Do Narrative Philosophers Believe We Are Continually Changing

INTRODUCTION

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This paper explores the concept of narrative in relation to the concept of philosophy. When asked, "What do philosophers really do?" no answer is obvious. It is easier to know what an aeronautical engineer does, or a lawyer does, than it is to say what philosophers do. One can ask if "doing philosophy" is a practice, or an example of storytelling.

The idea that philosophy is an example of storytelling may seem odd, but appealing. Others have conceived of philosophy through the same metaphor. A book by Will Buckingham, Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-Storytelling (2013), is evidence of this explanation. We shall consider such evidence later in the paper.

PHILOSOPHY, A PRACTICE OR A NARRATIVE PURSUIT?

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Human agency involves goals (what is happening), and techniques for achieving goals (what methods can be identified for the conducting the endeavor).

Most human practices, such as law or medicine, have their own rules, modes of operation, policies, customs, and beliefs. Practices often have societies or governing bodies, whose purpose is to over-see the projects and evaluate the results of those practitioners pursuing goals identified by their particular practice. Agency outcomes, and goals sought are also a large part of the philosopher's investigative agendas. Aristotle and Plato were agents whose goal was the investigation of human existence and human engagement with the world, but neither had overseeing standards of expertise, or measures of success and failure. There were no governing bodies to regulate their efforts. Simply by articulating through reason, essences (i.e. concepts, principles and laws) designed to capture how things "are", both philosophers were then able to speculate about how things could be. Yet, in exercising their own mental capacities, they used very different methods investigating the nature of existence, and what direction we should take in instigating change. Plato used narrative methods, exemplified in storytelling. Aristotle used deductive, logical methods encompassing careful observations. This paper will not defend the methods of Aristotle, though his logical and analytic methods would become some standards against which philosophical "success" could be measured over the ensuing centuries. Rather the paper will explore Plato's choice of stories and storytelling as a method for pedagogy, and as phenomena connected to the pursuit of philosophical problems.

A STORY

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A story is a constructed tale with a quest—perhaps, an encounter with a powerful phenomenon, and an experience of change. The encounter could result in a sense of failure causing a different route to be sought out, or a different goal to be pursued, or the encounter could occasion a success, a goal reached, a hurdle overcome. There is often a moral to the story, a message about good, a warning or admonition for failure, and all of the above are painted vividly with imaginative indulgences. The story of people trying to understand what they are and how they differ from other things is still on-going. Powerful phenomena confront human beings in seeming perpetuity: weather, wars, scientific predictions, revolutions of all kinds, technology, cultural inheritances and histories infused with hate, are just a few of the forces we have faced and still do face in our journey through the time we have on this planet. What our goal as humans is, other than to survive, has fostered endless kinds of stories or narratives—religious, philosophical, mythical, and more.

HISTORY AND NARRATIVE

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Certainly historians have perpetuated narrative as the method for conveying the journey of human beings discovering what they can do and what they should do. Robert Fulford, author of The Triumph of Narrative, observes:

… Every historian knows, and most readers of history eventually learn, that each story is constructed, each emphasis chosen, each major character selected by a historian or team of historians. And the historians in turn are heavily influenced …, by the intellectual tone of the period in which they are writing and by the imagined needs of the people for whom they are writing … While certain facts and ways of emphasizing facts maybe essential, the assembling of those facts involves a vast accumulation of choices. (43–44)

History may be understood as a set of stories; but, under the historian's lens, it may also be written as a master narrative, propelled by an author's view, one which generates a theme explaining previous occurrences and change.

For history to be a master narrative, there is a beginning—perhaps the birth of an Empire, a plot—the expansion of the empire, some characters—perhaps settlements established, and then a crisis—a tragic or predictable fall, or an unexpected success (an apex and denouement). The above steps conclude with the author's message: the moral of the story.

The moral of the historian's master narrative, according to Fulford, could be the critique of organized religion as was promoted in Gibbon's historical writings, (48) or the success of Christianity underlying Thomas Macaulay's writings (49). Today, there is resistance to developing master narratives for history. The bin of events, as Arthur Danto described history (61), grows increasingly large, defying thematic unification.

PHILOSOPHY AND NARRATIVE

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Does the same analysis about making choices that determine a direction for explanation apply to philosophy? Might philosophy be understood, first as a set of stories told by different thinkers, and second as a master narrative, a product of an underlying theme, the results of which are the sets of stories that still can be identified with the philosopher's never-ending questions?

