Abstract
This chapter describes narrative as an aesthetic form of cognition well suited for bridging the differences between Type 1 and Type 2 moral cognitions. It is argued that there are two ways to construct narratives: one by means of Type 1 processes and the other by means of Type 2 processes. Type 1 narratives are the most critical because they provide not merely representations of the flow of human experience, but the possibility of simulating the flow of human experience in human consciousness. This simulation ability creates opportunities for experimenting with different possible moral scenarios and testing them by experiencing the aesthetic judgments those scenarios evoke.
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Notes
- 1.
R. A. Mar, K. Oatley, M. Djikic, and J. Mullin (2011) ‘Emotion and Narrative Fiction: Interactive Influences Before, During, and After Reading’, Cognition and Emotion, 25, 818–33. Much of this research has been in regard to medical training. See S. L. Arntfield, K. Slesar, J. Dickson, and R. Charon (2013) ‘Narrative Medicine as a Means of Training Medical Students toward Residency Requirements’, Patient Education and Counseling, 91, 280–6.
- 2.
D. Herman (2003) ‘Stories as a Tool for Thinking’, in D. Herman (ed.) Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 163–92. Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue offers not only an impractical romanticization of classical Aristotelean and Thomistic communitarian approaches, but a commitment to the rational structures and realism underlying these approaches. See, for example, pages 122 and 128–9 in A. C. MacIntyre (2007) After Virtue, 3rd edn (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press).
- 3.
R. Barthes (1989) The Semiotic Challenge (New York: Hill and Wang), 89.
- 4.
D. P. McAdams (2006) ‘The Problem of Narrative Coherence’, Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 19, 109–25.
- 5.
Examples are common, but one can look at W. Labov and J. Waletzky (1997) ‘Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience’, Journal of Narrative and Life History, 7, 3–38.
- 6.
J. Truby (2007) The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller (New York: Faber & Faber, Inc.).
- 7.
P. Ricoeur (1984) Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, trans. by K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer (Chicago: IL: The University of Chicago Press), 52.
- 8.
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 43–87.
- 9.
P. Ricoeur (2003) The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language (New York: Routledge), 55.
- 10.
Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 64–70.
- 11.
J. Bruner (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 11–13.
- 12.
J. Bruner (2004) ‘Life as Narrative’, Social Research, 71, 694.
- 13.
Bruner, Actual Minds, 15–16.
- 14.
Bruner, ‘Life as Narrative’, 701 and 708.
- 15.
W. R. Fisher (1987) Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina), 47; and W. R. Fisher (1978) ‘Toward a Logic of Good Reasons’, The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 64, 378.
- 16.
W. R. Fisher (1984) ‘Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument’, Communication Monographs, 51, 13.
- 17.
Fisher, ‘Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm’, 14.
- 18.
Fisher, ‘Toward a Logic of Good Reasons’, 377.
- 19.
Fisher, ‘Toward a Logic of Good Reasons’, 377.
- 20.
M. Nussbaum (1989) ‘Narrative Emotions: Beckett’s Genealogy of Love’, in S. Hauerwas and L. G. Jones (eds) Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company), 221.
- 21.
Nussbaum, ‘Narrative Emotions’, 221.
- 22.
Nussbaum, ‘Narrative Emotions’, 222.
- 23.
M. C. Nussbaum (1990) Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press), 26.
- 24.
Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 26–7.
- 25.
Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 37.
- 26.
Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 37.
- 27.
M. C. Nussbaum (1995) Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press), xvi. Nussbaum deals with the work of Henry James in considerable detail as an exemplar of the importance of literature for thinking about ethical questions, but her treatment of James generally demonstrates the same kind of Type 2 processing as found in most other literary criticism, which often produces tortuous expositions aimed at identifying underlying symbols and conceptualizations. For example, in the midst of an extended explication of passages out of James’s The Ambassadors, Nussbaum remarks that the character Mrs. Newsome is ‘a brilliantly comic rendering of some of the deepest and most appealing features of Kantian morality’ (Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 27). It is not clear, however, that James took as his task the presentation of such structural and symbolic representations. Henry James appears to have held the same priority of perceptions and feelings over conceptualization that his brother William held to in his later works (see K. Boudreau (2010) Henry James’ Narrative Technique: Consciousness, Perception, and Cognition (New York: Palgrave MacMillan), 1–6). T. S. Eliot noted this in an often misinterpreted essay about the work of Henry James, noting that ‘James’s critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas’ and ‘James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea’ (T. S. Eliot (1918) ‘In Memory of Henry James’, The Egoist, 5, 2. Retrieved from http://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1308746718915629.pdf, date accessed 22 July 2015).
- 28.
T. Chambers (1999) The Fiction of Bioethics: Cases as Literary Texts (New York: Routledge), 3.
- 29.
M. Davis (1999). Ethics and the University (New York: Routledge), 46.
- 30.
Chambers, The Fiction of Bioethics, 3.
- 31.
Chambers, The Fiction of Bioethics, 7.
- 32.
Chambers, The Fiction of Bioethics, 47.
- 33.
See, for example, S. Hauerwas and D. Burrell (1989) ‘From System to Story: An Alternative Pattern for Rationality in Ethics’, in S. Hauerwas and D. Burrell (eds) Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company) which, while containing some evocative comments about the role of ‘skills of perception’ in moral deliberation (p. 169), refers to narrative as a necessary foundational cognitive category (pp. 168 and 177), and emphasizes the importance of analyzing stories to determine their function (p. 170) and developing explicit criteria for authoritative stories (p. 190).
- 34.
