For a few months I wonder around Bay Area philosophy meet-ups. And this is cool! People of all walks of life gather to discuss fundamental questions, teachings and books. No matter how rich they are in philosophical background (in the end we all are amateurs) every single meeting brings new unexpected turns in seemingly well thought of ideas. That was an introduction. Now the story from the last meet-up.
That was a group of atheists or positivists (I would say) and the topic was concerned with Charles Darwin’s ideas. I was just curious what else could be said after all these years in that respect. The coolest thing happened at the second part — during an informal conversation. Somehow we slipped to the evolution of humans and to the issue of “story telling.”
I started to recall whatever could be said about humans telling stories and realized that we can term history of humans as the history of story telling: from totally ritualized to ultimately free. And now the punch line: Initial ritualized narrative played crucial role in maintaining human society as human for it was a form of collective consciousness — the only consciousness possible in the very beginning. That is, liberation-individualization of story telling and story teller was, in fact, bringing up of individual consciousness.
Now, when this is said it seems obvious but when the idea hit my old brains it was hilarious… That happened a few hours ago and I got used to her already 