Narrative Purpose
Idea & Reality
For two and a half millennia, Western philosophy has been dominated by idea-centred methodologies. The world has been seen in terms of the ideas that philosophers have held.
This isn’t surprising, for philosophers spend years directing their attention at the ideas that populate their classrooms, books and debates. So it can seem to them as if philosophical ideas stood above the world, in a grandstand high up in abstract space, with the philosophers looking down on the spectacles taking place far below, classifying and analysing what they see. It can feel as if the space of rational ideas enfolded the spaces of the world.
The true geometry of idea and reality, however, is exactly the opposite. Ideas take place as events within the fabric of reality. Mental events do have the peculiar quality of being able to represent physical events, but it is the reality that enfolds the idea and not the other way round.
A Copernican Revolution?
In the 15th century, Nicolaus Copernicus discovered that the sun was at the centre of our solar system. This recast the geometry of existence so that humanity was no longer in a cosmologically privileged place at the centre of the universe, but instead inhabiting its true place, sitting upon a ball of rock that was spinning around a star.
Perhaps it is now time for a philosophical Copernican Revolution. We can set our ideas in their true place, within the fabric of reality. We can acknowledge that our ideas map out features of reality, and that they can serve us by helping us to navigate reality towards futures in which we flourish. But we can recognise, too, that they are just tools and that what matters is reality itself.
This is to shift from an idea-centred perspective to a reality-centred perspective. It is to prioritise the concrete of the physical world over the abstract of our conceptions.
Many of the difficulties philosophy has had handling questions of what living well means stem from taking an idea-centred approach and looking for answers with a universal applicability, as if one person’s living well was interchangeable with another’s. But, as Viktor Frankl put it, “It is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way. Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. ‘Life’ does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life’s tasks are also very real and concrete.”1
A Narrative Reality
The shift to a reality-centred perspective is also a shift from logic to narrative, for narratives relate specifics. They privilege the concrete over the abstract.2
If handled well, the specifics of a story may resonate with many people’s sense of their own lives, but the focus is always on particulars. Interpretations and ideas about what a story might mean are secondary.
In narrative, ideas have their place within the fabric of the concrete. Ideas can help particular people achieve particular goals. They can be shared amongst particular communities. But it is the weave of specifics that gives them their place.
Story Basics
Thankfully, we are all fluent in narrative. We grow up hearing stories, telling stories, and using our ever-expanding facility with narrative to gain control over the episodes of our own lives. Even as toddlers, we put words together that help us figure out who will do what, when, and why.
In the stories we tell there’s always a central character — a protagonist, or hero — **whose exploits we follow as if we were having the adventures ourselves.
The protagonist’s actions are always driven by their sense of purpose, for there are always several possible outcomes, with the protagonist preferring some to others. The greater the gulf between the good and the bad outcomes, the stronger the protagonist’s sense of purpose will be and the more engaging the story will be to its audience.
Like in real life, how a story will unfold is always uncertain. It can’t be known just through knowing the story’s starting point and being able to think things through. There will be a path for the protagonist to follow that will offer them hope of reaching their desired future, but the only way to find out whether or not they will succeed, and win the prize of whatever is at stake, is to follow the line of their experience.
This uncertainty can engage an audience’s curiosity. It sets up a loop of anticipation that can only be closed by paying attention to the story’s events.
Being A Protagonist
Stories can remind us of what it means to be a human being engaged in purposeful action, doing all we can to reach the possible futures that we have set our hearts upon.
Stories can resonate with the frustrations and elations we all experience, with life’s conflicts, with its friendships and alliances, with its odd ironies, and with what it’s like to see and hear and feel.
The universe we inhabit is more like the body of a great unfolding story than a set of facts. We are all part of its narrative weave.
As creatures with desires, we are all protagonists. We all favour some possible futures over others — though we’re not always sure what exactly we want to happen. The clearer we are, the easier it is to act skilfully and strategically and to shape events so that they deliver a future that we’re glad to be a part of.
- Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search For Meaning, New York: Washington Square Press, 1985, p. 99.
- “Please note now at once that there is all the difference in the world between your creative imagination, that is to say the fruitful activity of your attention, and the fruitless fantastic day-dreams which merely produce castles in the air and unrealisable dreams. The former, that is to say the creative imagination, is always […] occupied with entirely concrete problems.” Konstantin Stanislavski, On The Art Of The Stage, London: Faber and Faber, 1950, p. 257.