On a warm day in 1940, in the Dordogne valley of Southwestern France, a youth named Marcel Ravidat saw his dog disappear down a hole along a hill in Lascaux. 

Ravidat was determined to rescue his furry friend. He stood over the opening that had consumed his companion, threw pebbles down to assess the depth of his challenge, and heard the small stones clamor as they made their way into the bowels of the earth. Undeterred, Ravidat returned with several friends to explore the passage. Entering through the same hole that had imbibed his dog, they slid down 15 meters before emerging into a massive cavern.

Their oil lamps faintly illuminated a natural gallery of millennia-old painted images. Maybe it was an illusion from the flicker of their lanterns, but Ravidat reflected that they could see “a cavalcade of animals larger than life painted on the walls and ceiling of the cave—each animal seemed to be moving.”

The boys had stumbled onto the painted stories of a people who had long since faded from the Earth, but who—like we do today—understood the world around them through story, particularly stories of the visual variety. The boys’ rescue mission would lead to the discovery of over six hundred prehistoric paintings, which line the walls and ceilings of Lascaux, a large network of caves. 

The paintings—estimated to have been created 17,000 years ago, and depicting mostly local flora and fauna (there is only one image of a human)—are the product of many generations of artistic talent and effort. The cave paintings of Lascaux reveal how stories are the custodians of our values and cumulative wisdom. They reflect our shared past and fate. They are part and parcel of the human community, and a central part of what it means to be human. We are storytelling animals, and always have been. 

Storytelling and The Human Condition

This month, my series with The Teaching Company (formerly The Great Courses), called Storytelling and the Human Condition, is being released. Over twelve episodes, I explore what great stories across history and culture tell us about what it means to be human and to live a meaningful life. The series can be viewed for free here.

The human condition, said seventeenth-century French polymath Blaise Pascal, is defined by the greatness and wretchedness of man. As there is duality to our nature as human beings, there is duality to our stories. Great stories lay bare a culture’s values and expose truth where we might otherwise not wish to see it. As we explore the duality of stories and our human nature, we see the way that stories have been used to nurture what is best in each of us and diminish what is bad—all for the purpose of leading richer, more joyful, and more meaningful lives. 

In creating this series, I came to appreciate how stories are central to how we engage with others and the world around us. They help us make sense of the world, tell us who we are and why we’re here, and define our purpose for existence. Stories entertain us, instruct us, and, above all, connect us—to the world, to people in other times and places, to each other, and to our innermost selves. 

They help us to not only endure tragedy—but to laugh through it. In my episode on humor, for instance, I put Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, a comedy about global nuclear annihilation, in dialogue with Boccaccio’s Decameron, one hundred bawdy and ridiculous stories that span the breadth of the human experience and written and consumed amid Florence’s disastrous thirteenth-century bout of bubonic plague.

When people laugh at things, they feel superior to them. They conquer them. When we laugh in the face of tragedy, we defy our weakness and vulnerability. We conquer what we fear—whether it’s nuclear war or a plague—when we make it the butt of the joke.

And when we laugh at the shame, foolishness, and vulnerability in others—such as the outrageous Dr. Strangelove, or outlandish characters in Boccaccio’s Decameron—we’re made to feel powerful again in a world of uncertainty. These comedic stories helped their listeners confront and cope with our innate vulnerability and frailty in life.

Stories remind us of the remarkable constancy in human nature and the human experience, while simultaneously helping us to learn and grow. We are perpetually interested in questions related to the human condition: What does it mean to be human? Why are we here? What is the best way to live? These stories comprise “The Great Conversation”—the iterative dialogue between thoughtful people across time and place about questions of origin, purpose, and destiny. Studying stories from The Great Conversation across time, place, and genre allows us insight into how people have answered these questions for themselves. Doing so helps us become better able to understand who we are and how we can live life richly and, well, in the here and now.

As the millennia-old visual stories from the caves of Lascaux show, we’re storytelling—and story-listening—creatures from day one. According to narrative paradigm theory, conceptualized by communication scholar Walter Fisher, all meaningful human communication occurs through storytelling. This theory argues that, whether we realize it or not, each of us are storytellers, or listeners of stories, at different times in our lives. This isn’t just true for our own moment—but for people in all times and places. Every civilization and culture has stories that are used to explore the big questions of the human condition, beginning from humanity’s earliest, pre-literate days. 

In my series, I explore the breadth of the human experience, beginning with origin stories and progressing through themes such as suffering, love and sex, pride, death, freedom, and more. In each lecture, I put stories from different cultures, media, and eras in dialogue to show how stories from different disciplines, people, and places are in conversation with each other across generations and continents. All great art tells a story.

For example, in the episode on guilt and blame, I draw from two stories in the memoir genre that illuminate different ideas about guilt—both Augustine and Rousseau’s Confessions— and put them in dialogue with two other great stories that explore this theme: Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

In Book Two of his memoir, The Confessions, St. Augustine tells us a story. Here is how he relays it:

There was a pear tree near our vineyard laden with fruit, though attractive in neither color nor taste. To shake the fruit off the tree and carry off the pears, I and a gang of naughty adolescents set off late at night. … We carried off a huge load of pears. But they were not for our feasts but merely to throw to the pigs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves.

He says that he didn’t even want the pears. So why did he do it? For the thrill of the illicit act alone.

