Storythinking with Dan (chapter 2)
The next chapter in our collaborative reading project
Storythinking: The New Science of Narrative Intelligence, Angus Fletcher, 2023
Table of Contents (evolving)
Chapter 1 (hosted by Dan)
Chapter 2 (this post)
Chapter 2, “Story and Thinking” (Tracy)
The great Severance occurred outside of Athens in 335 BCE, just east of the city’s limestone walls…
as Aristotle, the wizened polymath, paces nervously — peripatetically — around the new-built library tucked beside a wolf-prowled hill. He unfurls a long papyrus scroll of Plato’s Republic, that “map of an ideal government, governed by reason.”
Plato had expelled poetry — and with it, story. There would be mathematics, and there would be music. But there would be no narrative.
“But surely,” Aristotle frowned to himself, “surely, story wasn’t philosophy’s enemy! Surely, instead, it is a humbly ally, an easy teacher to philosophy’s hard genius.”
Pleased with his idea, Aristotle inks two scrolls of his own: Poetics and Rhetoric, showing respectively how narrative generates emotion, and how emotion sways audiences onto the path of reason.
Aristotle meant to redeem narrative, but he ends up completing Plato’s cutting stroke between poetry and philosophy, narrative and reason, story and thinking. From then on, the philosopher would use reason to think, while the rhetorician would use story to communicate and to persuade.
I’ve paraphrased Fletcher p. 17-18 above. Clearly he had great fun using the techniques of creative non-fiction to write the opening lines of chapter 2!
He’s using story to get us thinking about the origins of the great Severance, as he calls it, the great Cutting Stroke, which split story from thinking. From Aristotle’s time onward, classical antiquity would have its philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Stoics) and its rhetoricians (Isocrates, Gorgias, Demosthenes, Cicero, Quintillian, Libanius) and its literary greats (Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Vergil). The most important divide for Fletcher is between hard-nosed philosophy — Aristotle and his logic-chopping heirs, all the way up through the Enlightenment and continuing through early modern science, up to Karl Popper as we shall see in a later chapter — and the softer literary storytellers, orators, playwrights, and epic poets, all too forgotten.
After this rousing introduction, Fletcher gets down to business in chapter 2 to consider the primordial origins of philosophy in ancient wisdom literature, the rise of “professional philosophy” in competitive philosophical schools, resulting in the triumph of metaphysics and argument, and at last stepping back to Socrates, Plato’s centerpiece character, to reconsider the “glitch-epiphany” of self-irony in the Dialogues.
Hello! Dan here. I’ll follow Tracy’s example in the first post and separate my comments with lines and make them italic.
I think it's a very attention-getting claim, that classical philosophy relegated narrative to a secondary role so it could elevate the logic they were developing into a useful tool. I can imagine how this type of thing might be carried over today in the sciences, where math might be an impediment to communication. I've heard some scientists say that if a scientist can't explain his findings in plain language to an intelligent layperson, there's something a bit suspect. Not sure how much I rely on that being true. There do seem to be a lot of ways to misunderstand scientific findings, willingly or accidentally.
Wisdom & the Schools
Philosophy’s origin, says Fletcher, is wisdom literature, which is found the world over from the most ancient of times, whether it’s Sumerian legends about the seasons, Egyptian scribal lore, the musings of a “deep-thinking wife” in the Upanishads, the Proverbs of biblically wise Solomon, or the teachings of Confucius in his Zhou dynasty colleges. Or perhaps wisdom originated in the more geographically proximate (to our ancient philosophical Greeks) numerological theses of the vegetarian Pythagoras. Or, reaching even further back, perhaps philosophy’s deepest wisdom origin is to be found in some “unrecorded mental jump” of an introspective Neanderthal or Homo erectus. (18-19)
Dan: like the laundry list of world cultures that all developed a philosophical tradition. This should go without saying, but it doesn't in some circles. It's good to see it acknowledged by a Westerner, that there are a lot of traditions we know of, and probably many more that have been lost in tragedies like the Jesuitical burning of the Mayan Codices.
Wise stories are primordial, and philosophy was born from them.
Philosophy was not born ex nihilo by logic’s pure light. Its vast library started as annotations in the margins of another kind of intellectual work: wisdom literature. (19)
Dan: I also like the nod to annotation and note-making, and to the implication there was a community of scholars engaged in a "Great Conversation" and that this probably led to philosophy.
