Making the Things of the World: Narrative Construction and the Project of Bioethics

There is an interesting but ugly building on the university campus where I was an undergraduate. It is the School of Architecture's Building, and it was made in the fervor of a time of Truth. So it both tells, and is, the "story" of architecture: performing and reproducing the method of construction in the visible world. First off, it is a stark place, all method and no tale: all the pipes are exposed and the bearing beams, and the chalk marks of the carpenters, and the measures of the unframed windows. One is intended to see the bones of the method and the work of making the things of the world. It is supposed to force us to "see" the work that shapes our conception of a Building, to see the"rhetorical and contingent nature" of the very thing that we are doing (Chambers 2001). But only because we know the cultural story called "buildings-on-campus" is it still possible to find our way around the thing—find the professor's offices, the bathrooms, the food place. One can get out the door. All of this is revealed by method. The trouble, however, is that the need for "buildingness," for ordinary uses and ordinary meanings, persists over and against the intricate method and display of architectural scholarship.

It turns out that all of scholarship—even narrative ethics, the philosophy of the work of the textual story of ethics—is rather like that building. . We live by stories, claim the narrative ethicists, and see the world as a series of tales needing resolutions; and in some instantly recognizable way this is true. It is the case that we are told of a outside world constructed first by narratives, long before we live in it as moral actors. In this way, one knows of plotted knowledge, of retribution and revenge, and the sensory world is the reawakening of one's knowledge of these tales. (Consider that fairy tales are important long before one needs to be rescued by the Prince; also consider the idea of pre-knowledge in the Platonic sense, in which all beings are born into knowledge that only has been forgotten. Each event then recalls a story we have within us.)

Tod Chambers is one of the most gifted practitioners of the art and the task of what we must do once we accept this premise of the centrality of the need for the reawakened story. His argument is simple—we only perform the moral gesture of bioethics consultation by way of cases, and cases are a kind of story of the tangible, embodied world, yet told in an abbreviated form, artificially displayed. Hence to construct a "building" (an applied ethics we use) we need to have a method derived largely from the discipline that studies narrative. The tools we use to build, and so need to teach, are not analytic philosophy, the search for revelant principles, or the normative duties, but are instead things like "reportability," "closure," "characters," "chronotope," and "gender" (Chambers 1999). By paying attention to how a story works on us, we see more clearly where we are in the story, and this ultimately shows us something like the way to the end of the story—the door to the outside world, the resolution of the work of the case.

I have been thinking both about why this idea makes perfect sense and about what is missing, and this has led me to think about Descartes and how philsosphy is organized around and against him. It is Descartes, after all—not a postmodernist theorist—who reminds us about

The ability to judge correctly, and to distinguish the true from the false—which is really what is meant by good sense or reason—is the same by innate nature in all men; and . . . differences of opinion are...