The Neurology of Narrative

The oral storytelling tradition of philosophy made evident by the dialogues of Socrates and parables of Plato goes underground with the writings of Aristotle. Our sense of what it means “to do” philosophy comes from Aristotle and his legacy, where the structure of storytelling is replaced by the construction of logical propositions, descriptions of abstractions, and assertions of general “truths.” And so what are we to make of the following?: “The more isolated I become, the more I come to like stories” (Aristotle, fragment 688). These are Aristotle’s words. They prompt us to think of Aristotle’s story–that he has a story, that he has an autobiographical “I” who has narrated his desire for narrative as a means of lifting him out of the loneliness of being the solitary thinker who contemplates himself into the philosophical mood. Stories, it would seem, offer Aristotle comfort, company, or the sense that others somehow are present by virtue of what stories tell, or by how they tell. They also prompt in him the reference to an “I,” an “I” who does not rise to the textual surface of his strictly philosophical writings, as in the Ethics or Poetics. What’s of particular interest to us about this fragment of Aristotle’s is the intertwining of the “I” and the stories, that they are in relation to one another, that one offers the other the chance at individual presence and mutual recognition. And we have come together in our own intertwining as authors to begin to work through what the relation of “I” to story is about, or perhaps more accurately, why that relation is.