On Stories
How stories convey symbolic truths and complement the formal logic of philosophy
What is it about stories that appeals to us? How is it that every known human society eagerly tells and listens to stories? And, you may well be asking, what do stories have to do with philosophy?
Consider the following story about Zeno of Citium, taken from Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of Eminent Philosophers (Book VII):
Zeno, the son of Mnaseas (or Demeas), was a native of Citium in Cyprus…
He was shipwrecked on a voyage from Phoenicia to Peiraeus with a cargo of purple. He went up into Athens and sat down in a bookseller's shop, being then a man of thirty. As he went on reading the second book of Xenophon's Memorabilia, he was so pleased that he inquired where men like Socrates were to be found. Crates passed by in the nick of time, so the bookseller pointed to him and said, “Follow yonder man.” From that day he became Crates's pupil, showing in other respects a strong bent for philosophy, though with too much native modesty to assimilate Cynic shamelessness.
Hence Crates, desirous of curing this defect in him, gave him a potful of lentil-soup to carry through the Ceramicus ; and when he saw that he was ashamed and tried to keep it out of sight, with a blow of his staff he broke the pot. As Zeno took to flight with the lentil-soup flowing down his legs, “Why run away, my little Phoenician ?" quoth Crates, "nothing terrible has befallen you.”
We don’t know for sure whether this story is literally true or not, but as a philosophical origin myth it has a number of important functions. First, it imparts a personality and character to Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, and locates the roots of Stoicism in Cynic and Socratic philosophy. Second, it humanizes and contextualizes some of the counterintuitive principles that Stoicism is famous for, including the indifference of material goods (Zeno reputedly later said, “I made a prosperous voyage when I suffered shipwreck”) and the irrelevance of other people’s unwarranted opinions to a good life. And it does so in a humorous way, making this episode relatable (we can feel Zeno’s embarrassment while spilling the beans) and its instruction more effective.
Now, compare the paragraph you just read with the story itself. Which one are you more likely to remember tomorrow—the funny and interesting story, or the explicitly analytical dissection of it? Which one will you remember next week, or next year? Which one will you remember the next time you are embarrassed or upset?
Adapted for Stories
For better or worse, humans are wired to respond to stories. In The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, and Human Evolution, first published in 2004, Dennis Dutton argued that the human penchant for stories (and other art forms like music, dance, and visual arts) is not simply the happy byproduct of our formidable cognitive faculties. Rather, our instinct for art is itself an adaptation that prepares us for our extremely social and rational lives. Because human evolution was spurred on by our hypersocial, cooperative natures, our ancestors benefitted from artistic activities that helped them learn to “read the minds” of other people and try out new ideas and possibilities.
In the case of fictional stories, Dutton suggested at least three benefits of storytelling for ancestral and modern humans (summarized from p. 110):
“Stories provide low-cost, low-risk surrogate experience. They satisfy a need to experiment with answers to “what if?” questions that focus on the problems, threats, and opportunities.”
“Stories—whether overtly fictional, mythological, or representing real events—can be richly instructive sources of factual (or putatively factual) information.”
“Stories encourage us to explore the points of view, beliefs, motivations, and values of other human minds, inculcating potentially adaptive interpersonal and social capacities.”
Brian Boyd, in his 2009 work On the Origins of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, further develops the thesis that stories provided an important evolutionary advantage for early humans. Boyd suggests that art, including storytelling, evolved from the mammalian juvenile instinct to play—which hones the skills each type of creature will need most in its adult life—along with the special human predilection for pattern identification.
We can define art as cognitive play with pattern. Just as play refines behavioral options over time by being self-rewarding, so art increases cognitive skills, repertoires, and sensitivities. A work of art acts like a playground for the mind…(p. 15)
In the case of stories, Boyd says, the patterns that particularly stand out to us “involve agents and actions, character and plot, intentions and outcomes” (p. 91). Why is that? Because our intensely social lives require us to understand, respond to, and get along with other people. Stories offer us our most pressing everyday challenges served up in the guise of fascinating characters and adventures:
Fiction allows us to extend and refine our capacity to process social information, especially the key information of character and event—individuals and associates, allies and enemies, goals, obstacles, actions, and outcomes—and to metarepresent, to see social information from the perspective of other individuals or other times, places, or conditions. (p. 192)
The arts are also a cultural tool for concentrating our attention on specific qualities of a culturally salient person or event, and ensuring the transmission of shared values and behaviors. From the cautionary morality tales of Aesop’s fables to the epic battles of Star Wars, stories pack in cultural expectations, warnings, lessons, ethical demands, and other types of social information crucial for surviving in a given human culture.
