Shaped by Stories: The Ethical Power of Narratives

Chapter Four

49 Chapter Four Y Stories and the Ethics of Experience The Difference between Experiencing and Knowing Mere experience is not as educational as people usually think. We are fond of adages like “the school of hard knocks” and “experience is the best teacher,” but the truth is that raw experience unmediated by reflection , theories, and thought can teach us little. Commonplace wisdom frequently asserts that the objects, people, and activities we experience most intimately are the things we know best, but if this is so, then why do spouses, family members, and colleagues whom we see every day in intimate circumstances frequently misunderstand, misinterpret, and mislead each other in completely confabulating but oh-so-common ways? The most obvious feature of commonplace wisdom—the usual source of these honorific claims about the educational power of experience—is its failure to see that the world is stranger, more complex, and more subtle than commonplace observation can detect. Unless a second activity occurs that goes beyond experience—conceptualization—the meaning of experience can remain forever opaque. Does burning my hand on a hot stove teach me not to touch the next hot stove I encounter? Only if I am able to construct a concept that goes beyond my experience, only if I am able to make the inductive generalization “a hot stove will always burn my hand if 50 s h a p e d b y s t o r i e s I touch it—including the hot surfaces of stoves that I have not yet seen or experienced.” But notice something crucial here: the knowledge about hot stoves lies in the concept, in the inductive generalization, not in the experience itself. Getting burned happens to my hand, but the knowledge of what this experience means gets constructed in my brain, not in my hand. Plato seems to be the first thinker to have argued that knowledge is always knowledge of concepts, not of experience, but interestingly, Plato’s elevation of concepts over experience has received powerful reformulation and reinforcement from modern philosophers of science, some of whom have been arguing for at least the last forty years that many facts, as in “the facts of nature,” are created by theories, not by experience. This is because no one knows what counts as a fact until she or he has some theory that yields the criteria for ignoring some aspects of reality as non-facts and taking other aspects into account as facts. In the history of science, facts that existed at one point in time, like the existence of phlogiston or ether, can become non-facts at another point in time. The facts of phlogiston and ether were created by theories, not by nature. Human beings possess the ability to have knowledge of some things they have never experienced at all. Educated adults in the West all have some notion, for example, of such concepts or places as perfect justice, traveling at the speed of light, absolute zero, and Tokyo, even though none of us has experience of the first three, and only some of us have had experience of the fourth. Human beings can also have firsthand experience that doesn’t necessarily yield knowledge. I can experience a burning sensation on my back, for example, but have no knowledge of whether this experience is being created by a hot piece of metal or a cold piece of dry ice. I can experience the taste of spices and herbs in a salad dressing but have no knowledge of which spices and herbs are producing the distinctive taste. Experience does not always lead to knowledge. Think about the number of people you know who commit the same selfdestructive , foolish, or illogical mistakes over and over. If experience is such a great teacher, why don’t alcoholics and drug addicts, who experience firsthand the losses and pain that their conduct leads to, learn how to quit drinking or shooting up? The catalog of their experiences grows larger and larger, but they learn nothing except, perhaps, that experience Stories and the Ethics of Experience 51 itself does not yield the knowledge they need for self-control. It’s not that their experience isn’t intense enough or that it’s illusory. The problem is that they don’t successfully conceptualize any alternative to it. The Kind of Knowledge We Get from Stories So what does all of this talk about...