Little did I know
That you were Romeo, you were throwin’ pebbles
And my daddy said, “Stay away from Juliet”
Love Story
Taylor Swift
Stories
You don’t know everything. You could never know everything. Let me give you a couple of classic examples of things you could never know:
- You don’t know what it’s like to be a bat.
- You could never understand what a lion said to you.
Philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked himself what it was like to be a bat, coming to the conclusion that whilst he might be able to imagine what it would be like for Thomas Nagel to be a bat, he could never know what it would be like for a bat to be a bat. Wittgenstein similarly famously remarked: Wenn ein Löwe sprechen könnte, wir könnten ihn nicht verstehen (often translated as “If a lion could talk, we wouldn’t be able to understand it”.) [PPF §327]
I am often reminding my students in vain that the meanings of words derive from the context in which those words are being used, not from the words themselves. We are able to communicate with each other because we share the same contexts. We do not share the same context with bats and lions and so we could never know what it was like to be them. Poor old Dr Dolittle.
And the fundamental contexts we share? Stories.
This is where Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, Carl Jung comes in. Jung pointed out that because we don’t know everything we have to take certain things as given. And wouldn’t you know, the things we take as givens are nested inside stories. We accept those stories as valid and they form the bedrock of our common life. I know what it’s like to be you because I know we share the same stories.
It is common to believe that way back in the past, people believed in myths because they didn’t know any better. They didn’t have Bunsen burners, pie charts, lab coats and test tubes back in the ancient times and therefore they believed silly stories about the world and who they were in that world. It turns out that us sophisticated modern people base our own knowledge and understanding on myths too. You might want to replace ‘myths’ with ‘basic underlying principles’ but it’s the same thing.
So myths form a foundation and it’s on that foundation that everything that you take for granted rests. Even if you don’t understand the foundation. For example, here’s a mythical idea that underlies Western civilisation: each individual has transcendent worth. It’s from this myth that the notion of natural rights is derived and of course our whole legal system is predicated on the idea that you have certain natural rights. The writers of the American Bill of Rights for example said they held “these truths to be self-evident”. In other words, there’s no proof of any of this but we ‘believe’ it. They are axioms of faith and a mode of operating in the world.
So let me tell you a story of what it means to be a human being. Oh hang on, millions of people already have. See if you can recognise it. It goes something like this…
There you are, bobbing along, just kind of existing in a place that’s working out fairly well. Everything’s going along fine and then something happens to knock you off your perch and you descend into chaos for a fair old length of time. And maybe you never get out but maybe you learn something down in the chaotic depths there. Perhaps a new strength in your character. And then you pop up in a new place and maybe it’s better than it was before.
Sound familiar?
The Lion King? So there’s Simba having a fun time until disaster strikes and he has to leave his home and travel the wilderness until his eyes are opened and he returns to claim what is his destiny with a new maturity and sense of responsibility.
Paradise Lost…Hamlet…Frankenstein…King Lear…in fact much of the A Level syllabus is concerned with retelling this archetypal Myth. And of course, as I have mentioned several times and often, Literature is where we understand who we are. Not to mention Star Wars, Finding Nemo, The Matrix, Spiderman, The Wizard of Oz and basically any of the Marvel© films. The list is fairly endless, because this particular myth is so integral to understanding who we are.
Don’t believe me that this particular myth is everywhere? Well let’s take a look at Harry Potter…
I have to declare that I’ve never actually read any of the Harry Potter books, but I reckon I can give it a decent go because I recognise the myth. Nevertheless, all due apologies to any of my readers who may be Harry Potter experts if I get the details wrong.
So we first meet Harry in his Muggle family, the Dursleys, and they’re not too great. In particular, his cousin Dudley is a right old piece of work: a spoiled, ill-formed, selfish individual who acts as a foil for Harry and of course he’s appreciated and doted on and Harry is actually punished for his virtues. That in itself is another classic story. The central story in Christianity is about someone who is precisely punished in the worst possible way for the highest possible virtues. That’s what makes it an archetypal story because there isn’t anything more unfair than that. And that’s also what happens to Harry. Luckily he finds out that he’s magical, which is quite convenient and off he goes to Wizarding school. As an aside here, going to Wizarding school is of course just like studying the Humanities because it’s through the Humanities that you make contact with the magic of your culture.
So Harry Potter goes off to the Magic Castle and he’s learning to be a wizard, and at some point we find out that all this time, he has a piece of the baddie Voldemort in him which is important for this to be telling us something about who we are, specifically what being ‘good’ means. Because being truly good is not just following rules, you also have to be able to understand evil. And in order to understand malevolence so that you can withstand it you have to understand that part of you that’s malevolent
And that’s another Jungian idea: part of personality development is to understand your shadow. The shadow is those things about you that you do not want to admit to having. This idea is also explored in that other classic story of a young man discovering his magical powers at Wizarding school, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, which I have mentioned before in these columns. Incidentally, an excellent way of learning about your own shadow is by studying history. Harry in the stories is able to stand up to the malevolence of Voldemort because he is infected by him to some degree. But I think that’s jumping ahead a bit.
At some point earlier there’s a snake basilisk type creature that lives deep down under the school. This underground of course represents chaos. Because, as we all know chaos is always just under the surface. Wherever we are is on thin ice. So Harry decides he’s going to go after the basilisk which means of course facing the thing of which he is most afraid. He’s rescuing ‘Ginny’ I believe, which is also the St George and the Dragon myth, but let’s not go there. And so Harry gets bitten and it looks like he might die. But then Dumbledore, the wise and magic ruler of the castle has a Phoenix who flies in, sheds a few tears on Harry and restores him back to life. Now the Phoenix, as you know, is a symbol of transformation or in this case, the capacity of the person to transform. Harry has been transformed by his encounter with his own darkness.
And we’re all captivated by this story because it’s a myth about who we are and how we should be in a scary world which might otherwise paralyse us/turn us to stone.
Science/rationalism cannot tell us how we ought to be. And whenever it has, it’s been an unmitigated disaster. As our dear friend David Hume famously argued, you cannot get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. But in myth it is possible.
What is it that every human being shares regardless of place and time? Any universally comprehensive language would be a myth. Myths speak to us, obviously, otherwise we wouldn’t understand them. We understand love stories, we understand stories of conflict, we understand stories of betrayal, we understand stories of anger, and that’s because we can feel jealousy, we can feel love, we can feel anger. Just ask Taylor Swift. These are part of you and they are part of me. There’s things about us that are honourable and good as well as things about us that aren’t, and we need to know both of those and that’s what the great stories tell us.
The stories we tell ourselves are the closest we’ll ever get to knowing everything there is to know.
Sadly, I’ve no time to talk about the myth of money or indeed the myth of Artificial Intelligence. Maybe in another encounter.
Until then Happy Reading/Mything
As part of my ongoing drive to constantly make progress as well as bowing to popular opinion amongst reader(s), I am throwing open the Director’s Tips section of this column to you. Please send in your tips and suggestions and I will do my best to include them in upcoming editions.
So here’s the last one from me:
Director’s Tip #last
Worried about whether you’re clever?
Intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting tomatoes in a fruit salad.