Faith & Reason, Part 4: The Nature of Narrative
Similar to what we have already found regarding Metaphor, appreciation is growing for the importance of Narrative in our understanding of ourselves and the world. See for example:
Herman, David (2002), Story Logic (University of Nebraska). MacIntyre, Alasdair (1981), After Virtue (University of Notre Dame Press). Mitchell, John (2005), ‘Evaluating Brady Error Using Narrative Theory: A Proposal For Reform’, Drake Law Review, 53, pp. 599-629. Pennington, Nancy & Hastie, Reid (1992), ‘Explaining the Evidence: Tests of the Story Model For Jural Decision Making’. Yamane, David (2000), ‘Narrative and Religious Experience’, Sociology of Religion, 61:2, pp. 171-89. Crites, Stephen (1971), ‘The Narrative Quality of Experience’, From Journal of the American Academcy of Religion, XXXIX, 3. In Why Narrative ?, Eds. Stanley Hauerwas and Gregory Jones. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1997. Elkins, James (1985), ‘On the Emergence of Narrative Jurisprudence: The Humanistic Perspective Finds a New Path’, Legal Studies Forum, 2, pp. 123-56. Hauerwas, Stanley, and David B. Burrell (1977), ‘From System to Story: An Alternative Pattern for Rationality in Ethics’, In Truthfulness and Tragedy: Further Investigations in Christian Ethics (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press). Reddy, William (2001), ‘The Logic of Action: Indeterminacy, Emotion, and Historical Narrative’, History and Theory, Theme Issue, 40, pp. 10-33. Schick, Theodore (1982), ‘Can Fictional Literature Communicate Knowledge?’, Journal of Aesthetic Education, 16, pp. 31-39.
And I have been pleasantly surprised by Daniel Dennett’s conjecture that consciousness is the result of a pandemonium of competing, atomic narrative scripts (Consciousness Explained, 1991).
Consider investigative journalism and law: Narrative was perhaps the most important tool I had while making my discoveries about the Kirk. Appeal to evidence and primary documents was foundational, but a decisive verdict required months of narrative development and interpretation. This importance of narrative in adjudicating the truth of a claim and compelling appropriate belief is summed up well by the US Supreme Court majority opinion:
The ‘fair and legitimate weight’ of conventional evidence showing individual thoughts and acts amounting to a crime reflects the fact that making a case with testimony and tangible things not only satisfies the formal definition of an offense, but tells a colorful story with descriptive richness. Unlike an abstract premise, whose force depends on going precisely to a particular step in a course of reasoning, a piece of evidence may address any number of separate elements, striking hard just because it shows so much at once…Evidence that has force beyond any linear scheme of reasoning, and as its pieces come together a narrative gains momentum, with power not only to support conclusions but to sustain the willingness of jurors to draw the inferences, whatever they may be, necessary to reach an honest verdict… (Old Chief v. United States; my emphasis).
The moral significance of individual thoughts and actions requires more than an inductive view of relevant evidence; it requires a narrative structure. The practice of law and judicial decision has provided fertile ground for theorizing about narrative
(I have not yet seen the debate between William Lane Craig and Christopher Hitchens, but I know who employed the right tools and who didn’t. I am not surprised by the analytic yahoos declaring Hitchens’ defeat).
But narrative has also been of interest in the field of axiology. In an essay discussing moral responsibility, free will, and Frankfurt cases, John Fischer (1999) cites David Velleman’s work on narrative (1991): “later events are thought to alter the meaning of earlier events, thereby altering their contribution to the value of one’s life.” Velleman compares the life of a person who struggles in marriage for ten years ending in a divorce and a happy remarriage with the life of a person who struggles in marriage for ten years to final happiness without divorce after the relationship matures. Velleman writes:
Both lives contain ten years of marital strife followed by contentment; but let us suppose that in the former, you regard your first ten years of marriage as a dead loss, whereas in the latter you regard them as the foundation of your happiness. The bad times are just as bad in both lives, but in one they are cast off and in the other they are redeemed.
It would seem, then, that knowledge of particular actions, as pertaining to the value of those actions, may at times depend on not only a narrative construal of evidence, but a narrative of sufficient expanse. Reason, then, must be able to ’see’ more than just the facts; it must access structures beyond what our traditionally construed inductive and deductive processes are able to capture. And it turns out that this is what religious faith is so capable of doing; faith is able to provide narrative meaning to our lives, the world we live in, and in fact the entire history of the cosmos. Facts of evil might just be a problem to simply be, to use Velleman’s word, “redeemed” at the end of time, once the full story has taken its course. Without much recourse elsewhere, Plantinga now points to a narrative approach to dissolving the problem of evil (Warranted Christian Belief, 2000). With vision like this, it is hard to see what the clear tension would be precisely between narrated faith and the more narrow, and therefore less meaningful, claims of empirical fact. The empirical question for the religious narrative simply reduces to whether or not the important historical facts are indeed true. If Christianity is true, then narrative would capture one of the most important ways we understand ourselves and the world.
A stronger point might be made about narrative. Scholars who are apt to point to the importance of narrative are often convinced that both agency and historical events are meaningless outside of a narrative context irrespective to value judgments. For example, it is hard to know what the significance would be if, empirically, Jesus did in fact raise from the dead, without some narrative context similar to what the apostle’s employed – beginning with the book of Genesis. It is likewise difficult to know how one would characterize a person’s actions without the use of narrative; if talking about a meaningful action, some sort of background story about the person performing the action must be assumed.
So the clash between Reason and Faith cannot be found between the story teller and the fact finder. Philosophically, we will have to look elsewhere; but if the more we look and find only harmony between faith and reason, at some point we must just give up and admit that, philosophically speaking, there just is no important distinction to be found.
But again, our concern about the tension between faith and reason is a very reasonable one, a very sound, practical concern resonating with the intuition of most over many centuries. So where do we turn to address this tension? I have already found Belief (Part 1 & Part 2) and Metaphor to give us nothing, and now Narrative is also a dead end. Before abandoning philosophy proper altogether, I will give one more important topic a try: the nature of Knowledge itself.
Posted by metzler on Saturday, May 23, 2009, at 10:28 am.
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