Story-making and myth-making : the place of poetic understanding when wrestling with real-world problems

The history of Western philosophy can be understood as a dynamic tension between seeing a literal world and a literal self as agent in this world, and an as-if world and an as-if self. The notion of 'as if' is an old one in philosophy and is particularly important when we wish to describe how we feel about our relationship to both our multifaceted milieu, the one that we have co-evolved with and ourselves as actors in the world. It is my contention that under conditions of stress of stress we readily fall into a simplistic way of thinking by concretising and objectifying all that we have dealings with, including how we see ourselves. To be silent in these times of ecological crisis; to be silent about the conscious dispossession of indigenous lands in Australia; to be silent about the deprivation of education from women in many parts of the world ... all of these great silences exhibit a literal attitude to cultural traditions of thinking and practice. Perhaps it is in times of stress and threat that we evolutionally speaking, have valued our ability to recognise simple distinctions and act decisively believing that the end justifies the means, as if we could see with clairvoyant eyes just what the end was and that acting with a certainty of belief was what was required by the critical nature of the events at hand.