Month: April 2026

The physics and metaphysics of Aristotle might seem like the last place to look to enhance our understanding of stories, but there are several good reasons to do so. The first is simply that he, along with Plato, represents the foundation of the Western intellectual tradition and is therefore the primary source of our attempts to understand anything. His influence on our thinking is still profound.

The second reason is that Aristotle’s philosophy is what is sometimes called ‘realist’ in that he believed that the reality we perceive is reality as it is. By contrast, the dominant philosophy of our time is what we can call scepticism, whereby we assume that reality is not what we perceive and never can be. The schismatic nature of our thinking follows from this. It is also why our default position is that stories are just mental constructs with no necessary relation to “the real world”.

What we can obtain from viewing stories through the prism of Aristotle’s philosophy is more context about where stories fit in the grander scheme of things. Aristotle was correct that they belong to “nature”. But, more specifically, stories are a subset of nature. To understand that, we need to know more about what Aristotle meant by the term “nature”. Fortunately, this is quite straightforward because it maps to a distinction between what he called first and second philosophy. First philosophy later earned the title metaphysics, while second philosophy was physics. However, the Greek word for “physics” is better translated into modern English as “nature”. Therefore, stories belong to the category of second philosophy.

Second philosophy is concerned with how things in nature change and grow. It is about transformation, while first philosophy is about things that are eternal and do not change. Another way to say the same thing is that first philosophy is about being and second philosophy is about becoming.

Thus, when Aristotle says that a story should imitate nature, he is saying that a story should accurately represent the manner in which things change and transform in the real world. But in order to know how something has changed, we must first know what it is. Therefore, we need both perspectives. We need metaphysics to determine the identity of a thing in the first place and natural philosophy to figure out how it changes.

In the modern world, we study the nature of change and transformation via all the various sciences. Physics is concerned with change in position, biology with changes resulting from life processes, economics and sociology with changes resulting from social considerations, and so on. Most of these disciplines were already presupposed in Aristotle’s work on second philosophy, which is why he can be said to be the father of modern science. However, as we have already alluded to, Aristotle took a more holistic approach in comparison to modern science. He was concerned with the broader principles of transformation and change.

Although we don’t need to get into the details, there is one of these principles that is directly relevant to our understanding of stories and which Joseph Campbell discovered by coming at the problem from a completely different perspective more than two millennia later. Aristotle found that transformation in nature is always grounded in what he called “privation”. Every change begins with the absence of the state that the changes denote. This is logically a tautology, but its explanatory power becomes clear when you realise that there are many different kinds of privation, each related to the kind of thing that is going to change. A rock does not transform in the same way that a human does.

To take an example, we could say a child lacks biological maturity. The transformation of puberty is born out of that privation. Similarly, a caterpillar has not yet become a butterfly. It lacks that mature state. The transformation is born out of privation but it also implies a sacrifice on the part of the thing undergoing the change. A butterfly never goes back to being a caterpillar. An adult never returns to childhood. Even a change of physical location requires a sacrifice. In order to be here, I cannot be there. This gives us two principles of every transformation: we gain what was previously denied us, but we lose what we previously had.

These general principles of change and becoming hold in all of nature. They also apply to stories, which are a subset of natural transformations. In fact, stories very often centre around the major transformations that we go through in life. For example, Joseph Campbell realised was that many popular folk stories from around the world are about the transformation of puberty. They don’t literally describe the process, but they convey it in metaphorical terms.

Thus, what Josephy Campbell termed the “call to adventure” is the other side of the coin to what Aristotle called “privation”. Every transformation in nature has these properties. The difference lies in the kind of thing that is being transformed. Human beings are not the same as amoeba. The transformations we go through are far more varied.

And that is ultimately what a story is. A story is always about the transformation that a human being is going through. As far as I’m aware, there are no stories about amoebas and I’m quite sure that, if there were, they wouldn’t be very popular. Stories are about human transformation and they encompass the full range of identity that a human can have, including physical, biological, psychological, social, economic, political, spiritual, etc.

Unlike modern science, which divides each of these transformations into different categories and studies them separately, a story is holistic. A biological transformation is never just biological because a human being is not merely biological. We don’t experience the world in clearly demarcated categories. We experience it with our whole being and that means a biological transformation is never just that, in the same way that an economic or political transformation is never just that. The schismatic nature of our modern science denies these holistic realities, and that is why stories end up being closer to Aristotle’s natural philosophy than modern science.

