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.