What narrative competence is for

R Charon - The American journal of bioethics, 2001 - Taylor & Francis
The American journal of bioethics, 2001Taylor & Francis
At another point Socrates demonstrates the consequences of the young politician Polus's
conventional arguments by offering him a vision of Athens's walls breached by enemies, its
fieet burning in the harbor—a vision Polus, given his sincere desire to serve the state,
cannot bring himself to inhabit. If he denounces the narrative Socrates reveals to him, he
must also denounce the reasoning that created it, abandon his earlier position, and open
himself to the possibility of a more profound engagement in the ethics of Athenian politics …
At another point Socrates demonstrates the consequences of the young politician Polus’s conventional arguments by offering him a vision of Athens’s walls breached by enemies, its fieet burning in the harbor—a vision Polus, given his sincere desire to serve the state, cannot bring himself to inhabit. If he denounces the narrative Socrates reveals to him, he must also denounce the reasoning that created it, abandon his earlier position, and open himself to the possibility of a more profound engagement in the ethics of Athenian politics. The ethical wisdom Socrates seeks here and in other dialogues depends upon his interlocutor’s willingness to join him in imaginatively experiencing the narrative realities of their own arguments and then returning to the present moment to consider in a more critical, more analytical way the knowledge they gain from the experience. Depending upon the particular narrative they enter, they may understand public and private lives in more complex ways, may reject all or some of what the narrative offers, may come to see alternatives to day-to-day realities, or may experience an utter transformation of the self. In this process, ethical discourse balances the potential loss of self in the narrative experience with the stabilizing infiuence of critical conventions and analytical methodologies and, to return to the specific concerns of bioethics, precisely replicates the practice of empathic, compassionate medicine and effective bioethical deliberation.
At the end of the Gorgias, Socrates appears to have won all the arguments and to have humiliated and demolished his foes, but in fact he and all of Athens have lost. Because his interlocutors could not move beyond the constraints of their own argumentative positions, Socrates stands alone, without friends, without a shared understanding of how a life might be lived in this place at this time. Thus, the greatest danger in Socrates’ world (and in our own) lies in the failure of the community to engage the dialogue, for it is in the dialogue, and there alone, that we can experience the necessarily contrapuntal rhythm of asking and answering, speaking and listening, feeling and thinking that lies at the center of the work we do; not the either/or but the and/also of compassionate bioethical deliberation and decision making. When we experience this kind of dialogue within our own community, we will also experience it at the bedside. If the Fiction of Bioethics accomplishes nothing more than opening us to this one possibility, it will have done us all a great service. n
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