As Aristotle said, stories must imitate nature, which means that stories must convey the transformation of the subject. That is true for the everyday kinds of stories we tell all the way up to the great stories of any culture. They are all about transformation and they are all based in some privation that is affecting the hero. Prince Hamlet is deprived of his father via murder and then his rightful place on the throne via political subterfuge. Romeo and Juliet are deprived of the possibility of consummating their love in marriage due to the enmity between their families. Iago is deprived of a promotion to lieutenant by Othello. He retaliates by depriving Othello of his chance of a happy marriage. Macbeth is deprived of the possibility of attaining the throne via lawful means.

Stories are the subset of all “natural” transformations that feature human beings. More specifically, as Joseph Campbell discovered, stories are always about the transformation of a specific hero. Great works of art can feature multiple characters, but each of them is the hero of their own journey, meaning each is going through their own transformation.

Putting it together, we get the following definition:-

A story describes the process by which the hero’s identity is transformed.

That may sound simple, but remember that Aristotle wrote two entire books discussing the meaning of identity (metaphysics/first philosophy) and transformation (nature/second philosophy). Fortunately, we don’t need to get tangled up in millennia-old questions of philosophy. Instead, we can approach the subject the other way around and ask the question, ‘What do stories have to tell us about identity and transformation?’ We’ll do that next week.

The definition of a story that pretty much everybody seems to agree on is that it is a collection of events combined together in some form. Thus, if we want to get to the essence of what a story is, we first need to ask the question: what is an event?

The meaning of event in general language is similar to occurrence, occasion, or happening. Most people would agree that an event is discrete, meaning that it must have a clearly defined start and end point. That’s certainly how we organise things when we put on an event. A wedding ceremony, a party, a concert, the voting in an election – these are all events, and they typically have well-defined beginnings and ends.

Not everything in the world is an event. As a first approximation, we can say that anything continuous is not an event. This follows logically from our definition of events as discrete. Waves crashing on a beach, clouds floating across the sky, the motion of the heavenly bodies – these are not events because they have no start or end point.

A tree falling in the forest would seem to be an event, since there is a start and an end time. But everybody knows the famous thought experiment about trees falling in a forest. If nobody perceives the event, did it really happen?

Th notion of an observer to an event sits at the heart of modern physics. The theory of relativity and quantum mechanics explicitly incorporate the observer or potential observer into the model. In fact, in some versions of quantum mechanics, reality is almost entirely predicated on the observer. An event does not exist until some observer is there to observe it.

There’s a more straightforward example of how an observer can create an event. The sun’s journey across the sky is a function of the earth’s rotation. Therefore, it is a continuous process and not an event. However, a person may decide to go and watch the sunset. The act of setting aside time to do that creates an event because the person’s arrival at the location is the start time and the disappearance of the sun beyond the horizon is the end point.

Thus, it’s possible to turn a continuous process into an event by simply deciding in our minds to do so. You could sit on the beach watching the waves and think to yourself, “The event starts now.” Later, you decide, “The event stops now.” Is this any less of an event than one that happens “naturally”? Is this any less of an “experiment” than one which aims to measure things that happened between the start and finish?

Note that this approach contrasts with the kind of practice that comes from Eastern philosophical and religious traditions, which are about attuning yourself to the continuous aspects of existence. “Emptying your mind” could then be seen as not imposing start and end points on things. You don’t try to create discrete events, you “go with the flow”. Once again, the question of what is discrete or continuous seems to rely on the observer.

For now, let’s set aside questions of observers and how events get created and just define an event as a “discrete occasion that has a beginning, middle, and an end”. We contrast this against the continuous aspects of existence.

Now that we know what an event is, we are a ready to understand how a story can be a “collection of events”. But think about it. Doesn’t a story have a beginning, middle, and end? And isn’t that the exact definition of an event?

The answer is yes. Thus, if we go all the way back to Aristotle in Poetics, we find this definition of a story:

“Now, according to our definition, Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, whole…A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end.”

A story is discrete like an event, and it has a beginning, middle, and end like an event, but a story has a different form which confers on the events that constitute it qualitatively different properties. Thus, per Aristotle, the event which begins a story:

“…is that which does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be.”

This is quite an extraordinary sentence, so let’s say it again. The event that begins a story does not “follow anything by causal necessity”. Remember that all of modern science is concerned with demonstrating causal necessity. Aristotle knew perfectly well what that meant, but he is here claiming that a story begins with something that is not a causal necessity. A story begins with something “new”. That is our first approximation for knowing when a story has started.

In relation to how a story ends, Aristotle says it is terminated by an event:

“…which itself naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it.”

