences humaines” (Ricœur 1985, 
278). We agree with Ricœur. However, we would like to broaden his 
understanding and insist that this holds true not only for the novel, but 
for stories in the broadest sense as we can find it in Schapp when he 
observed that even the “corporeal appearance” of a human being is 
actually “an appearance of his [her/their] stories” (Schapp 1953, 100)7. 
With stories, the narratives of life, we possess a reservoir of testimonies 
of human self-understanding that has thus far, despite the works of 
Schapp, Ricœur and others – been widely underestimated. We must 
finally and fully accept narrations as, in the words of Austrian thinker 
Robert Musil, “contributions to the intellectual dealing with the world” 
(Musil 1978, 942)8. 

 
II. Consequences 

We have to tried to show the mutual implication of life and 
narration. Our hypothesis may seem prima facie deceptively simple, but 
there are some surprisingly powerful ethical consequences to it.  

If it is true that stories – in the broadest sense – and human life are 
inextricably entangled then the disregard of some stories as irrelevant, 
beyond the canon, or primitive equals the disregard of those people who 
listen to and tell these stories. The western humanities have 
hegemonically determined for centuries what stories are of relevance. 
Those stories were mostly written by white, heterosexual men and those 
stories were mostly written down – even though some foundational 
figures of the western culture, most notably Socrates and Jesus, never 
wrote a single line of their own teachings. The African culture, for 
example, was and continues to be for its many people who continue to 
hand down their stories orally deemed ‘primitive’, pre-Western, of less 
relevance, inferior. However, if we take the entanglement of life and 
narrative seriously, we might have to give up the idea of a narrow canon. 



 Commissioned Papers    17 

Of course, can establish different parameters of, for example, the impact 
of different stories. The story of Jesus Christ has certainly had a great 
impact, but that does hardly make the stories of the Yoruba or Akan any 
less relevant. It is a still prevailing predominantly western 
misunderstanding that impact – often advanced by subsequent 
domination and subordination – is the parameter of relevance. We have to 
give up the idea of canonical stories as story of superior relevance, of a 
canon that one has to read to become a human being, of a canon that 
determines that only those who think within these given stories are truly 
thinking and thus entitled to speak their thoughts. We have to give up 
the idea of a general canon, because a general canon is necessarily an anti-
inclusive and superiorist tool of domination that is compiled by those in 
power. However, power is not a philosophical argument. There is, if we 
agree to the interconnectedness of life and narration, no philosophical 
argument for a canon. Any argument for a general canon is an argument 
against the relevance of all human beings.  

When we accept life and stories and stories and life as what they are 
by their blending, we have to understand that ignoring, disregarding, 
suppressing stories means to ignore, disregard and suppress human life. 
Africa was during the colonial era not allowed to have a story, was not 
allowed to continue her story. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel famously 
claimed that Africa is “no historical part of the world; it shows no 
movement or development” (Hegel 1986, 129)9, and anything one might 
of relevance there is actually part of Europe’s or Asia’s history. Africa, in 
Hegel’s opinion, which was highly impactful for the development of 
what is to be considered part of the philosophical canon and what not, 
has no story to tell and – and the colonial reality shows the transition of 
this philosophical assessment into tangible reality – thus there are no 
living beings to considered as fully human. This practice has to be 
discontinued. Philosophy has to desuperiorized, i.e. philosophy has to 
understand and dismantle the – implicit or explicit – assumptions of 
superiority in all its iterations. All must be able to determine who they 
are so that they can determine how they should act. Thus everyone is 
included in the ethical conversations of our times and we can 
collaboratively broaden our epistemological understanding and 
desuperiorize the philosophical canon by making it inclusive so that 
philosophy as a discipline can be a vital part of our coming history.  

 
 
 
 
 

 



18 Formation of the Human Person in the 21st Century 

Endnotes 
                                                      
1  We will use the King James Version to cite the English text of the New 

Testament and the Aland & Aland 26th edition for the Greek text. 
2 See Esaias 40:3. 
3 See for example John 6:20, 7:9, 10:11 and many more, furthermore see Thyen 

2005, 112. 
4 This is my translation. The German text reads: “Erfahrungen, die die erfundene 

Person macht, betreffen nicht nur sie; es sind übertragbare Erfahrungen. Niemals 

würden Romanfiguren unser Interesse derart herausfordern, wenn wir nicht 

spürten, daß an ihnen auch unsere Sache verhandelt wird; wir stutzen und sagen: 

so ist es, so wird es sein. […] In solchen Augenblicken wird deutlich, daß wir auf die 

erfundene Person angewiesen sind, wenn wir dem Allgemeinen Ausdruck 

verschaffen oder die verborgene Gesetzmäßigkeit auffinden wollen, die dem 

menschlichen Dasein zugrundeliegt“. 
5 This is my translation. The full German passage reads: “Wir meinen auch, daß 

der Zugang zu dem Mann, zu dem Menschen, nur über Geschichten, nur über seine 

Geschichten erfolgt“. 
6 This is my translation. The German text reads: „Ich weiß euch [scil. den 

Gelehrten] nicht zu helfen noch zu raten, auch mir selbst nicht; sondern ich weiß 

und kenne einen, der mir und euch helfen kann. […] [H]änget euch an [Christus], ich 

wills auch tun”. 
7 This is my translation. The German text reads: “das leibliche Auftauchen des 

Menschen [ist] nur ein Auftauchen seiner Geschichten ist“. 
8 This is my translation. The German text reads: “Beiträge zur geistigen 

Bewältigung der Welt”. Musil refers here only to the novel. 
9  This is my translation. The full German passage reads: “[Afrika] ist kein 

geschichtlicher Weltteil, er hat keine Bewegung und Entwicklung aufzuweisen, und 

was etwa in ihm, das heißt in seinem Norden geschehen ist, gehört der asiatischen 

und europäischen Welt zu“. 


