In this blog, which I mix with the idea of Quaker journal (Quakerism encourages journaling), I spend a lot of time wondering what's up with the storytelling industry. Why do they have such crushing and unimaginative stories for us to live through?
Obviously, I am not the only one asking this question, and after looking into it for awhile, one realizes one is looking at a bucket full of writhing snakes, the "narratives" or "stories" or "scenarios" I'm talking about. I see a lot of them, and I see they're roiling i.e. not lying still.
A narrative is a mnemonic device in large degree. That doesn't equate to a record of what happened exactly. Maybe a precise factual account is a part of some story somewhere. Maybe not. We weave stories to hold facts in our head, or rather to hold points of view. The latter factors in the aesthetic and moral dimensions of concern to philosophers, if only to keep quiet about say in Wittgenstein's case.
Some stories are considered toxic and/or poisonous in some way. These stories intertwine with ideologies, sometimes in the form of myth. To those holding to these stories, they may be comforting and useful. Stories clash, snakes fight, or seem to. Anything going on this long has to be seen as a natural process, a characteristic of the species.
Have we only been fighting over narratives since the Tower of Babel? That's a funny question, given how few believe in that story. Do I mean it seriously? The question simply points back to our current state of confusion, post Tower. The confusion seems deep seated. But was there a time when we didn't have it? Is that a sensible question at all?
In the primordial or archetypal sense of mythic objects, or guiding lights, we're happy to admit we're not doing physics. A person interested in physics stories might find the archetypal realm a neighbor because of the continuity we impute, to electrons on the one hand, and to the psychological phenomena on the other.
I've been delving into the literature around the Wolfgang Pauli - Carl Jung collaboration, reminding myself of the tenuous relationships between physics and psychology. Carl wanted to hold on to his credentials as a man of science, goes the narrative, and his work on "synchronicity" as a concept was an attempt to contribute to the literature of causality. He was avoiding being labeled a theosophist for example. He didn't want to be a Rudolph Steiner.
Another contributor oft referred to in this context is Isaac Newton, one of the greatest of the physicists. He did not abandon his psychological fascinations either. The publishing industry and those who sort narratives by genre, probably had more to do with making physics and psychology go their separate ways, than the principal authors, but they never fully succeeded with their enforcement, and the two are always coming together here and there, especially in California.
Told a different way: alchemy, astrology and religion, rebranded as psychology and thereby remained rooted enough in the sciences to continue making alliances with other sciences.
