Plato’s dialogue Timaeus has bequeathed to us a famous phrase, eik?s muthos or “likely story.” Today we use the idiom “a likely story” to dismiss what we are told as a “tall tale.” But, here in the 4th century BC, the phrase refers to an articulation of possibility or a plausible report like a myth or a fable that offers an explanation for some mystery by way of stories and images. It makes perfect sense this phrase appears prominently in the Timaeus, for that dialogue is a story about the formation of the universe; of course, there are no eyewitnesses to that event to whom we can turn for a description.
The important question becomes - why attend to likely stories at all? The point is not about whether a likely story can or should be entirely empirically accurate. Rather, it is about how helpful such likely stories are to us in living well, wisely, and virtuously. For example, likely stories are beneficial in the scientific method when hypotheses, the analytical versions of the “likely story” because they permit us to explore our world in ways we could otherwise never do. They are especially valuable as fairy tales and fiction when they paint value-saturated pictures for us of types of characters, situations, actions, and outcomes.
Plato argued that conversion to that which is moral, that which is right and good, is like an awakening. Hence symbols, allegories, fables, myths, and good stories have a special capacity to bring back to life the atrophied moral imagination, and a well-fortified and story-enriched moral imagination helps us to move about in the world with moral intent and likely stories are windows into probabilities from which we can select the ones most harmonious with the truths that we know – and, as a result, we can wisely decide how to act reasonably and virtuously in our lives based upon what we conclude and believe.
What are among such truths we can know? CS Lewis answers this question when he refers to the Tao in his short book, The Abolition of Man. Lewis adopts this term when he talks of Natural Law.
“It is the reality of the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” These are truths shared by all humankind through common experience - broadly intuited and experienced objectivities or if you will, truths, which are present before any particular religious or philosophical revelation.
Hugo Grotius, a 17th century Dutch humanist, diplomat, lawyer, theologian, jurist, poet and playwright, argued that even if the whole theological dimension were removed, natural law could be seen as set of principles without which civilised society could not survive.
Lewis writes: “What I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained.” The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law, but with this significant difference. A body cannot choose whether it obeys the law of gravitation or not, but a man can choose either to obey the law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
Lewis writes: “For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue.” To draw a connection between Lewis’ conception of the Tao, Likely Stories and Platonic philosophy in general, the Tao can be seen as a kind of counterpart to the Platonic archetypes: the realities of all things of which earthly things are the copied images.
The “likely myth” is a best available imaginative conjecture. Embodying certain intellectually appealing hypotheses; it is an image with the fewest possible distortions.
The challenge now for those seeking how to live virtuously in an increasingly disordered world is to defend largely abandoned likely stories that reflect “the kind of thing the universe is and the kinds of things we are". Again, it is important for us to bear in mind that such likely stories are also found in the timeless parables told by Jesus and the fables of Aesop.
As Lao Tzu puts it in the Tao Te Ching
“…the myriad of creatures all revere the way and honour virtue. Yet the way is revered and virtue honoured not because it is decreed by authority, but because it is natural for them to be treated so.”
Barnaby ffrench