We can consider: 1) if philosophy qualifies as a constructor of narratives; 2) if its connection to storytelling has been through the pedagogical value of narrative; 3) if philosophy can be thought of as a master narrative.

1) Storytelling as a process of construction for philosophers.

Carol Birch and Melissa Heckler write in Who Says? that stories are, in short, "[a] mental opposable thumb, allowing humans to grasp something in their minds—to turn it around, to view it from many angles, to reshape it, to hurl it even into the farthest reaches of the unconscious" (11).

The important idea is that of turning reflections on experience around and viewing them from many angles. Doing so can reshape their significance, their roles as cause or effect in understanding; that is their meanings. Doing so enables us to imagine different outcomes and different types of characters, but doing so also enables us to question familiar assumptions. In short, we can reconstruct previous tales, though social circumstances and danger can stand in the way of imaginative turnings.

In the beginning, the natural, the human, the transcendent, were not rigorously distinct at all. Stories comforted the frustration of knowing that we did not know causes and that we struggled to predict futures. Stories also inspired the efforts to provide explanations where myth and the burgeoning world of fact began to collide.

If we consider the very early Greeks, their compositions were not regarded as "philosophy" per se. Homer and Hesiod, dated c. 750 BC, produced the earliest works of literature in the western world. They are referenced in Plato's Republic as being included with, yet distinguished from, the Pre-Socratics. Now we call the Pre-Socratic writers, philosophers. Baird and Kaufmann in Ancient Philosophy, explain:

Whereas the previous great cultures on the Mediterranean had used mythological stories of the gods to explain the operation of the world and of the self, some of the Greeks began to discover new ways of explaining things. Instead of reading their ideas into, or out of, ancient scriptures or poems, they began to use reason, contemplation, and sensory observation to make sense of reality. (1)

The early Pre-Socratics proposed first principles which could be used to explain many events. For example, Thales, c. 550 BCE, argued all things are made of water; Empedocles (c. 410 BC) expanded the claim to include earth, air, and fire (Kirk and Raven 90, 324). Thus, for example, in place of the stars, a first principle became the compass for a quest. The first articulations of natural laws and first principles were tools for turning around previous stories about existence and human agency.

If early philosophers were turning around myths and viewing them from the perspective of reason, they did not abandon narrative modes of presentation. When Socrates died in 399 BC, Plato was recording new explanations about human nature, especially in the Republic.

Plato's Republic is one long constructed story. There the quest is for justice; the mountains to climb are built of myths and powerful Gods resistant to change; swamp and forest mazes form the traps set by mimetic poets and villainous sophists intent on perverting the course of justice; the tools for survival are education (mathematics and logic being the toughest most enduring aids); the hero is the one with courage to escape the cave. After escaping the cave, the journey into the new world of reason brings reward—a brief glimpse of truth, a place in society, and self-confidence in a job well done. The endurance required to undertake this journey, the risk-taking (the unknown) and the possible failure, are far beyond the courage and skills of most people who will live accepting what they are told. The one who leaves the cave is someone we can imagine, perhaps someone with whom we dare to identify. Yet the story doesn't end in any traditional way (happiness, death or immortality). The story inspires us to imagine a different ending, or ask the critical question of all human inquiry "What if?" Finally, a moral of the Republic as a story is that education is critical to flourishing as a human being.

2) The pedagogical value of narratives in philosophy

Plato's dialogues were his narrative tools for planting new ideas in the listener's imagination. Imagine a world where women have knowledge, or have the ability to run city states, and fight in wars, and receive educations. The seeds of future change were planted through stories. And the tools of criticism were embedded in storytelling. The reader learned to recognize myths as myths, and then recognize many myths as modes of social control—some of them openly resistant to philosophy, others pretending to mimic it.

Plato's stories created a tsunami of "what if 's" in future minds and triggered naysayers, doubters, followers, corrections officers, preachers and social movements that were both violent and peaceful in the centuries that followed. The power of narrative inspired the ensuing chapters in the history of philosophy, one which challenged old frameworks, and built new ones. For example, if stories generated higher authorities, even transcendent ones, such as God, that served our imaginations, such authorities could be turned around and viewed from many angles. The philosopher's understanding of God might be quite different than the theologian's, thereby giving the reader a choice with which story and its heroes he or she wants to identify. The pedagogical value of philosophical stories is considerable.

