A Tragedy: The Collapse into Solipsism of Will Storr

A Reflection Upon Reading "The Science of Storytelling" by Will Storr.

This is a sad story. A tragedy. The drama of Will Storr. The collapse of a gifted, intelligent man into loneliness, isolation, radical skepticism and solipsism.

What is solipsism? It is the most dire, vacuous, desolate of philosophies. The conviction that the self is enclosed within its very self; is incapable of knowing anything exterior, anything objective, anything real. The conviction that thought, feeling, decision, purpose, communion and devotion are nothing else than electrical firings of neural paths, hallucinations, a closed futile purposeless process.

We cannot know exactly when or why. But at some point a rupture occurred...between this person, Will Storr, and reality. He fell into loneliness, isolation, suspicion. He broke with reality and defined himself, catastrophically, as imprisoned and alone on the desolate island of himself. A psychic Robinson Caruso! He described his parents as Roman Catholics, with a negative tone. He described himself as a difficult child, in their eyes. Was he colicy? Hyperactive? Defiant? Were they anxious? Addicted? Angry? We don't know. We do know that he disconnected...from trust and faith, from realism, from knowledge and love of the real.

He writes: "each of us is ultimately alone in our black vault, wandering our singular neural paths..." The word hallucination occurs hundreds times in this book. For him, all knowing is hallucinogenic. Each of us is confabulating a private, fictional world...without real connection with each other or a real world beyond ourselves. In the real world, we know the difference between hallucinations, as happens in schizophrenia, and real knowledge. But he dissolves that distinction and defines all knowing, all conversation, all of reality as hallucinogenic. 

His life and work contradict this view of course: why write a 300 page book when all you are writing is your particular confabulation? Why should we be together here discussing it when each of us is alone, caught in a closed privacy of  neural paths?

Here an irony arises. Storr is an excellent investigative journalist. What is investigative journalism? It is the depth study of an event or development in order to unveil what REALLY happened. The emphasis here is on REALLY! Such study assumes that something did happen, in reality, not just in someone's neural paths. It assumes that thorough research will reveal, with some degree of clarity and certainty, even if limited and always imperfect, the contours of what happened.

Storr is gifted with a fine intellect. He exercises it fruitfully in his research and writing. But he denies the very nature of "intellect." "Intellect" comes from the Latin, "inter" and "legere" which is to read into, to see into, to penetrate into the nature of a reality. Storr would see myself and the entire Western and Catholic traditions as "naive realists"...we believe that reality is real, that it was created by a supernatural intelligence, and given as gift to us, for our intellects to understand and our hearts to appreciate and love and for our wills to revere, cherish and protect. Yes we are realists. If naive means innocent and trusting, so be it. If naive means ignorant and lacking intelligence...well wait...for Storr there is no such thing as intellect or intelligence. There is only futile, closed off confabulation and hallucination. 

So we see that Storr's work and study dramatize the purposefulness of the human intellect in its passionate hunger to know the real. I see this, so happily, in the voracious, aquisitive appetities of my grandchildren in their eagerness to know and learn. Already by 1 year old their minds are sponges, soaking up knowledge of the world around them. They are NOT just manufacturing their own private hallucinations, they are taking in, trustingly, what is outside them. For example, they so quickly learn language which is specifically not solipsistic but a communion with others in the exploration of the splendors of shared created reality.

There is a second irony whereby Storr proves the opposite of his solipsistic proposal. His thesis is about story: that the human mind instinctively creates stories to shape reality and provide meaning and direction. He finds in story a kind of salvation, of transcendence or escape from the enclosed solipsistic Self. He writes: "In dramatic story we discover ourselves in acts, decisions, often surprises. We find out: Who am I?" Further he writes: "By a story we are transported out of our live, so that we can return to them changed." "Stories connect us, across tribal barriers." He writes that "the gift of story is wisdom?" But you have to wonder: what is wisdom if all knowing is hallucination? Clearly, he does not really believe what he articulates. He is in fact himself enchanted and fascinated by the real, the good, the true and the beautiful.

Something inside of him is wounded, sad, hopeless. So he cannot surrender cognitively to the very values he lives: the search for truth. The dramatic conflict of good and evil.  The beautiful.

He writes: "...in life, unlike in story, the dramatic question of who we are never has a truly satisfying answer." He does not know who he is. Or where he came from. Or where he is going. He is confused,  isolated, unhinged, despairing.

This is normal...in the state of sin. Of separation from God. Of disbelief in the person and event of Jesus Christ. 

But I have high hopes for Will Storr. His fine intellect, with its profound yearning for Truth, will finally allow him to receive Truth. His sense of the dramatic, of the collisions and collusions of freedoms, will eventually lead him to consider the Great Drama that is Creation and our Salvation and our combat with the world, the flesh and the devil.