SubscribeDecember 29th, 2011
wording and communication
I love looking in over at Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog. She writes an interesting mix of things – literature of course, politics, commentary on things like the Chilean miners and their ordeal last Fall. She’s no daily blogger but everything she does post is well thought out, fun to read.
Here is one thing that really caught my eye today:
Post 40: She talks about the Top 5 FOX Myths post from November 22. Compare the wording.
Le Guin’s post of Myth #1:
MYTH #1: The congressional Super Committee failed because both sides refused to compromise.
REALITY: It failed because the Republicans in Congress, following the Party Line, now refuse ANY compromise on ANY issue offered by the Democrats.
Reaganist Republicanism has become a rigid ideology, as Stalinism was.
To be a Republican politician now, you must be, literally, politically correct.
If you don’t correctly parrot the Party Line, you will be exiled to (shudder!) Liberal Siberia.
MoveOn’s post
MYTH #1: The congressional Super Committee failed because both sides refuse to compromise.
REALITY: The Super Committee failed because Republicans’ number one, non-negotiable priority is to protect millionaires and billionaires from paying even one more penny in taxes. Democrats repeatedly offered deep spending cuts (far deeper than most progressives would like) in exchange for raising taxes on the wealthy and closing corporate loopholes, only to be refused again and again. So even though the vast majority of Americans say they want to protect Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits, and raise taxes on the rich and corporations, that won’t happen until Republicans put aside their extremist stance
Of the last part MoveOn says “until Republicans put aside their extremist stance”.
Le Guin says “you will be exiled to (shudder!) Liberal Siberia”.
By using “Siberia” Le Guin gives us an image which by which we can understand current political behaviour in the US by referencing our own knowledge of USSR totalitarianism and human rights abuses that came under the guise of politics. It’s so much better than the “extremist stance” thing.
December 27th, 2011
poetry and What does “meaning” actually mean?
I’ve been trying to read Poetry and the Fate of the Senses by Susan Stewart and frankly I’m having trouble getting past the introductory chapters which, amongst other things, lay out the assumptions that are likely to underpin all further argument.
Here’s the fundamental question it makes me ask: What does “meaning” actually mean?
And yes I get that it is somewhat of a meaningless question – a tautology, as it were. But you see that’s, what the book feels like.
For this post, let me back up for a minute and give you a very basic image that I use to imagine abstraction and how it works. It is my hope that the image will make explaining my problem with this book’s set-up more obvious.
Image a black screen. On the screen near the lower center is a white globe. That white globe is the human body and all its doings, including the apprehension of the world, its assessment and consequent behavioural modification – those things we normally call a mind. Now imagine that the black screen is full of energy packets zooming around. Each of those packets has a very specific shape – triangles, cubes, rhomboids, etc. The white ball has a number of openings that conform to some of the shapes but not to others.
Here is the first layer of meaning. The shapes of energy packets in the black screen beyond the white ball that are not matched by the shapes in the white ball are meaningless. They are invisible, untouchable, silent, tasteless, etc. This layer of meaning is shared by all forms that endure for any length. Complex chemicals “recognize” some other chemicals and not others. Those ones are meaningful to the complex chemical because it can recognize them. This is not self awareness, but it is recognition.
In human beings this layer of meaning is ever present. In this sense there is no moment in the life of a human being in which the universe is meaningless since there is never a time when the basic chemical and sensual recognitions and processes are not ongoing. This has a good deal of impact on Stewart’s fundamental image of darkness and night as formless, with no boundary and therefore not allowing any intersubjectivity or an ongoing dialectic.
Second image: Along with the white sphere there is now a smaller blue sphere. The two spheres are connected; the blue sphere is dependent upon the white one. At the level of mind that starts to create self-aware abstractions (that is meaningful recognitions that endure long enough for those recognitions to be called aware, and be manipulable by the imagination), mini “worlds” are created. A mentally constituted mini world is a blue sphere. The first order meanings that are always ongoing go through a further process if they are neurologically active enough (firing time crosses a time threshold). This later process is founded on the earlier processes but are projected onto a screen of their own – and a mini world is created to rotate, grasp, assess, manipulate the few “recognitions” that are part of the being’s current concern.
What the body does is posit a smaller “body”, limiting the “variables” so that a specific concern can be addressed in a simplified, but still recognizable “field”. This is an abstraction and the blue sphere.