3) Philosophy as a master narrative

In 1926, Ernst Cassirer wrote a book, still in print today, The Individual and The Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. Cassirer was determined to make the case that Renaissance philosophy was not some aberration associated with Christian debates. In spite of the multiple variations on problems that the Renaissance thinkers proposed, Cassirer argues convincingly that they are not isolated storytellers but part of the "entire intellectual movement" of mankind, one that affected and determined future movement of thought, or "a new cosmos of thought"(6). His concluding chapter tracks the rise of the subject-object dialectic, which animated future philosophical debates starting with Descartes. We learn that Descartes didn't invent the mind-body dualism, but that he simply adapted it. His predecessors struggled through two centuries of trying to articulate, indeed unify, the dualism of God and the ego, both sharing the same space which is only known to us through individual consciousness. "The Infinity of the cosmos threatens to not only limit the Ego, but even to annihilate it completely; but the same infinity seems also to be the source of the Ego's constant self- elevation, for the mind is like the world it conceives" (190).

Cassirer sees the Renaissance as having "the indisputable merit of determining the problem" (191) of an unresolved dualism, out of which a more systematic philosophy began to emerge as the next chapter in an ongoing master narrative. Still, such a master narrative emerges gradually (in that philosophical questions never fade away). The intellectual movement may generate new chapters in its quest to know existence and human agency, but it still begins with stories and the drive to unify them.

When Plato proposed reason, in human consciousness, as the ground of all claims about existence and the driving force behind human agency, he initiated a new story that veered away from the materialist explanation for everything. In short, the role of reason in our lives became the theme of a beginning master narrative for philosophy. But before we can conclude that philosophy as a human pursuit is a continuing master narrative, we need to explore more carefully the components involved in writing philosophical narrative, and the obstacles—the hurdles on a quest—that philosophers would gradually unveil: a) the determination of a philosophical event, b) the critique of meaning, c) the confrontations with other disciplines and practices.

A) THE IDEA OF A PHILOSOPHICAL EVENT

The story of philosophy (Cassirer's intellectual movement) develops in chapters, and this story sets out signposts for others. By signposts, I mean a recognition of a dominant concept (reason), and the pursuit of the meaning and use of such concepts by many philosophers over time. Examples of such concepts are: the existence of God, freedom, the individual, or the ground of ethical theory. If we begin with reason as the dominant foundation of a philosophical master narrative, we can ask: Is a focus on reason sufficient as an event to propel the master narrative forward?

No story is the product of reason alone. Every time we observe a cause, or create a link between events, or even demarcate something as an event, the imagination is also at work selecting from the 'vast bin of events' that have been used in the past to explain something. The writing of a book (such as the Republic) which turns old ways of living around and provides new rational directions for ordering our lives can be thought of as a philosophical event. Choosing reason as a necessary tool for exploring existence and human agency narrows the number of paths available for future investigations. Philosophy gradually defines its events—and what constitutes a philosophical question—but nothing in our speculations and imaginings excludes narrative as a method for furthering the rational movements of the human mind.

So, to continue the activity of responding to the accumulating events generated by thinkers who came to be recognized as philosophical, philosophers read the stories of previous and current philosophers, and they respond to each other's narratives. They respond because those narratives can become part of one's experience; they can become part of the conceptual framework through which decisions are made and acts are conducted. Narratives can also inspire responses that challenge the story being read. For example, the reader can ask, after reading a text: Why did the narrator tell me that at the end of this tunnel God would be revealed? The tunnel has come out in a forest, with little light. Surely I need to take another route in my quest to understand God, or begin my journey again departing from a different idea as to what God is, or what the word God means.

The reader can also ask: When philosophers respond to a preceding philosopher or even current one, are philosophers trying to prove a previous story wrong? Consider: When working with numbers, mathematicians intend to correct a calculation that doesn't repeat or accord with established laws. Scientists might prove the previous understanding of the origins of life on earth to be wrong. Do philosophers seek to prove each other wrong, or do they offer a different way of understanding what society could become? If the latter, then they are offering a different story with carefully chosen premises, characters and moral endings. For example, when philosophers began to promote the idea that a human being could be thought of as an individual, and the concept of being an individual required the concept of freedom, a free individual became the hero of a new philosophical story, one that resulted through making a major shift from previous tales.