Fletcher tells us that the point of wisdom was “a pair of physical processes” (21), a focus on the most practical of questions: “how should I live my life?” and a method: narrative. It is this pair of practical focus plus narrative method that structures the first half of the chapter. With the rise of “professional philosophy” in competitive schools in ancient Greece, the practical focus ends up turning to metaphysics with a goal of making statements about eternal truth, i.e. about Being rather than becoming, and narrative method turns to argument in the form of equation, identity, and interpretation, rather than story. Temporal processes are excluded, there is an “eschewal of change,” and a deletion of past-future
to make power symbolic, converting wisdom literature’s gods from earthly sources of food, warmth, or light into timeless beings who assert their absolute rightness. (24)
According to Fletcher, this shift from practical story to metaphysical argument is extremely unfortunate because it means departing from the most basic rudiments of how animal brains are designed to work. Philosophers, to achieve their artificial focus and method, are obliged to go so far as to
create a more capacious and less corruptible space for intellectual questing, urging their students to withdraw as much as possible from the jumble and claw of daily survival. Where ethics had served initially as a way of improving the physical health and happiness of farmers and merchants, it thus morphed in early first-millennia-BCE philosophy into an aggrandizement of reclusive sages. (25)
Dan: I like the idea that "our brain has evolved to function in a human landscape." If the human part is an overlay that a person maps ("narrates onto the actual geography outside") that suggests the experiences we're processing may be as much about our worldview as it is about what's happening outside us. That idea of cultural influence (I don't say determinism) from postmodernism.
I really liked the distinction Fletcher makes between "truth" and "action". It's the key to what historians do, as opposed to, say, sociologists or political scientists or economists. Contingency and agency are other ways to talk about "becoming" as opposed to "being". But it does threaten the idea of neat bundles of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Hanging onto that seems to lead to teleology like Hegel and Marx.
Reclusive, absolutist, timeless philosophy, as the professionals do it, ends up going against not only the wisdom tradition, but also deep rooted biology, as evidenced in the earliest animal brains. Ethics, which began from concern over “how should I live my life?” has its source in “the brute biological hunger for less pain and more pleasure.” (21) If I want to tame hunger, I will use trial and error to craft tools for hunting, fire, and shelter. For “professionals,” this is no longer the focus.
So, too, with narrative, where "actors perform actions, and characters engage in plots.” (21) Stories acknowledge that humans, dfrom primordial times, prioritize paying attention to other humans, as companions, cooperators, and competitors. “Human landscapes” of activity are naturally so in focus that story as method tends even to “narrate the human landscape onto the actual geography outside” (21). We keep such careful track of our fellows that we tend to anthropomorphize everything around. We’ll invest “the sun, the weather, the wheat fields” with “plotted actions,” with emotions like anger, with motives, with creative scheming. (21) This mode of thinking may be fanciful, attributing human psychology and behavior where it doesn’t belong, but it is certainly creative!
Too bad, says Fletcher. It was the philosophical “transmutation of ethics into metaphysics” and the “conversion of narrative into argument” following on from Aristotle that thereafter forms the substance of the whole western tradition through the medieval ages (Plotinus, Neoplatonists, Aquinas, and even the Islamists Ibn Sina and others), all the way through the Enlightenment, Romantic era, and modern philosophy: Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger.
Nor is it just a historical trend. There’s an ideal.
The highest state of human existence is one spent grappling with the problems of metaphysics. (26)
As for wisdom literature? It becomes allegory. Whatever nod Aristotle gave to narrative in his late Poetics or Rhetoric, according to Fletcher, the absolute turning-point away from wisdom was the Topics.1
Topics was authored in roughly 350 BCE by Aristotle as the fifth book of his Organon. Over the previous four books, Aristotle had laid down the rules of induction, deduction, and interpretation, establishing the calculus that would power Catholic theology, Enlightenment science, analytic philosophy, literary semiotics, and digital AI. Now, in Topics, he enriched logic with a tool — dialectic — that would form the foundation of medieval quaestiones, Renaissance rhetoric, Hegelian reasoning, Marxism, and modern continental philosophy. (26)
Put another way, what Aristotle did to the genius of Plato and his dialogical Socrates, the “chatty gadfly,” was to “distill it into formal argumentative procedures.” Aristotle converted dialogue — an element of story — into dialectic, a method of logic. (27-28)
Aristotle carefully divested the Socratic Dialogues of their narrative components. The character of Socrates was removed, as was the plot of him talking with Meno, Ion, Gorgias, and other semifictionalized actors, until all that remained was the truth-computing protocol of thesis-antithesis-synthesis… [the] Topics completed the reduction of wisdom literature into professional philosophy. (28)
Plato may have expelled the poets, but Aristotle made Socrates’ narrative chatter “rigorous” by “replacing story with syllogism” and “discarding the rhetorical frippery.” (28)
Before stepping back, as Fletcher does in the rest of the chapter, to see what exactly was lost in de-storifying Socrates and his “mind,” it’s worth pausing for a moment to see what Fletcher himself has done with this little story about wisdom and Aristotle and the whole history of western philosophy following on.
What is beginning to strike me about Fletcher’s purpose in writing this book is that he’s using story and narrative as method (sort of), in defense of story — not just for communication or rhetoric but as a thinking tool — ultimately to make a logical point, an argument, a metaphysics even! What he wants to argue is that there are (there exist) two essentially different kinds of thinking: logical thinking and storythinking, the latter of which cannot be discounted. The history of wisdom literature, the rise of professional philosophy, rhetoric, science, and so on — and their chief (philosophical) proponents — are then marshaled by Fletcher as evidence to make this case.