The thing is that once inside the world of the blue sphere the same process can be accomplished and a new tertiary set of spheres be postulated and manipulated. By their nature, these imitation “bodies” – which are abstractions and simplifications – feel like a total world in themselves. But these small blue worlds cannot function as whole worlds, anymore than a virgin can know what sex is like by reading the Kama Sutra. The risk is that the blue sphere “forgets” its connection (and dependency) on the the white sphere. This is when abstractions take on a life of their own and often get completely outside the bounds of reality – and, often, polite society. (Think about the abstraction – women are the source of trouble in men’s lives – when you create a world out of that, you can easily forget that women are also the source of new men (baby boys), the source of much pleasure, and posit a world in which women don’t need to exist – e.g. monasticism. Look at the trouble that has got the Catholic Church into.)
Here is a real world example: Ask yourself the question, How can I live a meaningful life? An abstract-generating question. You might think about ethics, or pleasure, or narrative, or a number of other areas in human life, but in an attempt to answer such a question you are unlikely to include questions like what shall I cook for dinner tonight or I wonder who’s scratching at the door. These last two are concerns of the white sphere, but not of this particular blue sphere generated by my question.
But imagine now that you get caught up in this particular blue sphere and your connection is something deep and profound. Then your tummy rumbles. The concern for supper becomes not a concern temporarily set aside, but an intrusion, even a threat to the integrity of the small blue “world”. If you cannot “remember” that the abstract blue world you created to deal with this question of meaning is just an abstracted small portion of the larger real world (the white sphere), then any “foreign” thoughts threaten the new world. In that moment, the unknown presenting itself becomes an act of war.
So back to Stewart: Her abstract world – her blue sphere – is language devoid of bodily sources of meaning.
But I disagree. Night is not formless. The unconscious is merely unaware, not empty. Language is not “a counter to the oblivion of darkness”. I doubt whether language (or poetry) counters anything at all – that is, it isn’t in a combative relationship with the body from which it originates. What combat is created, what need to counter the unseen, comes from this abstraction taking its role as a “world” literally and forgetting to dissolve in the face of the larger needs of the originating body.
December 21st, 2011
a fish swimming, part 2
The idea that we have become fish out of water, that we are somehow outside life, outside “the world” is Giegerich’s way of explaining why we can suddenly (since the 19th century) ask questions like “is life meaningful”.
Man had to have stepped out of his previous absolute containment in life, so that he now was both enabled and forced to view life as if from outside, because only in this way could the whole of life become thematic in the first place. Now, with the question about its meaning and worth, existence as such had become a vis-à-vis, as it were, which is the opposite of in-ness. Man now for the first time had a position to the world per se. The question of meaning is the mark of the modern period after the conclusion of the age of metaphysics at the beginning of the 19th century. (page 3)
My question is whether or not this is the best way (most accurate with respect to actual human history) to explain the apparent changes in human psychology. For one thing, such a metaphor – to view life from outside – implies a place that is outside our lives. Where would that be? To require a place outside the forces that generate our living for our consciousness to view those same forces necessarily divorces consciousness from its ground of origin. Not only is it probably not empirically possible for such a divorce to occur, but such a view generates a dualistic metaphor that can’t be undone later.
I also have to question the in-ness he assumes in “pre-modern” minds. He’s talking about the minds that so questioned what they had as to paint the cave walls in France, those same pre-modern minds that came up with the wheel, atl-atls, hide boats, figured out how to domesticate dogs, horses, barley, corn, and everything else that made modern minds what they are. I’m sorry, but those minds sure seem as if they could think outside the in-ness for long stretches at a time.
I think part of the problem is that thinkers about myth and the unconscious seem to take for granted that we have a mind. A mind. We don’t you know. We have many minds and a kind of floating flash-light of an awareness that only makes it seem like we have “a” mind.
As we evolved different abilities, we also developed different brain-body bits to control those developing skills. When the “control movements and coordinate with visual sensations” is needed the spot-light is there and not on the “continually assess smells but only make “us” aware of ones that indicate possible dangers or potential treasures” skill that we still possess (ever suddenly smelt a hint of acrid smoke when you were driving and notice how your attention shoots over there?). Each of those abilities is the hub of a “mind”; they run simultaneously; most of them are unaware and constitute the manifold territory we know as the unconscious.
If we view mind like a cell, with many interlocking bits that make the thing function as a whole, with no in-ness in any time of human (Homo sapiens) history, then what to make of the loss of meaning?
I’m not done yet so there will be a part 3.