Writing narrative often involves including a moral to the story. Asking about right and wrong, as a characteristic of narrative, invites the suggestion that meanings could be made uniform and thereby become the measure of truths about rights and wrongs, in the way that numbers help establish scientific truth. Let us explore whether or not meanings, even rational, philosophical meanings can be assumed to be uniform.

B) THE ROLE OF MEANING IN STORIES

Truth fluctuates according to the methods for establishing it and the meanings being examined. Each method for determining what is true presumes there will be an acceptance of the meanings embedded in any articulated truth-claim. Treating meaning as an essence to be discovered has not proven fruitful or convincing; one can better understand the multiple meanings surrounding experience much more readily through stories, than through analysis. Let us first consider a concept to examine how its meaning can change according to its role in our existing lives.

Fluctuating meanings: Travel as an example. The concept of travel is a working idea in human agency. The meaning of travel, when considered through a definitional (or search for an essence or law) mode, can be very different from the meaning of travel considered through a narrative mode of thinking. Documenting or analyzing what brings into travelling—survival needs, curiosity, motivations, and quests—is collated for reports and study within time frames. Getting from A to B can be timed and the methods for doing so (on foot, by car) can be documented. Our decisions about the relevance of time to our understandings about travel will become part of our experiences of travelling. We then synthesize the meanings we have acquired about travel through growing, developing, conversing and being educated, with each experience we have of travelling. With every journey, our travel meanings can alter and change. Because we continue to travel every day, (e.g. from a bed to the shower) our experiences change every moment. Documenting doesn't encompass our capacity to synthesize and adapt meanings.

We can report our experienced meanings through concepts, definitions, essences, or, another word might be, principles. We can also convey meanings with stories. With the story, we become the narrator, the creator of settings evoking sympathies and empathies; we can determine endings that can be funny, full of outrage, or pathetic. We can choose the meanings we want to share.

So we could report on travel through reciting modes and times of arrival and departure, a list of sights seen, and things discovered or lost along the way. Yet, if we are reporting on getting from the house to one's work place, the documentation method (just citing statistics) for explaining what that travel means seems somewhat impoverished. In no way does it convey the meanings that the above journey has for the individual under time pressure, or when facing a snow storm.

Meanings also reflect the role a concept may play in a different setting. Philosophy may be written in books, but once read, concepts discussed can become subject to experiences and generate different meanings. A universal concept, such as nature, can alter significantly in meaning according to our sources. For Kant, in his Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790), nature is frequently a source of examples that evoke human judgments of beauty—judgments that are universal, necessary, disinterested—ones that bring to the experience of beauty in nature an interpretive concept of purposive but without purpose (see Sections 7–10). The assumption for Kant was that we universally respond to nature as beautiful. In America, nature became understood as wilderness—untamed, wild, and chaotic (Nash 2–3). Meanings for the concept of nature evolved through their association with concepts of peace, the development of cities, and the surge of capitalism, to cite only a few. (For further explorations of factors influencing conceptual meanings, see Trott, Works Cited.)

Wittgenstein, a little bit on meanings. Some of these issues have been well investigated by Wittgenstein, about the mysteries of meanings and language and whether there is a "form of life" or objective essence behind the meanings of words and their uses. Anthony Grayling, in Wittgenstein, writes:

We do not go right or wrong in language use according to whether we correctly or otherwise describe objective facts, but rather according to whether we follow the mutually agreed and observed rules of our linguistic community. The community as whole cannot go right or wrong either; it just goes: the only constraints on use are the internal ones founded on agreement and custom. (103)

Grayling pursues the difficulties that this observation raises—conflicts involving realism (is there something out there that words connect to?) and anti-realism, (there are no fixed grounds of meanings, only customs and use), and conflicts between the ensuing relativism that Grayling thinks is inevitable, that of cultural relativism and cognitive relativism (106). He reminds us that cognitive relativism is only discussable because we can agree that forms of life entail differences, and recognizing differences means there is common ground against which things can be understood as different (107–09). Such common ground could be for some, dictionaries, though they can be notoriously frustrating, for others, a realist metaphysics.

