Telling Stories

Whenever we tell a story, we are being intentionally selective in the details we include.  I am right now sitting in the common room of the Divinity School at Yale.  There are people in the corner opposite me having a conversation.  There are several people at tables working on various things (I can’t tell what from my vantage point).  Occasionally someone walks thru.  Even though I am narrating events in this room, I am not telling a story.  There is no point to the narration, no movement, no plot.  I could sit here all day and list everything that happened in this room and we would have an extensive amount of observations about life in the common room at a divinity school, but not a story.

Likewise, if we wanted to describe a “science” or “philosophy” of something, we have to be selective. If we wanted to make some sociological conclusions about divinity school students based on my rambling observations of a day in the common room, we would need to choose particular observations and organize them in a particular way to come up with anything that made any bit of sense or held any significance.  We would need to look for patterns of behavior or something else that we could use as an organizing paradigm.

The same would be true of history.  A list or cataloguing of events is not really a history.  History attempts to explain why events happen, and to do that you need to be selective, look for patterns and connections, causal relationships, etc.

What I think this all gets at is that the universe in its raw form is simply too much to take in.  Which seems at first a very trivial statement, but I think it is one of extraordinary importance.  We can’t simply observe and soak in everything that happens around us, we need to organize it all in some useful way.  We make stories, scientific theories, philosophies, histories, etc., all for the sake of organizing and simplifying a literal universe of data that we could not otherwise make sense of.

Now, in light of what I said the other day about a subtle circularity in logic, I want to observe that the same kind of subtle circularity exists in almost every other “organizing scheme” we might develop.  When we narrate events, why do we choose the details we choose?  Because those details form the structure of the story we want to tell.  In other words, the story in its totality is already in some sense assumed by the details that make up its parts.  I think we could say the same of all our methods of organizing our experience of the world- they are all intentionally selective, and in the process of being selective are to some extent assuming themselves.

What does this say about how we organize data?  Does this mean all our reasoning is fallacious and that we can’t know anything?  If we just stopped here it might be taken that way, but I certainly hope that this is not were we stop.  I have written plenty of times on this blog about the idea of coherence, and I think it is the key to understanding how reasoning can function.  In a way, I am working with the ideas of German philosopher Immanuel Kant, though there are plenty of ways in which he and I would strongly disagree with one another.  But he at least provides a starting point for us, which is the idea that we, functionally, must organize data.  The world is too much for us to take in as a brute reality, we have to organize our experience of it into some sort of system of understanding, some sort of paradigm.  That understanding or system can take a variety of forms, be it a story or narrative, a rigorously logical philosophical system, a strenuously tested scientific model, a quasi-mystical/otherworldly perspective, or perhaps some other way of thinking.  What matters, at least so far as this post is concerned, is not so much the form that it takes as that it “works”: that it makes sense of our experience and puts it all together into some sort of worldview that we can operate out of.  When it fails to do this, whether because of an internal “inconsistency” or because we encounter new experiences that we cannot make sense of in our old way of thinking, we are forced to abandon our understanding and seek out another one, a remarkably unnerving or “shaking” experience for many if not most of us.

That these understandings or paradigms in some sense assume themselves is, I think, a natural product of their selectivity which I think serves to underline our subjectivity.  Here is where Kant, who has given us a starting point, and I would diverge (or at least I diverge with some of his interpreters, I’m not as clear that Kant actually says what I’m about to attribute to him).  The “Kantian” view would be that we all have a common set of mechanisms for forming our understanding of the world and thus can come to some sort of “objective” understanding.  My own view is that our understanding of the world is much more individualized, that the selectivity required to tell a story or form a theory is rooted in our own individual, subjective selves and the viewpoint associated with that self, not an inborn or innate system of categorization.  So we all in some sense “assume” the story we tell because we are the ones telling and crafting it.  Is this fallacious?  Is this “subtle circularity” damaging to the credibility of our systems?  Perhaps, but I don’t think it needs to be.