December 19th, 2011
Image: a fish swimming everywhere looking for water
Cathy sent me a copy of Giegerich’s paper “End of Meaning” which I hadn’t read, nor even heard of. (Thanks Cathy!) It’s long and I’m still on the road so I’m reading it a few pages at a time when I stop and have a walk-break.
Here’s the abstract:
“Meaning” as in “the meaning of life” is not (“semantically”) a belief system, but (“syntactically”) the sense of “in-ness.” A comparison of the logic of animal existence with that of human existence reveals that man, despite having been biologically born, remained psychologically unborn, language, myth, metaphysics having served as a secondary psychological “uterus” for him. With the dramatic changes in the human situation since around 1800 (the closure of Western metaphysics, the industrial revolution), the previous in-ness was no more. This fundamental change can be seen as the eventual birth of man, astrologically expressed as the emergence of consciousness from the status of “fish in the water” to that of “Aquarius,” the lord of the waters. In this sense, the “loss” of meaning must not be interpreted negatively as a loss.
C. G. Jung’s personal need to nevertheless regain a new sense of meaning necessitated his becoming a psychologist. Only through the logical interiorization of former contents of myth and metaphysics, only through the displacement of the arena of essential questions from the public world to the so-called unconscious “inside” the private individual, was it possible to simulate a situation where the former sense of meaning could become true once more. This interiorization is comparable to Kronos’ swallowing of his just-born children.
This idea that man has lost the exterior meaning function, that is, we have lost the capacity to live inside myth because we have become individuals, seems a little sideways to me. Nevertheless there are some brilliant moments in just the small amount I have read so far. For example, the idea that meaning is not semantic is frakking brilliant. Of course it can’t be because otherwise any non-linguistic human being is incapable of meaningful moments, relationships etc, and what little is known of normal adults with no language shows that this is not the case. So meaning is pre-linguistic.
What gets me is that Giegerich then goes on to say as his “therefore”
Meaning, where it indeed exists, is first of all an implicit fact of existence, its a priori.
and this is a problem because it shoots us right back into Kant’s lap and that simply will not do. Now, perhaps that’s not what he intended so I’ll keep reading and see what happens.
So here’s what I am going to do. I’m going to do one of those post-as-you-read/react things.
The next installment will be titled: a fish swimming, part 2
November 23rd, 2011
shape, space and meaning in poetry
This post responds to Qunqun’s query in the comments on an earlier post (obsess a lot? November 21).
The class talks about white space and its impact on meaning. One of the things about white space is that it can be a passive space, its shape completely determined by the text. In this example the white space is determined by the characters. The space, as the text says, makes meaning possible but it doesn’t actively provide meaning in and of itself.
Imagine “30 spokes” presented differently – in some way that would create white space that represents the insight of the poem.
As for my bitty, the exercise in the class asked us to create a poem in which the white space was considered as important as the text. There are many ways to do that of course but this is the one that I took to class.
This kind of poetry is not my natural metier but there is much to be learnt from attention to what is not normally seen.
June 2nd, 2011
words
Do you ever think about what words are?
They must be constructs, based ultimately on meaning structured by our bodies, but what does that really say?
Seamus Heaney seems to have believed (don’t know if he still does) that words are somehow objects, or arise from objects in the world. Words are things that can fly, shelter, stream.
The Loaning (from Station Island) As I went down the loaning the wind shifting in the hedge was like an old one's whistling speech. And I knew I was in the limbo of lost words. They had flown there from raftered sheds and crossroads, from the shelter of gabled ends and turned-up carts. I saw them streaming out of birch white throats and fluttering above iron bedsteads until the soul would leave the body. Then on a day as close as a stranger's breath they rose in smoky clouds on the summer sky and settled on the uvulae of stones and the soft lungs of the hawthorne. Then I knew why from the beginning the loaning breathed on me, breathed even now in a shiver of beaded gossamers and the spit blood of a last few haws and rose-hips.
There’s more to this poem, but you get the idea of what words mean to Heaney. In some way words seem to be the soul. They inhabit the “uvulae of stones and the soft lungs of the hawthorne.” Words are a connecting force somehow linking man to land.
So very beautiful, yet I find it really disturbing. There is a sense that the words are independent of the speaker, that the world grows the words as it grows the haw and rose-hip. If this is true then there is no distance between the thing in itself and the word that signals it. So either things are symbols or words are things; I’m not sure which is worse.