Fact vs. Fiction
From the perspective of cultural learning, it’s not always important whether a story is factually true or not, but rather that it expresses something important for us to know. Are the heroic lessons of the Iliad or the Icelandic Eddas any different whether these legends are literally true or false (or perhaps in between)? It’s beside the point whether they actually took place in the exact way they are recounted. What’s important for most listeners is that these stories entertain and instruct by showcasing interesting characters facing interesting challenges. Whether the characters are elves, animals, gods, or some other entity, they stand in for humans and act with recognizably human characteristics. They represent patterns of human behavior that are relevant for our lives.
As mythologists often point out, the purpose of great stories is often not to convey a historical truth but to convey a symbolic truth—an underlying truth about the human condition that is as true today as it was 3,000 years ago. We may not face a Hydra like Hercules, but we will certainly face problems that seem to sprout two new heads whenever one is chopped off. And though we don’t “believe in” the ancient Greek gods and magical creatures, we will surely confront episodes of jealousy, revenge, dishonesty, unfaithfulness, arrogance, courage, and the full panoply of human emotions and actions that these characters display.
Problems emerge only when myths are taken as literal rather than symbolic fact. Telling fact from fiction is often a tricky business, and it can be difficult for descendants to tell whether the stories of their ancestors were meant as true or not. We all know how quickly gossip can spiral out of hand, like the old-fashioned game of telephone—I whisper something in my neighbor’s ear, and they mishear it slightly, transmitting a somewhat different version of my words to their neighbor, and so on. By the time ten or twelve people have heard the tale, it’s completely different. What started as as factually true may no longer be so, as it’s interpreted in different ways in each successive telling. This is even more difficult when a story is recounted by ten or twelve generations and its origins are lost to the mists of time.
So a story like the one told by Diogenes Laertius about Zeno may or may not be true, but unless you are a historian looking for bedrock fact, this need not pose a problem. The point of the story is what it expresses about Zeno and the founding the Stoicism. This short episode packs in a lot of philosophical information in a pithy and memorable way—a way that humans are designed to remember. Especially in preliterate societies (or societies where most people were not literate), it was much easier to couch lessons in a way that could be easily remembered and retold rather than as abstract exposition.
Of course, this means that if your intention in listening to a particular story is to learn the literal truth about something, you will need to know (a) whether the story is told as true and (b) whether you can trust the storyteller. If someone—say a friend, or a newspaper—is claiming to provide a factual truth, you as the listener must be able to assess whether or not the story is actually true. This is the great difficulty we encounter in today’s fast-paced, digitized, anonymized world (which we will discuss further in next week’s post on critical thinking). Our Paleolithic truth-telling radars didn’t evolve for the age of global news media and AI deepfakes. It can be very difficult to decide if a person or organization is telling the truth.
On the other hand, there are plenty of reasons you might enjoy a good story that isn’t literally true. Let’s explore why it can be a good idea to bring stories and fiction to a realm that traditionally trades in truth: philosophy.
Stories and Philosophy
If stories are such an effective means of making sense of the human condition and in transmitting deep truths, why don’t they play a bigger role in philosophy? They once did. The founding texts of Western philosophy, Plato’s dialogues, have the basic format of stories, complete with characters who have certain motivations and act in certain formulaic (or sometimes surprising) ways. Socrates’ philosophical ideas are so memorable because of his colorful personality and remarkable life—because he was embroiled in the all-too-human dramas of family life, friendship, war, dinner parties, and social conflict. In his life we recognize the old familiar problems that haunt our own lives, and his exceptional character and unconventional actions inspire us to find meaning in the confusion of the real world.
As Martha Nussbaum pointed out in her classic work Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, wise and thoughtful stories “are indispensable to philosophical inquiry in the ethical sphere: not by any means sufficient, but sources of insight without which the inquiry cannot be complete” (p. 24). No one is suggesting that literary texts replace standard philosophical texts as we know them, but rather that high-quality literature be recognized as a necessary and complementary way of thinking through life’s greatest questions. Those qualities of stories that we discussed above—such as their ability to take us outside the confines of our own narrow experience and show us other possible experiences—also happen to be excellent tools for doing philosophy. Boyd even describes fictional works as thought experiments that allow us to test out theories of mind and the world without ever leaving our armchair (or the campfire).