This “subtle circularity” has the potential to be damaging if we make a leap to the claim that our assumptions objectively reflect reality.  If I make the claim that the story I tell is the only story that can be told about the day in the common room then I committed an error, the “subtle circularity” which guided my telling of the story has become a fallacy.  If I acknowledge that the story I am telling is one among several then the assumptions which shaped it are no longer damaging, they are merely acting to set off this particular story as its own story.

It is important to note here, as I wrap this post up, that what I am arguing for is very strictly an epistemological limitation.  I am not attempting to make any metaphysical claims about the nature of reality or truth via this argument.  There is much more to say about that, but it will have to wait for another post.

Philosophy in Conversation

One more shameless plug:  Just found out that a paper proposal I submitted to the Society of Biblical Literature has been accepted and I will be presenting it at the New England Regional Conference in Boston on April 29.  The paper is on the hermeneutics (branch of philosophy interested in how we interpret texts) of Augustine, who I am putting in dialogue with the founder of modern hermeneutics Friedrich Schleiermacher and a prominent example of post-modern hermeneutics, Yale's own Dale Martin.  This is only the second time I will have presented a paper at an academic conference, and though I am fascinated by hermeneutics I don't have nearly enough background to consider myself an expert.  So I'm a little nervous about this presentation, particularly the Q & A part, but also quite excited for it!

Hermeneutics is, I think, ultimately where philosophy goes.  It is, as it were, the meta-philosophy.  Given my three axioms, at the end of the day while I think philosophy provides us with certain "basic beliefs" that we need to make sense of the world at all- beliefs like the world exists, other people exist, etc.- I ultimately think that philosophy tells us very little with any certainty.  My subjective understanding of the world is, at the end of the day, something about which I cannot have objective verification.  I cannot ever really know that most of the things I believe are true.  I can make the claim that these beliefs I hold work in a coherent way with one another- that my view of the world makes sense of everything about the world that I have experienced.  But that is not to say that I "know" these things are true.  The objectivity required for real "knowledge" is something I can simply never achieve.  This seemingly bleak, nearly skeptical picture that I have painted I have tried to temper by the idea of communication.  This idea is, I think, essential to philosophy.  As we communicate, as we enter into dialogue with one another, the ideas that we have may be challenged or supported.  Our sensibilities may be honored, or we may find ourselves offended by what others have to say to us.  All of this is part of entering into a conversation, be it spoken or in writing or perhaps in the form of art.  Hermeneutics attempts to describe how this conversation works, to provide us with a philosophy of the dialogue on which philosophy is built.

Here is where the third axiom becomes especially important, I think.  In a previous post I noted that embedded in this axiom seems to be the assumption that other people exist because for communication to happen we need more than one person.  What that also implies, I think, is that the other person is really saying something.  In post-modern hermeneutics there is a tendency to relegate meaning entirely to the realm of the "reader."  The reader creates meaning, the author or speaker and the "text" have no agency whatsoever.  I think the most simple refutation of this is the phenomenon of reading a text with which you disagree or which you find offensive.  Perhaps we can find some deep Freudian reason why I might create a reading at which I myself am offended, but I think the more straightforward notion is to say that the text, or the author, or perhaps both, really are communicating with me as the reader.  Communication is not me in a vacuum imagining what others might say, it is me listening to what someone else actually has said.

The danger to saying this is that we might slip too far in the opposite direction and endlessly ponder what exactly the other person meant.  I'm not sure that is helpful, either.  I have mentioned before that I am a bit of a musician.  As a musician, I occasionally write music (though not nearly as often as I would like).  My experience when writing a song has generally been that while the song originates with something in my experience, be it an event or an emotion or whatever, it usually takes on a life of its own in the process of being written such that at the end of the day I can say simultaneously that I deeply identify with my own music, but also that none of the songs I have written are actually about me or anyone that I know.  They have become their own entity.  I imagine that this is how many artists feel, whatever their medium.  I think this is also how much of our communication works.  The text and the author really are saying something.  But that something may not be clear, even to them.  So when we interpret a text, we interpret it based on how it affects us.  To a certain extent, that process is guided by who we are- it is part of our subjective experience.  But I also think it is the case that this process is the result of something from beyond us projecting into our experience, in a sense generating an experience for us from which we draw some meaning.

