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Rothenbuhler Associate Editors. DOI: First, humans are Homo narrans—they are innately storytellers. Fourth, human rationality is ruled by our nature as narrative beings. Fith, the world is not a set of puzzles to be solved.
Instead, the world is known as a story, and there are always a range of potential stories to choose among in explaining the world and our place in it. According to these ive presuppositions, human beings naturally reason in a narrative form and all know how to evaluate narratives for good reasons. Narrative rationality is a given among humans, not an accomplishment for elite arguers and thinkers.
It will also be alleged to have normative implications. Fisher prefers the narrative paradigm primarily because of the explana- tory power of narrative over argumentative forms of reasoning, and because narrative as innate human skill is more compatible with democratic and egalitarian ideals. According to Fisher, all participants are storytellers and none hold trumping skills or expertise that should lead others to auto- matically defer to their reasoning abilities.
Some texts may even approach a ith function, that of evisceration or destruction of other stories p. All of these func- tions are most successfully pursued when an audience judges a narrative as high in narrative probability and narrative idelity.
Fisher elucidates three ways a narrative can be assessed in terms of narrative probability. First, a narrative can be assessed as to its argumentative or structural coherence among its various parts. In other words, we judge characters as reliable and stable if there is some consistency among their actions and values, and we question those characters that seem to change for random or unpredictable reasons in a narrative.
Second, a person pays attention to the text to determine if relevant and important facts have been let out of this persuasive account. Using the ive components of the logic of reasons as a foundation, Fisher elucidates ive tests of narrative idelity: First, the question of fact: What are the implicit and explicit values embedded in a message? Sec- ond is the question of relevance: Are the values appropriate to the nature of the decision that the message bears upon?
Included in this question must be concern for omitted, distorted, and mis- represented values. Rowland argues that if the narrative paradigm is truly a paradigm, then one should be able to analyze each artifact as a narrative and to usefully apply the standards of the narrative paradigm to evaluate these argumentative utterances.
Rowland concludes that one could read each text as a narrative, but this would miss the uniqueness of each appeal. For instance, the documentary video lacks any real development or plot, diferentiating it from the science iction story with its characters who develop and change in speciic ways over time.
One of the most sustained lines of criticism concerns the status of the narrative paradigm as a normative tool of argument analysis. In his statement of the narrative paradigm, Fisher wishes to give an account of narrative identiication that cov- ers both how humans already evaluate narratives and how we should ideally evaluate narratives.
Critics such as Warnick and Rowland focus on this mix of normative and descriptive theoriz- ing, and argue that the narrative paradigm cannot both describe dysfunctional reason- ing and give observers the resources to criticize it. It cannot, on this line of reasoning, do both. Warnick pushes this point further, asking in the case of conlicting transcendent values the last step in the logic of good reasons —how is a critic or community to decide such conlicts? In other words, how can this account of narrative rationality make sense of those cases where narratives challenge deeply held values in an audience and successfully get that audience to agree to act, believe, or value in a radically diferent way?
Kirkwood is primarily interested in the version of this problem attached to the rhetorical disclosure of possibilities. The Indians understood that salmon's gift involved them in an ethical system that resounded in every corner of their locale.
Such an understanding of salmon recalli Aldo Leopold's maxim that 'a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise'. The salmon stories perform an integrative function which guides development of the myth. Among Australian Abctigines, many narratives am even mom literally 'embodiments' of the locale in that they am signified in body paintings and dance. Joanna Mendelssohn reports that when women of the Alyawarre and Mmatyerre communities came to argue a land rights case to the courts, they used awelye, 'clan symbols that tell, as words cannot, how the people are part of the land.
They painted their bodies with designs tka told their personal stones and danced and sang to explain their Dreaming'. Through awelye these people depict the lush wild oranges and honey, the magic of sacred grus, the rituals of gathering food and the campfire intimacy of head lice. Assimilating body and narrative to time Our lives are embedded in a complex and subtle network of both spatial and temporal relationships. Stories are inherently temporal Connelly and Clandinin and the study of time is thus significant for understanding narratives and for exploring ways of assimilating language to the world.
Erikson suggests that different cultures embody different mythological space-time frameworks: 'every person and every group has a limited inventory of historically determined spatial-temporal concepts, which determine the world-image, the evil and ideal prototypes, and the unconscious life plan'. Thus, another step in reconstrucdng our relationship with the earth may be to deconstruct common Western assumptions concerning the material teality of time.
But it is difficult to discuss alternative ways of conceptualising such notions as sequence, causality and succession without confronting this inflexible dogma see Highwater The Western way of experiencing time is only one among many constructions of reality in Highwater's 95 words, a 'linear construction of temporal experience' which, together with language and mathematics, 'constitutes the essence of the active Western mode of consciousness'.