Serious novelists, Nussbaum reminds us, have always engaged in the business of ethics, drawing our attention to important moral questions and offering solutions and examples of how we might answer them. In ancient Greece, epic stories and dramatic performances were viewed as offering a philosophical response to these questions, which is why many philosophers disliked the poets so much. In Nussbaum’s words:
In Plato’s attacks upon the poets we find a profound insight: that all the ways of writing that were characteristic of tragic (and much of epic) poetry are committed to a certain, albeit very general, view of human life, a view from which one might dissent…The elements of this view at least include the following: that happenings beyond the agent’s control are of real importance not only for his or her feelings of happiness or contentment, but also whether he or she manages to live a fully good life, a life inclusive of various forms of laudable action. (p. 17)
The Stoics, too, believed the tragedians had gotten things wrong, but they also thought that Plato had gotten things wrong by trying to ban the poets. Zeno and Chrysippus saw an important place for literature and the other arts in living a good life, and while they disagreed with the particular viewpoint presented by popular authors, they didn’t think censorship was the right answer.
In Nussbaum’s reading, the power of stories is not simply in the subject matter they cover, but in the literary form itself. In literature, she notes,
A view of life is told. The telling itself—the selection of genre, formal structures, sentences, vocabulary, of the whole manner of addressing the reader’s sense of life—all of this expresses a sense of life and of value, a sense of what matters and what does not, of what learning and communicating are, of life’s relations and connections. Life is never simply presented by a text; it is always represented as something. (p. 5)
Such a view can be partially expressed in the matter-of-fact expositional style of modern philosophy, but nonfiction will always fail to capture some elements that are extremely important to the living of a good life. The circumstances in which a character is compelled to act, the struggle of indecision, the various duties or desires that motivate her actions: these are difficulties can be easily and memorably grasped from a decent fictional narrative. (For example, the ancient Stoics were fascinated by the character of Medea, relying on Euripides’ famous tragedy to explore Medea’s psychology and, through her, human psychology in general.) This is why Nussbaum insists that “moral philosophy requires such literary texts…for its own completion” (p. 26). Not all narrative fiction is philosophy, of course, but certain types of narrative fiction have the potential to be incorporated into philosophy in its complete sense of seeking wisdom about life.
Finnish philosopher Jukka Mikkonen, in Philosophy, Literature and Understanding: On Reading and Cognition, suggests that just as literature can present us with a solid philosophical worldview, it can also unsettle us from one. It’s not only about the endpoint, but about the journey:
In philosophical aesthetics, debate on the cognitive value of literature has traditionally focused on the end product of literary interpretation and attempted to capture it in terms of truth and knowledge. The study on the cognitive value of literature should not, however, be limited to debating the truths and knowledge which literary works might provide but should also acknowledge the procedural dimension, the reader’s journey to understanding. Moreover, while literary works assumedly may give us propositional and non-propositional knowledge and enhance, clarify, and revise our conceptual knowledge, the works may also confuse us and make us doubt what the think and, further, the confusion thus caused may have cognitive value of a significant kind. (p. 76)
Everyone knows that a great story is great not just because of a satisfying ending—although that is important too—but because of how the characters get to the ending. Usually either the character evolves or the reader’s point of view somehow evolves to enable a growth in understanding. In specifically philosophical works, the characters may well be on a journey, but the author is primarily concerned with the reader’s journey in understanding. (Perhaps this is one of the main criteria for philosophical fiction?) Sometimes it’s necessary to pass through a state of questioning or confusion in order to reach new insights.
Concluding Thoughts
I know we’ve covered a lot of ground in this essay, so here’s a handy summary of some the important points about stories and philosophy:
Humans have evolved to appreciate and/or benefit from art (including music, dance, visual arts, and storytelling)
Art may be similar to play in strengthening our capacity for uniquely human cognitive activities (using our rationality and sociability)
Our brains are wired to detect patterns in nature, and art is “cognitive play with pattern” (in Brian Boyd’s words)
A wide range of benefits have been proposed for stories in particular:
Enabling us to experience situations we would not normally have access to in regular life
Allowing us to test out solutions theoretically before we ever need them in reality
Enhancing our theory of mind by allowing us to enter into other people’s minds and understand their experiences
Building social cooperation by transmitting shared values and knowledge
Forms of storytelling are not philosophically neutral but are organically tied to the author’s philosophy of life (e.g., tragic poets presenting fate as terrible)
Philosophical fiction can unsettle our comfortable assumptions about life and lead us on a journey to new insights
A complete exploration of ethics will include philosophical art and fiction
I hope this has helped you to think about philosophy and stories in a different way. This is a theme I hope to explore more in the future, both through standard nonfiction essays but also through various forms of philosophical fiction. In more ways than one, creating and consuming stories—and other forms of humanistic artistic expression—is integral to a full understanding of human nature.