Where this leaves us, I think, is a picture of a conversation.  As I approach others with my own ideas, I have the experience of learning about theirs.  Our ways of thinking, our philosophies, enter into a conversation with one another.  From that conversation we draw some sort of meaning.  That meaning may change us in some way, impacting our own way of thinking, molding our philosophy as our experience and understanding of the world grows wider and wider.  But it may also change and impact the other person, shaping their philosophy as they too grow in their understanding.

Three Axioms

I think perhaps the most fundamental philosophical statement that can be made, an axiom , if you will, that must be assumed at the very start of our philosophical endeavors, is that people are subjective.  By this I mean that we always see things from a first-person perspective.  I cannot exit myself and understand things in a perfectly objective way.  The story I tell is always "my story" from my perspective.  I think this is one of the most important insights that we can glean from the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.  So while I believe that there is a world "out there" beyond myself, and that this world exists objectively in a certain way, I also believe, following Kant, that I do not have access to that world directly.  I only have access to my perspective on that world.  And that perspective will always be my subjective, own perspective.

So far, this sounds like a case for a pretty drastic relativism.  But that, I think, is a bit too quick of a conclusion, and I believe that if we really follow such relativism to its end it actually negates the value of our selves and our perspectives and results in a kind of nihilism in which everything becomes meaningless.  But I don't think that is the only option- another axiom I might claim is that we as humans are rational beings.  By rational I don't mean anything particularly specific, I'm not attempting to describe a system of logic or analysis.  I am merely wanting to say that we are thinking beings.  We don't just react to stimuli, like a worm being prodded with a stick, we actually think about the world we experience and the way we are going to act.  Not always do we think well about it, not always can we articulate our thoughts about it in anything that resembles a clear manner.  But we do think about it.  Part of what it means to think about things, I would argue, is for our thoughts to make sense (if only to ourselves), to be coherent.  Thoughts are not just random jumbles of information, we do in fact "systematize" them in a certain way.  Again, not trying to argue that we always do this by a particular logic or that we always do this well.  But I would argue that as rational beings we think about the world, and our thoughts form some sort of coherent understanding of the world from which we operate in our first person, subjective experience.

This idea of coherence is, I think, the way from which we escape a complete, nihilistic relativism and what gives rise to the philosophical enterprise.  Here we have to assert another axiom- that we humans are capable of communicating with one another.  That does not imply that communication is always perfect, that misunderstandings do not arise.  Nor does it say anything about the form of that communication, whether or not it follows a particular pattern, etc.  But on a whole, we are able to communicate in a way that is meaningful, in a way that allows the communication to be constructive and to continue.  In this communication, we frequently talk about the world we experience, from our own subjective points of view, and discuss the differences between these points of view.  This communication adds a new layer to our understanding- we now have more input about which we have thoughts that must be worked into our system in some way.  As this process continues, it turns out that coherence becomes more and more rigorous of a standard so that certain ways of thinking about the world become much more favorable than others- we call these  particular systems "schools of thought" or perhaps "worldviews."  Given that we are all subjective, our own understandings will be nuanced, but broadly speaking will fall under the umbrella of some such "school."  We will each hold to our particular system of beliefs because it "makes the most sense to us" from our first person perspective- in other words, it seems the most coherent with our experience of the world.  We may have reasons or arguments for thinking this way and reasons or arguments for thinking another system is not coherent enough.  We now have a full-fledged philosophy.