It is not the intent of this paper to explore these metaphysical problems. The intent is to observe that the identification of community understandings of meanings—ones that can overlap with other communities, ones that can dissipate, disappear, and be co-opted for different purposes—is pretty close to the community of meanings used in great narratives. One need only encounter the term boojum in the poem, the Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll in 1876, and then read of the term boojum being co-opted for a discovery in physics in 1976 by David Merman, a physicist at Cornell University, and published in Phys. Rev. Letters, 1977, to appreciate the fluidity and cross cultural pollination of meanings that language can germinate. (The term boojum has also been used to name a species of tree and different places in the world; its extended meanings are prolific.)

Frequently shifts in meaning occur through the magic of metaphors, and while Grayling criticizes Wittgenstein for his lavish reliance on metaphors, insisting that clarity is the final goal and measure of great philosophy, the fact that the practice of philosophy continues to exist is testimony to the far-reaching perhaps unrealistic expectations Grayling has of achieving great clarity and precision. He writes: "Language is an instrument capable of precise use. When it is so used philosophical difficulties can be expressed and investigated clearly" (116). But the implication is that all philosophical difficulties can be recognized as difficulties in some universal sense. If cultural and cognitive relativism are to be overcome by clarity, one can only wonder why achieving clarity is taking so long. Will a king's understanding of being a king ever match his servant's understanding of what a king is?

At best we can map the logic of our cognitive deductions and inductions, and identify particulars and universals as conceptual tools shared by rational minds. But beyond that, any discussion of what constitutes a philosophical difficulty will require our recognition of communities, indeed language communities, and agreement about clarity within those communities may be achieved with very different sets of precision tools.

C) THE CONFRONTATION WITH OTHER DISCIPLINES: SCIENCE, THE SYSIPHEAN HURDLE.

The idea that philosophy is a master narrative—a story struggling with clarifications, reinterpretation, adjustments and adaptations, has the hallmarks of the quests of ancient and modern heroes. The narrative was grandly captured by Hegel who wrote: "The history of the World …, its development has been a rational process…the rational necessary course of the World-Spirit" (10).

Philosophers wrote determinedly trying to reach consensus about philosophical difficulties. They debated each other's books and challenged old narratives with dangerous new story lines: God doesn't exist; individuals should be considered free agents; capitalism is harmful. Yet Reason, as debater and negotiator, eventually faced a seemingly insurmountable hurdle. The evolving canon of books was creating a tough river for readers to navigate, but the rapids philosophers themselves were being swept into was the rise and power of science.

Science, compared to the turning wheels of philosophy, was a tale of crash and burn. Experiments and observations that could not be described with measurable properties enabling further discovery were cast aside. Nicolaus Copernicus, (1473–1543) and Isaac Newton (1642–1727) could not be ignored.

Science pressed on relentlessly to find answers to whatever puzzled its practitioners. Scientific knowledge accumulated because events that could be duplicated could be more easily be analyzed and replicated. If science was thought now to be the proprietor of truth, the question became: Should philosophy become a follower of the new god? Was that the end of narrative as a pedagogical engine?

The Aftermath of Science as Demigod. Philosophy as narrative never disappeared in spite of the numerous scientific discoveries that were accumulating. In the 1600s when Newton was revolutionizing physics, Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), who certainly tried to be more scientific with his materialist metaphysics, none the less, was constructing his master narrative, The Leviathan. John Locke (1632–1704) was turning around accepted truths about the classes into which people fall by nature or by God's will, and rewriting political narratives with individuals as the main characters. Later in the 1800s, Kierkegaard (1813–1855) wrote dialogues about fearing the uncertainties of God and love; Marx (1818–1883) inspired the "Davids" of the working world to fight "the Goliath," capitalism; Nietzsche (1844–1900) wrote short stories, crowd stirring monologues, and occasional treatises for the characters living out his story of survival and self-discipline to consult. Science may have challenged the methods of storytelling, but science in no way obliterated the multiple meanings so embedded in the events of the philosophical quest (Fulford 13). Consider the political events of the late 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Nietzsche had well demonstrated that the power of stories could reconstruct thoughts about human nature. With WWI and WWII, the awesome power of narrative was re-born. Some of Nietzsche's stories were turned into fodder for deception and abuse far beyond what he intended or could have imagined. The developing European narratives of white supremacy and the need for cultural genocide, unleashed with enormous power, brought thousands under the spell of new narratives of hate and cultural supremacy. The new god of reason—science—proved helpless in turning around the emerging myths and stories; science was reduced to being their servant of violence.