T. F. Brady, T. Konkle, and G. A. Alvarez (2011) ‘A Review of Visual Memory Capacity: Beyond Individual Items and Toward Structured Representations’, Journal of Vision, 11, 1–34. Often overlooked from a Western perspective are the many examples of nonlinear narratives in human literature. See, for example, D. Penault (1992) Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights (Leiden: E. J. Brill).
- 35.
M. S. Gazzaniga (2012) Who’s in Charge: Freewill and the Science of the Brain (New York: Ecco), 83.
- 36.
W. James (1909) A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy (New York: Longmans, Green, & Co.), 272.
- 37.
James, Pluralistic Universe, 283–84.
- 38.
James, Pluralistic Universe, 254.
- 39.
James, Pluralistic Universe, 271–2.
- 40.
James, Pluralistic Universe, 288–9.
- 41.
James, Pluralistic Universe, 284–5.
- 42.
W. James (1890) Principles of Psychology, Vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt & Company), 266–8.
- 43.
James, Principles of Psychology, 260–8.
- 44.
James, Pluralistic Universe, 250–1.
- 45.
A. Damasio (2010) Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon Books), 102.
- 46.
K. Oatley (1999) ‘Why Fiction May Be Twice as True as Fact: Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Simulation’, Review of General Psychology, 3, 102–3; and R. A. Mar, K. Oatley, M. Djikic, and J. Mullin (2011) ‘Emotion and Narrative Fiction: Interactive Influences Before, During, and After Reading’, Cognition and Emotion, 25, 818–33. This is similar to the aesthetic point made in I. A. Richards’s often overlooked literary theory. See I. A. Richards (1925) Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, Inc.). The notion of mental simulation has been common in discussions of philosophy of mind and folk psychology, but those discussions have rarely included references to literature and narrative. See I. Ravenscroft (2009) ‘Is Folk Psychology a Theory?’, in J. Symons, S. Robins, and P. Calvo (eds) The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Psychology (New York: Routledge), 140–2.
- 47.
Oatley, ‘Why Fiction is Twice as True as Fact’, 101.
- 48.
There are obvious similarities of this approach with reader-response criticism, particularly in reader-response’s articulation of reading as a subjective and potentially unique experience. However, although reader-response theory begins with attention to the reader’s reaction to a narrative, this reaction is believed to be understood best by analysis and conceptualization, which effectively compromises the Type 1 narrative quality of texts. See L. Tyson (2006) Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide, 2nd edn (New York: Routledge), 169–86, for a description of this emphasis.
- 49.
J. Hakemulder (2000) The Moral Laboratory: Experiments Examining the Effects of Reading Literature on Social Perception and Moral Self-Concept (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.) 150.
- 50.
R. M. Miller, F. A. Cushman, and I. A. Hannikainen (2014) ‘Bad Actions or Bad Outcomes? Differentiating Affective Contributions to the Moral Condemnation of Harm’, Emotion, 14, 573–87.
- 51.
D. Westen (2007) The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation (New York: Public Affairs), 3–12. Unfortunately, Westen too quickly buys into the structural, Type 2 narrative approach such as that advocated by George Lakoff, and only discusses the formal, mechanical construction of narratives.
- 52.
D. Westen, P. S. Blagov, K. Harenski, et al. (2006) ‘Neural Bases of Motivated Reasoning: An fMRI Study of Emotional Constraints on Partisan Political Judgment in the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election’, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 1947–58.
- 53.
G. Lackoff (2008) The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st-Century Politics with an 18th-Century Brain (New York: Viking), 21–36.
- 54.
A. Lippman-Hand and F. C. Fraser (1979) ‘Genetic Counseling: Parents’ Responses to Uncertainty’, Birth Defects: Original Article Series, 15, 330–34.
- 55.
Lippman-Hand, ‘Genetic Counseling’, 333–5.
- 56.
Lippman-Hand, ‘Genetic Counseling’, 333–6.
- 57.
Alasdair MacIntyre notes the importance of imagination for thinking in the terms of a rival moral tradition as if it were one’s own, although his characterization of deliberation between moral traditions as centering on differences ‘in claims to truth and to rational justification’, is a much less aesthetic notion of imagination than I have in mind. See MacIntyre, After Virtue, xii–xiii.
- 58.
P. Ricoeur (1970) Freud & Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. by D. Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 28–35.
- 59.
See, for example, A. Scott-Baumann (2009) Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion (London: Continuum), which has an insightful concluding chapter.
- 60.
W. M. O’Barr (2008) ‘Children and Advertising’, Advertising & Society Review, 9, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/advertising_and_society_review/v009/9.4.o-barr01.html, date accessed 7 July 2015.
- 61.
G. Lakoff (11 September 2006) ‘Five Years after 9/11: Drop the War Metaphor’, Huffington Post, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/five-years-after-911-drop_b_29181.html, date accessed 22 July 2015.
- 62.
For a helpful overview of these issues, see D. C. Gompert, H. Binnendijk, and B. Lin (25 December 2014) ‘The Iraq War: Bush’s Biggest Blunder’, http://www.newsweek.com/iraq-war-bushs-biggest-blunder-294411, date accessed 5 July 2015.
- 63.
See, for example, Dick Cheney’s comments, Z. J. Miller (25 June 2014) ‘Dick Cheney Says Iraq War Was “the Right Thing”’, Time, http://time.com/2919765/dick-cheney-iraq-obama/, date accessed 15 July 2015; and Condoleezza Rice’s comments, ‘Despite Costs, Outcome in Iraq Has Been Worth it Says Condoleezza Rice’ (1 February 2010), https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/despite-costs-outcome-iraq-has-been-worth-it-says-condoleezza-rice, date accessed 10 July 2015.
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Tillman, J.J. (2016). Narrative and Moral Deliberation. In: An Integrative Model of Moral Deliberation. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49022-3_7
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