Narrative, complexity, and context: Autonomy as an epistemic value

Those masterful images because complete. Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?. A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street. Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can. Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut. Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone. I must lie down where all the ladders start. In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. – W. B. Yeats, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”. Human beings are not at the pinnacle of intelligence, smarter than other animals, far smarter than plants, farther still from rocks and other non-living things. It is, in fact, the other way around: the rocks, being oldest, know the most, followed by plants and by animals older than we are. As the youngest, the most recent inhabitants of this place, we humans are the most ignorant and have the most to learn from our elders. – Paraphrased from Paul Schultz, Elder, White Earth band of Ojibwe. In Margaret Drabble’s novel The Sea Lady (2006), a man and a woman in late middle age travel toward a small city on the English coast, near where they met as children, to receive honorary doctorates and - as it turns out, not coincidentally - to meet for the first time in thirty years. They had parted after a brief and disastrous marriage following a love affair that, in its intensity of both passion and happiness, shadowed the rest of their lives.