The final event follows naturally from the first but triggers no subsequent causality. Aristotle is not saying that the end of a story does not have any effects afterwards, just that the final event terminates the internal logic and structure of the story. Whatever new state of being began with the event that started the story has now resolved itself one way or another. Any events which follow cannot be part of the story.

Thus, we can sum up our first approximation of the definition of a story as a chain of events that brings something new into the world. The story begins with the arrival of the new complex whole and describes the manner in which it comes to fulfilment.

A story is therefore its own discrete chain of causality, but not in the material sense of modern science. Aristotle had a much wider definition in accordance with his understanding of “physics” as being about “nature”. Modern physics is concerned with measurement, experiment, and material causality. In order to achieve that, it abstracts events and objects down into simple points. Aristotle was talking about “nature”, and that means he was trying to account for growth, change, and motion in relation to natural wholes, not to individual particles or objects that behave like them. That’s why his version of an event is larger and more complex than modern physics and that is why it is not amenable to measurement.

It’s also why there is almost no distinction between Aristotle’s understanding of physics and of stories. For Aristotle, art was good art to the extent that it exactly imitated life and therefore presented causality as we find it in nature. More than two millennia later, the Romantic movement of the 19th century would rediscover the same idea, and it did so largely in opposition to modern physics.

Thus, Aristotle sees no important distinction between a fictional story and a story about the real world:-

“It is, moreover, evident from what has been said, that it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen – what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity. The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose. The word of Herodotus might be put into verse, and it would still be a species of history, with meter no less than without it. ”

Whether a story is about real events or fictional ones, it has the same properties, i.e. the same relations hold between the events which constitute the story. Thus, “nature” is full of stories since stories are about the events in nature which bring some new thing into existence. (Note that I am using “thing” here in order to be deliberately vague. Things can include events, objects, properties etc. The new “thing” can also be the destruction of an existing thing).

It’s for this reason that we find a fact which is hard for us even to imagine in the modern West because of the split between physics and art that began with the scientific revolution. Because stories are natural, our main point of reference in Aristotle is not his work on Poetics but on Physics (physik just meant “nature” in Greek). For Aristotle, stories and physics are both concerned with growth and transformation, properties which deliberately are left out of modern physics.

That’s why our next port of call as we continue to build our understanding of what a story is almost the last place anybody would look for it these days, namely, one of the founding texts of Western science – Aristotle’s Physics. We’ll see what it has to teach us next week.

It occurred to me after last week’s post that it is worth spending a little bit more time on the etymology of the words we are using since the word “story” has its own, ummm, story that helps to shed some light on the confusing number of meanings that are at play around the concept. Understanding these broader meanings in advance will help to clarify the specific meaning that I will be using in this series.

Let’s start by talking about the Old English word for “story”, which was “tale”. It’s related to the word “tell”, and it originally had a connotation of “giving an account” or “recounting”. In other words, the default meaning was about things that actually happened in the real world. We can see a similar semantic alignment in the modern German “Geschichte” (story), which is related to “geschehen”, meaning “to happen”.

The important point to note here is that the default meaning of the word was tailored to the everyday kinds of stories we tell each other. It’s something that is so basic and familiar that we rarely think about it, but we are always telling stories, and those stories are assumed to be based in reality. We may misremember the details. We may fabricate things to sex it up a bit. We may leave out the bits that make us look bad or emphasise those that make us look good. Nevertheless, the default assumption in an everyday kind of story is that we are “telling the truth”.

This can be contrasted with another kind of story, which is one that is deliberately made up in order to entertain or educate. It seems that most languages have a specific word that denotes a made-up story alongside a role for the person who does the making up. In Old English, a professional storyteller was called a “scop”, and the story they told was called a “spell”. “Spell” was related to “speech”, since stories were always delivered orally in a culture that was almost entirely illiterate.

The word “scop” had a broader meaning of “create or make”. You could scop a story. You could scop a table or a pair of trousers. Storytelling was a trade like any other. This broader meaning of creating something is also present in Aristotle’s Poetics. The actual word in Greek was “poiesis”, which also meant to make or construct. Since Aristotle was writing about Greek tragedy, and since Greek tragedy was created by professionals who specialised in the role, it made sense for him to use poiesis rather than a term that denoted everyday storytelling. He was concerned with identifying the criteria that could be used to judge the quality of a finished work of art just like you might judge the quality of a bottle of wine or a painting.