On the other hand, because Fletcher’s presentation (communication?) method is narrative, the story-evidence of all the philosophical characters and moves involved, he is often pulled up short by the complexities of actual history, of the actual protagonists and antagonists of the stories he tells and their complicated ways of navigating their respective worlds. Fletcher frequently has to step back and recalibrate his argument because of the story.
Aristotle may have codified the great Severance, but he is also the one who “saved” poetry and rhetoric. Plato may have started the campaign against the poets and against the mythical forms in which ancient wisdom was couched, but he wrote in Dialogues and featured characters, speeches, and narrative plot. Plato even resorts to myth-telling of his own. Ironically, what makes Fletcher’s metaphysical claims most persuasive, i.e. that storythinking really is a Thing, is that wherever his logical argument breaks down because of the complexity of reality, storytelling comes to the rescue.
All this indicates to me that, yes, there may well be a metaphysical divide between logical versus story, but at our point in the human trajectory, we’ll have to use both together. As we get into later chapters, a re-fusion of the two is ultimately where Fletcher himself ends up.
Stepping Back to Socrates
Aristotle in the Topics had supposedly sealed the fate of Socratic dialogue by perfecting the argumentative method, the rules, the process and procedures of dialectic. What Fletcher argues in the last part of chapter 2 is that something was deeply lost in this move, namely the “plot twist” of Socrates’ oracular “what I know is that I don’t know.”2 “Knowing that you do not know” turns out to violate logic’s fundamental law of non-contradiction: X cannot = not-X. Yet for Socrates: I know = I don’t know. (28-30) Fletcher says the human computational logic system “glitches” on this kind of “plot twist.”
What is more interesting to me is that Fletcher develops this idea argument by drawing upon this common Socratic plot twist as found throughout Plato’s Dialogues. There is always an “epiphany” on the part of the interlocutors (Socrates’ conversation partners) that is self-ironic. However seemingly smart or wise in practical terms a dialogue partner may be — they are quintessential worldly success-stories, perhaps embodying much of the classical wisdom literature — Socrates’ dialogue partners end up wrapping themselves up in (logical) conundrums through talking to the chatty gadfly, to the extent they end up having to admit that they just don’t know. Socrates defeats them.
Self-irony is thus, says Fletcher, that we humans
mentally exit our perspective to look wryly at ourselves from without. Which is to say: it’s a psychological action. It’s our prefrontal cortex pointing a perspective-shifting neural network at the rest of our brain. (29)
In the Topics, by de-storifying, Aristotle has deleted the self-ironized plot twist, the logical glitch, from the human mind. And this is a tremendous loss.
Even if self-irony isn’t the essence of Socrates’s cerebral activity, it’s a major source of his intelligence. It allows him to interrogate his own assumptions, escaping the lazy sophistries that clog less introspective intellects.
And Aristotle’s deletion doesn’t just eliminate part of Socrates’s intelligence. It also eliminates a path for us to develop such intelligence ourselves. That path is the Dialogue’s literary plot, which we walk along in our imagination, encountering Socrates as a story character who prompts us to dramatize the mental action: I know that I know nothing. (29-30)
Dan: Self-irony is interesting to me not so much because it's an action, as because it again suggests change over time. Character development isn't really a thing in philosophy. The trail and error element is important too, I guess. But for me the interesting part is really trying to get into the head of someone else. Imagine their motivations. Logic that points to a "truth" also tends to ignore the idea that other people may think differently for legitimate reasons -- not just because they're ignorant.
Luckily, by realizing the loss of self-irony, we can “walk back Aristotle’s logical erasure of plot and character” (30) and learn to diversify our perspective, engage in thought experiments, and “think with many minds” through the characters, trial and error actions, and diversity of plots that story uniquely gives us. (30-32)
The practical side of me loves this! Truth in the real world is almost always messy. Being overly self-assured is the bane, really, of ever learning anything — which seems to be exactly the kind of wisdom Socrates offers Athens’ overly self-assured aristocratic youth. If you think you already know, you’ll never consider that you have so much more to learn! Whereas those who invest deeply in continuous, lifelong learning tend to find the horizon continuously receding. The more they know, the more they realize they don’t know.
And yet, wrapping one’s brain up in logical conundrums, especially if one is an apparently (actually?) successful worldly person, i.e. a practical person, seems counter-productive. How many people have more or less the right answer under their nose, could act on it, are ready to act on it as a workable and worthwhile course of action, but don’t because they overthink. Some argumentative gadfly has provoked them into mental immobility and inaction by making everything paralyzingly abstruse.
And on to chapter 3.
Fletcher actually makes a fairly gross error on p. 25 when he says the term “philosopher” means lover of truth. Actually, it means lover (or friend) of wisdom, sophia.
 | A guest post by
|