Yet there is the medial image. The loaning (space between cultivated fields) strikes me as the place one occupies when one is bi-cultural in some profound way. It is a kind of limbo because one can never really be at home, not in a consuming way, not to find that place of rest which is assumed in any ultimate destination.
And there are lost words. For Heaney those words like “loaning” and for me words in Salish which I will never know, and never be able to adequately pronounce. But it isn’t really the word itself for me, and I suspect it is for Heaney. He seems to locate the power of the earth in the word itself, and in this he seems really to see words as objects whereas I see them as constructs.
In Heaney’s world a word lost is like an extinction – the death of some lineage of butterfly. Using the words is an act of rebellion against death. And like some mythological spiritual traveller, from his place between cultures Heaney the poet can access the dark grey of limbo and lure back into the air lost souls, lost words.
There sure is literary precedent for such a view. But I can’t go there, because words are not really things despite their apparent power. The idea of words as things is endemic because in our embodied existence we know power through things. We hit our brother with our teddy bear and “bam” a reaction. That’s power. Later we call brother some nasty, nasty word and “bam” a reaction. Words are power; so words are things: lived logic.
I think of words like the blue in a blueberry. Put a blueberry in a fire. Where’d the blue go? Words are the “blue” in a blueberry. Not the thing itself; not existent independent of the thing; not something that can flutter up on Limbo’s winds. Words are moments of our embodied relationship to things in the world. They are the humming unconscious network of our senses, energy vibrating in ways sensible to our bodies, the awareness of difference, the desire to categorize. Words are the first green shoot to pierce the earth’s skin in an unthought drive for sky.
Even more I think of words as distilled human movement, a gestural structuring of a learned physical concept. They must be really, since as a species we first had movement, then learning and communication, then oral or gestural language, then writing – specifically words. These abilities aren’t independent species’ acquisitions. They are built one on top of the other using the structures and limitations of the preceding stage to form the foundation of the next. In other words, our capacities to learn and communicate were built on the structures and functions of human movement and physical capability.
It’s that evolutionary basis in movement that makes me say words are not things but distilled human doings. So when we lose a word, like some now lost Salish concepts, we have lost a history of someone living, some person doing in his or her world, what his or her people did. There is no limbo for that. That death is just death. Resurrection can only come if some other person, some future group relearns and re-does what the lost once knew. And that? I don’t know if that is really possible.
May 3rd, 2011
the question “what is poetry”, part 1
I’m not sure the question “What is poetry?” is sensible. That is, I’m not sure it really has an answer, or that it has anything to do with the world. It’s more a question that creates a world, and which answers that creation’s questioning with its own image.
If you read poets on poetry, there appear to be many things of which poetry is capable. I want to argue that all of these things are possible—to empower feeling, to lift imagination, to redress cultural/political/economic/aesthetic wrongs, to free the soul, to free the self—because of certain assumptions about words, things and change.
In Philosophy in the Flesh, one of Lakoff’s and Johnson’s (L&J) contributions to embodied cognition, there is a chapter on metaphysics and the metaphors that underlie such philosophical pursuits. They show that in order for us to ask questions about the nature of Being, we must first assume certain things. These assumptions, as always with human beings, are based ultimately on our embodied nature and take their cue from things of which we are capable physically, operating as physical creatures in a physical world. L&J list four basic folk theories that need to be in place to support the question, for a description of Being to be possible.
1) “The world makes systematic sense, and we can gain knowledge of it.” This is the folk theory of “the Intelligibility of the World.”
2) “Every particular thing is a kind of thing.” Folk theory: There are general kinds of things.
3) “Every entity has an “essence” or “nature,” that is, a collection of properties that makes it the kind of thing it is and is the causal source of its natural behavior.” Folk theory: Essences exist.
4) “There is a category of all things that exist.” Theory: There is an all-inclusive category.
Being is a kind of thing. It has an essence (or is an essence). Specific beings are instances of the general category Being.
These are assumptions, not truths. An appalling thought really, given it’s the basis of all (?) Western thought. Certainly these assumptions are the basis of religious thought and, I think, the basis of the question “What is poetry?”.