THE FRACTURED PHILOSOPHICAL NARRATIVE

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The 20th century saw the master narrative of philosophy with common themes (the existence of God, the freedom of the individual, the moral dilemmas of economic theory, the evolution of life) shattered in face of the rock of science. Yet, science, as reason, had not overcome social narratives, and philosophy as reason had become entangled in its own struggles to be scientific. The master narrative of shared problems and concerns for philosophers—each responding to each other's efforts to ask "what if "—fractured into what philosophy is now, a community of specialists. As science developed expertise in increasingly refined disciplines, so philosophers became specialists, such as analytic, continental, idealist, feminist, and philosophers of multiple disciplines, each with their own methods of problem-solving. Many specialist philosophers have no contact with others beyond their specialty.

But not every philosopher retreated to his or her office to focus on apples in baskets or the meaning of words. Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir are obvious examples of those who refused to accept the dominance of science, and began to promote a new wave of existential and phenomenological thought. Throughout the chaos and failure of reason in the first half of the 20^th century, in spite of the fractured specialties, new philosophical stories were being developed.

THE REBIRTH OF THE MASTER NARRATIVE

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In Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-storytelling (2013), author Will Buckingham identifies the split between those who see the pursuit of philosophy as constituted by narrative, and those who grasp its essence as scientific bolstered by time independent arguments towards truth. Buckingham begins his exploration of philosophy as storytelling with Franz Rosenzweig, who having survived WWI, published The Star of Redemption in 1921 (14–15). Rosenzweig wanted to overturn the endless pursuit of essences and absolutes as being impossible dreams. His example for illustrating the shortcomings of this kind of philosophy, one based on principle, was the concept and reality of death. In turning every aspect of living into a discussable concept, we distort and quite likely ignore the impact death has on our pursuit of essences. But instead of seeing the history of western philosophy as a continuing narrative, he regarded it as an endless pursuit of essences and absolutes—"a gradual turning away from experience, reducing its variety" (15). Philosophers were seeking for the concept for everything or, the Hegelian totality. For Rosenzweig, philosophy was a master narrative of an escalation of efforts to develop totalizing concepts. The western tradition of philosophy even treated death as an idea we can simply categorize and discuss.

Philosophy consumed with essences, he argued, teaches us nothing about human experience. To support his case against the revisions of concepts oriented towards the absolute or totality of all existence, Rosenzweig wanted to develop a new master narrative, one that centers on experience, not absolutes. To further explain his goal, Rosenzweig distinguishes between speech-thinking and thought- thinking (29). Thought-thinking (speaking to no one in particular and so to everyone in general) as Rosenzweig thinks Hegel exemplifies, has no need of the experience of time. Hegel, in Rosenzweig's mind, has tried to overcome the experience of living in the world by overcoming the temporality of world in which we live and die. Indeed, "Hegel's philosophy manages to place history itself within an essentially a-temporal framework" (23).

Such Absolute understanding entails an annulment of time (23). Not everyone agrees that Hegel is pursuing timeless concepts and essences. Jonathon Rée regards Hegel's Phenomenology as a kind of philosophical storytelling "in which the hero of the piece is growing up to be the narrator of the story" (24). So Hegel's book can be read from two different perspectives, the narrative, and the timeless and universal. Rosenzweig resists the second reading of Hegel, and suggests that, in such a complete atemporal state of understanding we can negate the "other" as simply a conceptual component, not a real living human being (29).

Speech-thinking is actually speaking to another, a person with a voice in time. We know the iciness of solitude and the warmth of conversation. It is only in our "countless fluctuating relationships" (31) that we know ourselves as human beings who live and die. There is no solitary monad or soul or identity with its own power. We live in a continuing historical narrative, one that is structured by conversation, storytelling and communal singing or shared performance (31).

Rosenzweig is arguing that scientific methods in no way reflect our experience as living beings. In doing so, he is challenging the trajectory of the philosophical narrative through history to its present state of isolated specialists. He wants a return to philosophy as a philosophical narrative, a practice that pays attention to time and the experience of living with others (32). Books are not the primary source of understanding; only in their discussion does philosophy reach into our lives.

