Beyond narrative
Is the structure of storytelling an intrinsic aspect of reality, or is it just a mental aid that we can let go of once we reach enlightenment?
This is a technical question raised in GrimGriz’ podcast with John Vervaeke:
and in Paul Vanderklay’s commentary:
If you're able to keep up, I enthusiastically suggest you give the interview a listen. John speaks about opponent processing (11:15) and healthy ecology of practices (40:00) that I can firmly get behind. Don’t meditate without contemplating, don’t go inward without connecting to the world around you, don't stay just in your head without including some physical activity. This is something I've had to learn for myself with the help of John, my partner, and many other insights that ultimately form "Vervaeke's dialectic". I will write much more on this topic later, in the meantime you can read the last part of this post, where I talk about how jujitsu has been transforming me.
The question that had me most intrigued was whether the narrative was necessary to properly ground moral aspirations (30:43), to which John resolutely said no. This surprised me. Why? In this video, John explains the mutual interdependence of three types of ontological pillars: the nomological (how things are, the immutable laws of how things work), the normative (idealized future states we aspire to, motivating personal growth), and the narrative (particular stories in which self-improvement is seen in action, following both the nomological constraints and the normative aspiration). As an example, John mentioned addictive video games such as Tetris, which bring all three of these pillars together and draw people into an immersive state of flow.
I thought of these as three essential and equally important pillars, yet John now appears to suggest that the narrative is nothing more than a pedagogical crutch that we use to learn about the normative aspiration. We ground the desire to grow into stories that we can understand. By taking the perspective of the hero, we acquire a taste of how it will be like to be our transformed self. Stories can help us develop, but, according to John, they may not necessarily be an essential part of our reality. He suggests a state in which we can discard the narrative crutch and practice growth in a purely nomological-normative world.
Why is this interesting at all to me?
John and I have the same feeling about stories: they either seem too particular to be part of the general texture of reality, or too idealized to be believable. Paul touches on this in a commentary that came out shortly after I began writing. We both understand that parables are more real than reality itself, because they contain the deeper, universal patterns that we can all relate to. Yet the more profound these stories are (such as the resurrection), the less believable they become: they acquire the flavor of the timeless nomological structure of the world, like those laws that Newton discovered. As John says (35:41), what Jesus did was to actually break the narrative frame.
The stories in the Bible talk to me, metaphorically. Yet, for them to work, they need to be situated in the particular, this is their very goal, to bring down the timeless abstract nomological patterns from the Heaven to Earth. While I admire their messages of truth, I have difficulty relating to their Bronze/Iron Age context. And since I did not grow up in a culture which organically accepted (and possibly updated, through rituals I did not participate in) these stories to be the cornerstone of narrative ontology, I am now in a vacuum where my Neoplatonic views and my normative aspirations for self-growth remain disconnected and ungrounded. It is a huge dilemma and a feeling of disconnectedness that fuels my urge to self-transformation:
maybe the next version of me will find a way of connecting it all together.
I deeply empathize with John in his endeavor to rid himself of the stories, and I'm fascinated to see the result of his ambitious attempt, although I'm watching it from the agnostic sidelines for now. This is an enormous task, but the alternatives, attempting to either give an updated version of the old Christian narrative, or to create an entirely new one (let's call this the New Age movement), would require just as much effort. Especially since the aim is to bring them up to the same level as of our established scientific nomological order and humanistic normative order.
No one here is suggesting that narratives should be removed from epistemology, how we, conscious beings, learn about the world. Stories let us learn about the normative aspirations, how to do good and become good. They are also essential to doing science. Science seeks to populate the nomological space, to map the unchanging structure of the universe. But the processes we use to learn are deeply narrative. The scientific method is a story, embodied by the scientist, the hero of the story. Moreover, before entering the pantheon of the unchanging, aimless ontological laws,
even our pre-paradigmatic scientific theory-buds are stories: just think about how consciousness emerges from the unconscious material in the popular emergentist view, or how the runaway paperclip maximizing AI destroys us in the story of the singularity.
The ongoing debate is this: Is narrative also an essential part of ontology?
I am uncertain as to the answer to this theoretical query, but definitely reluctant to make it my aspiration to rid myself of the narrative.
John asks us to “move on” (35:59) but the idea of moving on implies narrative in itself. To progress towards a non-narrative state appears to be a performative contradiction to me. Maybe he means “arrive,” which we all will, eventually on our deathbeds. Until then, my life, my embodied existence, seems to always be a story, an exciting one with its highs and lows, its heroic subplots, and its strange turns of events that I can partly control as an autopoetic being.
Until my death, everything is a process.
Transformation and narrative structure appear to be linked to consciousness. Consciousness imply change and narrative structure. I am unsure whether narrative is a fundamental element of reality, but it truly feels paramount to my consciousness and to consciousness in general. Thus, I am afraid that to answer the original inquiry, we need to decide if consciousness itself is a fundamental element of reality.