Both postmodern physics and a number of non-Western cosmologies challenge this conceptual system. Numerous metaphors testify to the materiality of Western understandings of dme, including military metaphors time marches on , escape metaphors time is getting away from me , loss metaphors I'm running out of time and possession metaphors I 'haven't got time.
In each case, dme is a 'thing' which either lies behind us or ahead of us and is 'mule implacably material by our language-bound confusion of time as a spatially and physically constructed phenomenon' Highwater Without this organizing structure of language and experience, notions of 'progress' as a cumulative process would be untenable. Most Native American languages have no tenses to express a lineal notion of time and some, like the Hopi language, lack names for such arbitrary divisions of time as seconds, minutes and hours.
They speak, rather, of a perennial reality of the now. Studies of the semantics of non- Western languages demonstrate that the cor. As Zen master D. Suzuki says in Peterson : In the spiritual world there are no time dimensions such as the past, present and future; for they have contracted themselves into a single moment of the present where life quivers in its true sense The past and the future are both rolled up in the present moment of illumination, and the present moment is not something standing still with all its contents, for it ceaselessly moves on.
Suzuki here refers to the notion of being which, in Buddhist traditions, is an immediate, phenomenological, bodily-felt experience. A collective shift toward this mode of being-in-the- world, or present-centeredness, would constitute what Berman sees as a genuine somatic revolution, a heresy which might have the power to interrupt the modernist discourse of 'the mind grown above nature'.
Birds, trees, even rivers and stones begin to stand forth as living, communicative presences'. Such a tangible resonance challenges the psychic distance we have established between ourselves and nature, drawing us beneath the substructure of subject and object into the primordial dimension of integration and wholeness that Merleau-Ponty see Levin referral to as 'Flesh', a pre-ontological attunement to beinpas-a-whole that is woven into the fabric of embodiment.
Pre-modern spiritually-oriented cultures are not alone in their rejection of a linear and material construction of time. In the transactional interpretation of quantum physics, waves of probability originate in the past, present or future and interfere with each other, creating matter and energy Wolf Within this framework, all possible paths emerge in all possible directions between causative events and their effects and, as Wolf writes, what we call 'reality' emerges from the act of observation: Consciousness itself acts in the universe by creating paths Events take on a certain meaningful coherence and appear as natural or given, rather than self-chosen and observer-constructed.
Modernism, especially the discourse of modem scieRce, has become such a least-action pathway, a habitual mode of perceiving and dealing with the world. But, as already noted, the discourse of modern science has failed to provide a normative matrix for long-term survival. So the question becomes one of how to interrupt the established least-action pathways that threaten survival.
In many primal cultures, the shaman serves to 'interrupt' normal pathways and break the law of habitual observation by deliberately choosing non-ordinary reality Wolf To effect this, the shaman enters the 'mythic' or imaginal realm of non-objective reality, which Wolf sees as corresponding with the quantum realm of unobserved, and tharfore unmanifest, possibilities. The reconstruction of our relationship with the earth may require such a deliberate transgression of habitual least- action pathways.
It invites alternative connections of symbol and reality, a shamanic journey on pathways that allow the mythic dimension of experience imagination, dream, fantasy, empathy, cynchronicity and the subterranean flows of feeling and desire to inform our narratives. It is to acknowledge the prominent ways see Johnson in which meaning is tied to bodily experience, and to understand, as Levin 47 suggests, that feeling integrates what objective thought would divide.
And it is to ask, as Nietzsche did, how far is the truth susceptible of embodiment? In the words attributed to ILL. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine'. What are we to do? The narratives of premodern mythologies and postmodern physics do something that the narratives of modern science fail to do, namely, they accept that the creation of meaning in the world is a human and communal responsibility.
As Helen Watson 6 writes, among the Yolngu people of Australia's North-east Arnhemland, the cosmqs is acknowledged as one whose meanings have been created and have a history embedded in the lives an. This meaning and history is sometimes referreu to as 'song'.
The explanation that Ancestral Beings created meaning in this world in their actions of social living is a necessary and inevitable component of every aspect of ordinary Yolngu life. Yolngu people continue to sing the world into existence as an everyday activity. The majority of people in modern Western societies have abrogated their responsibility for 'singing the world into existence'.
Instead, they accept uncritically the world that Bacon, Descartes, Newton and others 'sang' into existence a world that presents itself id a machine of structures and systems, a world that is constructed as a story that obeys the rules of the positivist metanarrative of knowledge. At least pert of the answer to the question, 'What Ate we to do?
We need myths and metaphors that 'sing the earth into existence in the conditions of urban and late industrial itrestyles.
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