Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

Arendt contrasts narrative understanding with conceptual definition. A definition fixes meaning by drawing boundaries—often simplifying, excluding ambiguity, and pretending to finality. Storytelling, by contrast, can disclose significance indirectly: it shows how motives, actions, contingencies, and consequences hang together in a concrete sequence. Meaning emerges from the pattern of a life or event as it is narrated, without being reduced to a formula. The claim also implies an ethical and political stance: to understand human affairs, one must attend to particularity and plurality, allowing interpretation and judgment to arise from the story’s texture rather than from an imposed, supposedly exhaustive concept.