Yet he is still making his case in a book written for "everyone" he hopes to reach, a statement with totalities that directs us to re-conceive of philosophy's goals. Rosenzweig's book, by reflecting on the history of philosophy, is a response to other books; it does not suggest they are wrong, but that they are part of a practice that inspires him to promote a new quest, a search for a way to address the exclusion of aspects of human experience, such as real conversation and death.

Buckingham agrees that a book on its own cannot be a conversation, but also that writing a book is a philosophical experience that alters the meanings initially conceived and the meanings expressed throughout the beginning to the ending of the book written. We can "take a different path that permits us different imaginings, or imaginings of the same kinds of things in radically different ways" (156). And this is exactly what narrative sustains. It can be a conversation the reader has in his or her mind as the story progresses.

Buckingham then turns to Levinas and his extensive use of stories as tools of explanation. Levinas, Buckingham will explain, is inspired by Husserl's vision of establishing the irrefutable foundations of an ethical world (not a world with theories of ethics). But Levinas, as did Rosenzweig, suspects the totality approach in creating a holistic system. Instead, his stories draw us into the horrors of moral decisions and our finitude in face of the unknown (59). The experience of being human can best be described through the passions activated by the uncertainties of the decisions demanded of us every day. Reason reflects, but cannot write the story of being human.

Buckingham observes that while Levinas may reflect on stories as too prone to flights of the imagination, he cannot reject the comfort they provide as we face our inadequate ability to live as rational beings.

CONCLUDING REMARKS ON THE NEED FOR PHILOSOPHY AS MASTER NARRATIVE

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Perhaps there is a way to understand philosophy as exemplifying a master narrative, one that originates with Platonic dialogues that first engaged reason as well as imagination in a conversation.

The plot of human development has been the continuing need to establish a balance between the rational and the imaginative capacities of understanding; the quest is to explore the furthest reaches of human vision in terms of teleology, rational rigour, and the emotional will to live. The characters are not the famous philosophers (they are like signposts on a forest path) but their pupils; everyone joins the conversation when engaging with philosophy. One must be ready always for battle, and should something not make sense, one must face possible defeat and then a choice. For example: Do I keep my beliefs about God, now destroyed by logic, or do I abandon them and take the chance of a life struggle on my own? Do I stay in the battle, that is the conversation, and turn the argument around and imagine another arrangement of concepts for understanding God, ones built from an accumulation of choices?

With a plot, a quest, some characters, a crisis, possible defeat and possible survival, philosophy can continue to be an ongoing master narrative exploring human capacities to effect change through imagination and thought. Good stories survive multiple readings and interpretations. When some analytic philosophers tried to dismiss some philosophical chapters as pointless (as happened to Hegel and the neo-Hegelians at many universities in the 1960s and '70s), other philosophers kept copies of Hegel's Logic hidden away. Today Hegel's books are once again being turned around to address our philosophical needs.

The effort to make philosophy more like science, grounded in principles and dismissive of narratives, can be questioned. Science doesn't survive through stories; it simply discards previous theories that don't work and develops new ones. Perhaps those in philosophy devoted only to clarity and sound argument are churning out endless documents that may soon be discarded as repetitive, irrelevant, and able to be discarded. No one discards a good story; no one suggests it is wrong. More likely we look for someone to share it with.

Philosophical stories, about the existence or non-existence of God, about beauty or justice, about whether or not we are material objects or spiritual phenomena, all must meet the demands of our shared logic which might force us to re-think our beliefs and claims. Yet these stories must continue to serve the visions of the imagination, and the knowing that we do not know.

Might philosophy suggest that the moral of its story is to find truth? That "moral" should set off alarms in an alert and intrepid intellect. The affirmation of its "moral" invites immediately its negation. Reason can always affirm and negate. Philosophical practitioners are deceiving themselves if they think that, with their scientific methods of analysis, they are offering truth. Those that aspire to absolute truth reveal the risks of transcending storytelling, because once we believe some truth or moral command, we don't turn stories around and give them new readings. As a result, we will no longer think we need to hear new stories. Certainty and clarity can then be harnessed to direct actions without critical review.

IS THERE A MORAL TO THIS STORY?

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Take delight in imagining answers to that which we do not know; but know the perils of declaring truth—one being, that there will be no more stories.

WORKS CITED

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Source: https://utpjournals.press/doi/full/10.3138/uram.35.3-4.190

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