Seamus Heaney, in his book The Redress of Poetry gives poetry at least two distinct defining properties. The first has poetry as “the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.” The second follows Simone Weil’s Christian metaphysics and gives poetry the power of redress. Poetry acts from the imagination (and imagination’s access to Being) to balance justice (in reality) as it swings in the gale winds of human religious, political and economic fervor. But there is an addition here, to the basic four assumptions. Heaney quotes Weil: “Obedience to the force of gravity. The greatest sin.” If you take the four folk theories above and add the idea of moral balance and its required patterned-change-as-god (i.e. the good will prevail), then you have the assumptive basis of Heaney’s question. When he asks “What is poetry?” Heaney has been created by the world of those five assumptions, and so, of course, the question he asks and the answer he finds—poetry’s power of redress—necessarily comes.
Does this make the question or answer wrong? No. Is either therefore correct? No.
Before I close part one of this post, I want to mention Heraclitus. L&J bring him into the Pre-Socratics chapter in the metaphysics section. They quote him:
Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed. You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others go ever flowing on.
Sounds so new-agey, don’t you think? That impediment aside, the point of this is to show that the basic assumptions can be utilized to address Being as Change or Pattern. Being doesn’t have to be a Thing, it can be a Way all without giving up the four basic assumptions.
Can the assumptions be forgone? And if not “what is poetry?” then how to query to experience of reading Heaney’s The Haw Lantern?
More later: Earle Birney and the idea that poetry is a magic spell.
March 10th, 2011
what is “evidence”
I’ve been thinking about what the word “evidence” means. This relates to my current reading of Dawkins’ book and to a comment by QunQun talking about Wittgenstein and the idea of language games.
Evidence as a term means that which tends to prove or disprove something, or it can be grounds for the belief of something. What a definition like this does is make anything potentially “evidence” for any proposition you care to make. I could say, for example, that the Wingabonga lives in the winter jasmine in my garden and cite as evidence for that belief my dream about the Wingabonga, and the fact that I found the Wingabonga’s favourite food near the plant. This counts as evidence because the dream and my finding orange peel on the pavement in my yard are the grounds upon which my belief in the Wingabonga’s residence took hold. They are also evidence for the existence of the Wingabonga. Does this really count as “evidence”? Sure, why not? It meets the limits of the definition.
Looking at the term “proof” doesn’t help because all it means is “evidence sufficient to establish a thing as true”. Ambivalence: that’s the nature of words.
What Wittgenstein showed with his language games concept is that what the word “evidence” actually means is how it is used within a specific language community. So Dawkins, being a scientist, has an idea of what evidence means that is established by how “evidence” is used in the science language community. This involves, amongst other things, checking to see if Wingabongas actually exist in the empirical world. This fact checking with respect to the empirical world acts as a guide to whether a Wingabonga can possibly live under my winter jasmine. My dreams and my orange peel evidence are secondary to the empirical fact of the Wingabonga’s non-existence. This empirical fact (the Wingabonga’s non-existence) negates the evidence of my dreams and the orange peel detritus. It doesn’t say I didn’t have the dream and that I didn’t find the orange peel, just that the dream and the placement of the orange peel mean something other than what I thought.
This is the kind of empirical evidence Dawkins wants for god. And of course there isn’t any.
So what counts as evidence for a theist? There are a good many, but most of them have to do with the human community. There are things like the fact that all human cultures worship some form of divine, for example. Why isn’t this good enough for Dawkins? Because it is like my orange peel evidence. Sure the orange peel is there. Does that mean a Wingabonga lives in my winter jasmine? No. There will be another explanation, although I may not be privy to it.
Then there are the arguments for god that try to base themselves on empirical evidence. I think these kinds of arguments have arisen (like creationism) because science and its idea of evidence is clearly successful and powerful. Science and empirical evidence has become the one to beat. The problem with that is that the natural “territory” of religious language includes the word “evidence” but it isn’t the kind based on empirical data. That word has rules, and one is to test the hypothesis for empirical validity, and, because of that, the god test keeps failing.
What appears to me, though, is that those who keep bashing up against the empirical wall don’t seem to realize that there is a fundamental difference between what they took as “evidence” for the existence of god (their church, their feelings, their family belief, their assessment of odd events as they relate to their story of origin) is not the same thing as the “evidence” that supports things like evolution. So they keep doing silly things like the banana proof without any apparent clue to how foolish they appear.
So which “evidence” is right? Neither of course. However, if you use the theistic form of the term in the scientific language community you’re going to get intellectually smashed. Expecting otherwise is not a mark of intelligence.
January 6th, 2011
dead birds and word power
You have heard of the dead blackbirds I am sure. Here is the most useful coverage of it I have seen.