Thus, both Old English and ancient Greek maintained a distinction between “everyday story told by people recounting events that happened” and “story made up by a skilled practitioner for education or entertainment”. It was much the same distinction we have now with the “entertainment industry”. However, the trade of storyteller also included something of what we would nowadays think of as journalism, i.e. stories about current events. Professional storytellers were also given licence to make sense of events rather than simply recount them. That’s why the greatest storytellers have always been seen as religious or mystical figures capable of capturing fundamental truths of existence.

None of this had anything to do with the word “story” which was not present in Old English and whose original meaning in ancient Greek had nothing to do with “tales” or “mythos” or any other word that denotes a narrative. Nevertheless, there was a good reason why the Greek word “historia” eventually came to be associated with “stories”.

Because the distinction between factual and fictional stories is always getting blurred in everyday life (just look at the amount of nonsense on the internet for an example), trying to get to the truth through stories can be problematic. Most of the great myths that we know had some basis in reality, but they normally come with countless embellishments of questionable veracity. Over time, stories tend to lose their fidelity to the original event.

Enter the role of the “historian”. Herodotus is usually credited with being the father of history, and one of the reasons was because he used the actual word “historia” to refer to a book he wrote. This book is still translated into English as “The Histories”, but this is somewhat misleading because that is not the original meaning of the word. “Historia” could get translated into modern English as “enquiry”, although its meaning is even wider than what we would think of by that word. For the Greeks, “historia” could refer to an empirical investigation of the kind we now think of science, but it could also denote an intellectual or philosophical rumination. A classic example is Aristotle’s “Historia Animalium”, meaning “Enquiry into Animals”, the first text of what we would now call “zoology”.

Herodotus was using the word “historia” because he was conducting an enquiry into various beliefs that were floating around in the different communities of the time. In actual fact, his work was probably the earliest form of what we would now call “anthropology”. He travelled around a lot, collecting folk stories from various communities, getting different perspectives on wars and other major events, etc. He then collated these enquiries into a book which, while it does contain a great many stories, also has a lot of reflections, anecdotes, and titbits. It was a serious work but was also designed to be entertaining.

The use of “historia” by Herodotus, Aristotle and other Greek thinkers makes clear that they all understood the word to mean “enquiry”. However, sometime between the golden age of the Greeks and the rise of Rome, the word’s meaning changed so that in the Latin of the time of Caesar it had come to denote the exact same semantic meanings present in old English “tale” or Greek “mythos”. That is, it was primarily a narrative of events.

Any last remembrance of “historia” as enquiry disappeared as the Roman Empire slid into the dark ages, and the whole idea of a professional intellectual was lost. The meaning of “historia” as “story” lived on in the Romance languages and came into English via the Norman invasion. Because of the prestige that the French language enjoyed for some time afterwards, “story” elbowed “tale” out of the way to take top spot among the myriad of words that all mean something like “narrative of events”.

That’s the way it remained for several hundred years, but there is one final twist in the tale. Beginning around the time of the Renaissance, Western culture was once again able to create for itself an intellectual class that had the time and space to make enquiries. Since “historia” also existed in shortened form as “storia”, and since this distinction was also present in English, it makes some kind of sense that “history” came to refer to the enquiries of an intellectual called a “historian”, while “story” retained its meaning of a “narrative of events” used primarily by everyday people. Meanwhile, the role of those who created stories for education and entertainment fell to “artists”, “authors”, etc. Thus, we have ended up with the same basic set of meanings that existed in the Greece of more than two millennia ago.

So, that is the story about how the word “story” came to mean “story”. But we still haven’t answered the question: what is a “story”? The beginnings of an answer may be found in the tale we have just told.

The word “story” has been on one hell of a journey. It began life during the epoch-making period where the ancient Greek civilisation flourished, enjoying the company of the great thinkers who founded modern philosophy and science. It went on holiday during the Roman Empire, spreading wherever the Latin tongue found a home. It eked out a living with the European peasantry of the Dark Ages, hitched a ride on a French ship to the isle which would eventually create a global empire, and now enjoys a status as probably one of the best-known words in the world since it denotes a universal concept in a language that has become all but universal. Along the way, “story” has undergone a number of changes including the way it is spoken and spelt and the meaning it denotes. Therein lies the heart of any true story. We’ll explore that more next week.

Most people have probably heard the one about how Eskimos have a heap of different words that all refer to snow. This is meant to prove that language adapts to reflect the needs of the speakers. If you live in the subarctic, you get to know snow pretty well, and you need to talk about it a lot.