Are birds falling from the sky examples of pareidolia, eschatology, or something else?
Essentially the blackbirds died because fireworks frightened them out of their wits. But never mind the facts, this is a “sure sign” that Harold Camping is right. Ugh.
There is a difference between what we experience and what we think it means.
December 13th, 2010
valuing reason and narrative equally
Following up with Lilian’s value postings, I have also thought more about what it is I value and why. I do find it stimulating because along with my reading, such thinking has triggered a cascade of important and revealing dreams. This might not be a comfortable thing, because some are best classified as nightmares, but it is a healing and helpful thing. So thank you Lilian and litlove for getting this started.
In the first values-post I started with autonomy and I stick with that because, as someone who lives marginally, I know what domination feels like and looks like and I don’t like it. It is all too human of course, the desire to dominate, and as such needs to be recognized not as a “side effect” but as just one of the things it means to be human. We have a lot of bits and bobs that make us up. Some of them are for public use, some are best done alone and in the quiet. As we mature we learn what those things are and find ways to control our bodily functions as well as our mental ones to conform to the public standards and for the public good. We think about those things over time and some of them move from private-only to public display (such as men’s and women’s naked knees) and some stay rigorously private-only (such as defecation). Autonomy is one of those values that maintains its value over time. Everyone, pretty much, wants it. The question is what to do with it if you are lucky enough to have got you some.
This leads me to my second value. I think I have to say this feels like the ability to think, to reason, to seek verifiable narrative to explain how things happen. Despite the fact that my last posting on values had loyalty and social compassion prior to reason, I now think that the ability to reason and to think critically is fundamental to the capacity for social compassion that isn’t hiding some conversion agenda. For example, there have been some historical situations in which the religieux of the area had the monopoly on food and refused it to the starving if they wouldn’t first accept indoctrination into the faith. Not really a hidden agenda but I’m sure you can think of others. I have to say I despise this kind of thing and my habit of thinking is what got me there.
Thinking is what I do with my freedom. What I’ve discovered about the world through the (definitely arduous) process of thinking things through has led me to the place where I am and to the kinds of things I do. For example, thinking about what it means to be human has led me to my valuing of the practical responsibilities that social compassion dictates. One must realize, for example, that no matter how much a culture thinks of itself as the pinnacle of human development, cultures, groups, beliefs, nations rise and fall. What we are today, what we believe, espouse, are certain of and value, will, in time, seem archaic and, frankly, silly. What has enduring value is the thing that enables the species to thrive and this, in all cases, requires the moderation of desire and its mandible belief.
The problem is that there are so many competing stories about what it means to be human that one has to decide upon some system for evaluating the various narratives. This is where critical thinking becomes central. I mean one can make a judgment based on “this is what I was always told to believe” and many people do that and live completely comfortably with the results but I’m afraid I can’t do that. The reason for that is that these kinds of systems are often based on an “us” and “them” categorization of the universe and if you happen to be amongst the “them” group and the “us” group is in power, well, life can be hard and one’s personal good (or bad) luck seems not a very coherent way to decide on a human value .
These categorizations are natural of course, just as the desire to dominate is completely normal. But they are things that have to be moderated in society to enable the “them” a place with “us” at the table, so to speak. The only way to do this is to recognize that the “us” and “them” categorizations are a narrative and not really part of the way the world is. “Us” and “them” are a part of the way the human mind structures experience, and not representative of the world itself except in so far as the human being is part of (and a result of) the world. Categorization is a mental construction and it can be recognized as such. It can also be moderated. Critical thinking is the way to begin.
The real joy in this is that once narratives are recognized as distinct from what actually is true about the world, it makes narratives much more fun. No longer do we need to fight and die for one or another of them, but we can simply agree to play in the world of each others’ stories and not limit ourselves from the necessary analytical investigation that change, adaption and learning requires. It’s not that I think we can see outside narrative. Once we acquire language, I don’t think we can really. But what we can do, that is in the practical world just as good, is replay the facts of the case inside different story rubrics. This allow us to remember that all our stories have some truth value but none of them is to be mistaken for the truth itself. So essentially, I am saying we have to recognize narrative as equally of value with the capacity for reason, and this is largely the case because we can’t seem to live without narrative (and it is truly delightful) and we can’t seem to live decently with others without the application of reason to those same narratives.)
That ability, the capacity to think critically about our narratives, is central to living a valuable, moral and ethical life in the presence and midst of others.