If that’s true, what can we surmise from the fact that the English language has about the same number of words that mean “story” as the Eskimos have for “snow”? Here’s a list:-

Story, fable, legend, myth, tale, fairy tale, folktale, saga, epic, memoir, history, parable, biography, autobiography, narrative, account, anecdote, yarn, spiel, novel, novella, short story, plot, parable, apologue, chronicle, drama, tragedy, and romance.

Then there’s a bunch of words that are as good as stories:-

Report, record, deposition, recitation, testament, tip, gossip, tidbit, message, rumour, hearsay, scuttlebutt, and scoop.

A big part of the reason why we have so many damned words that all mean basically the same thing is because modern English has three main sources of linguistic inheritance: ancient Greek, Latin, and old English-Germanic. The majority of the words listed above come from Latin and Greek. “Saga” is the odd one out, as it came from Norse and must have arrived in England with the Vikings. Although, note that “saga” simply means “story”. So, we’ve inherited the words for “story” from four different languages.

As is usual in modern English, the words that actually come down from old English or Germanic have a common, “lower-class” connotation because the intellectual language for most of modern European history was Latin. Therefore, the English words for “story” never got used in the serious business of academic research. But even the everyday word “story” is itself derived from the Latin “historia”.

Just as we have inherited this profusion of words that all relate to some kind of story, we also have a number of different scholarly disciplines which study them. Among these are mythology (myth, saga, epic), literature (novel, novella, drama, tragedy, romance), theology (legend, biography), literary criticism, history, philology, and even journalism and social science. That is before we get into the more specific frameworks of understanding which have seen fit to apply themselves to stories such as the Marxist, psychoanalytic, or postmodernist schools of interpretation.

What we need to do in this series of posts is try and forget all of this noise and get down to the underlying structure that unifies all of these nominally different concepts.

In his work Poetics, Aristotle did not set out to define the nature of stories. He was actually concerned with Greek tragedy. He defined six categories of analysis, but it’s the first two that we still use. One is “plot” and the other is “character”. Plot relates to the events that occur in the story, and character relates to people in the story and how their personality and agency shape it. Of these two, Aristotle believed plot was the most important, and his influence is still reflected in modern dictionary definitions which emphasise that stories are about the “events” that occur.

Joseph Campbell’s big innovation was to focus on character instead (i.e., the hero). However, his work has not seeped through into modern definitions of stories, presumably because he was studying something that we think is unrelated: myths.

Ancient Greek tragedy was performed on a stage and had music and other accompaniments. Myths are quasi-mystical things told around the campfires of hunter-gatherer tribes. Because of the superficial differences in the way the story was delivered, we tell ourselves that they are two different objects. In fact, the underlying structure of both is the same. It is only once we understand that structure that we can truly appreciate what really is different between the stories of hunter-gatherer tribes and ancient Greek tragedy. This is one of the main reasons to bother with what would otherwise be nothing more than semantic nitpicking.

Still, even semantic nitpicking sometimes turns up something important. Consider this. The actual word that Aristotle used in Poetics was “mythos”. That gets translated into modern English as “plot”. But, in fact, its meaning in ancient Greek was simply “story”. What Aristotle was really saying was that the story was the most important part of Greek tragedy.

Now, “mythos” appears in modern English as “myth”, and “myth” refers to just one specific kind of story. A myth is a story that usually features supernatural beings and is assumed to be foundational to the culture out of which it arises. This perspective would never have occurred to Aristotle or the Greeks. In fact, it arose out of a very specific intellectual milieu in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a heady mix of anthropology, linguistics, comparative history, and psychoanalysis.

Scholars and missionaries had gone off collecting stories from the various peoples of the world, including tribal societies. Meanwhile, historians and linguists had made great breakthroughs in the understanding of stories told by ancient civilisations. In addition to all this, there were developments in biblical interpretation, which moved away from treating the Bible as the source of literal truth. Out of all this, a new category called “myth” was created to account for one kind of story that was presumed to be found in every culture. Joseph Campbell was a comparative mythologist. He took the various “myths” from around the world and looked for what was similar about them.

It’s funny, isn’t it? The first great breakthrough in our understanding of stories came from Aristotle, who was studying Greek tragedy and realised that the story (mythos) was the most important part of it. Then, about two and a half millennia later, the next most important breakthrough came from a man who was studying “myths” from around the world. Neither of them thought they were studying “story” even though they both used the word that meant “story” in ancient Greece (“mythos”).

It’s not hard to see why we still don’t have any unified understanding of what a story is. We have been studying the superficial differences and not paying attention the underlying structure. In next week’s post, we’ll start to do just that.