“My desire,” Augustine recollects, “was to enjoy not what I sought by stealing but merely the excitement of thieving and the doing of what was wrong. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden.” 

After this theft, Augustine is wracked with guilt. His guilt about his sin may be a defining through line in his work.

As human beings, we feel guilty when we do certain things. We do not like to feel guilty because we don’t want to feel like we are bad people. Augustine flagellated himself for his wrongdoings—some have argued to an unhealthy extent— but more often, we blame other people and circumstances to assuage our consciences and distance ourselves from our wrongs. We tell ourselves stories to mitigate our complicity, and implicate others instead.

This is the story that the French thinker Jean Jacques Rousseau recalled in his own Confessions—consciously titled after Augustine’s work—to exonerate himself after his own produce theft. Putting these stories in dialogue offers us essential insights into the human condition, guilt, and the stories we tell to survive it.

There is a certain je ne c’est quoi to exceptional creativity—and storytelling—that remains beyond the realm of explanation—especially those powerful works of art and stories that move us to change, transform, feel, and which resonate with us an especially moving way.

In his Confessions, Jean Jacques Rousseau describes a time when a friend flattered and persuaded him to steal asparagus from a neighboring garden. Rousseau stole the asparagus, and then sold it at the market for a profit, splitting the profit with the friends who put him up to the crime. 

Yet unlike Augustine, Rousseau rejects any feeling of guilt. After all, his friends put him up to it! It was their fault.

But then Rousseau goes further than that: he decides that there actually isn’t anything to feel guilty about at all. He writes in his Confessions, reflecting on his theft of the asparagus and the aftermath, “This practice taught me it was not so terrible to thieve as I had imagined.”

Augustine and Rousseau represent two polar opposite responses to the emotion of guilt in human life. 

Augustine fully embraces his shortcomings, which results in almost crippling guilt, shame, and self-loathing. 

Rousseau, on the other hand, first shifts the blame for his conduct onto someone else and then proceeds to deny his guilt. The divergent views of Augustine and Rousseau on guilt stem from their opposite views of human nature. Augustine thinks human beings are inherently bad, corrupt by nature, and in need of divine grace for salvation. Rousseau, by contrast, thinks that human nature is inherently good, but is corrupted, misguided, and misdirected by society.

Guilt and conscience are an inevitable part of the human condition. Augustine’s account of guilt—as well as those found in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which we don’t have the time to explore here—illuminate that one does not need a concept of God in order to weaken and crumble under the pressure of a bad conscience. 

As Socrates told us, virtue—as health of the soul—is its own reward. Vice, by contrast, is its own punishment.

A Brief History of Storytelling

We’ve already explored the 17,000-year-old stories behind the painted caves of Lascaux—and the story of their far more recent discovery—which is an early form of storytelling, to be sure.

But the story of stories doesn’t end there.

Around 350 BCE, the Greek philosopher Aristotle cultivated his theory of drama in a work called Poetics, a Greek word that literally means making, doing, productive or creative. Aristotle sets the stage for all artists—all people engaged in the creative act, as storytellers. Central to Aristotle’s theory of story is mimesis, or imitation.

Beauty begets beauty, arts begets art, story begets story. We hear a story that excites, entertains, and inspires us, and we cannot wait to retell it and share that delight with others. 

We are inspired by the creative, artistic, and narrative acts around us, and are driven to emulate them ourselves. Imitation isn’t just the best form of flattery, as Oscar Wilde quipped: It is central to the creative—and by extension, the storytelling—enterprise. 

As I show in my course, and as Lascaux shows us, stories are not just told in written form. They were central to preliterate cultures that depended on the oral—or visual— tradition of storytelling to hold their traditions, history, and values. 

In Ancient Greece, a rhapsode was a person who traveled between cities performing ancient Greek epic poetry by heart—Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey, Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days, among many others—for a fee. In Plato’s dialogue Ion, written about 380 BC Socrates explores the relationship between the creator and the performer by engaging a rhapsode named Ion.

Ion has just won first prize at a poetry recital contest, a feat of which he is very proud. Socrates suggests that perhaps it isn’t his own talent that won him the prize, but divine inspiration. He analogizes the creative act to magnets: “It’s a divine power that moves you [Ion], as a ‘Magnetic’ stone moves iron rings.” 

Divine inspiration moved Homer to create his epic poems, inspiration that comes down from Homer to Ion, who in turn passes on that inspiration whenever he shares his memorized poetry with others. True art and stories are the domain of the divine alone.

While modern readers may find Plato’s idea of an artist being divinely inspired hard to accept, there is a certain je ne c’est quoi to exceptional creativity—and storytelling—that remains beyond the realm of explanation—especially those powerful works of art and stories that move us to change, transform, feel, and which resonate with us an especially moving way.

We humans are just mouthpieces for them. 

We’ve been telling stories perhaps from beyond when we even had written or oral language. They’ve been used to pass down knowledge and culture from generation to generation. In the Middle Ages, where storytelling was formalized through the practice of traveling troubadours and minstrels (latter-day rhapsodes) who traipsed from town to town telling stories and singing songs. The poetry of Beowulf and Chaucer’s comical vignettes in the Canterbury Tales were also popular during this time. 

The human condition is tragic but also beautiful. Stories help bring beauty out of tragedy.

The rise of the printing press during the late Renaissance and early modern era—and soon after, the novel—helped usher Europe into a more peaceful and less violent era. Arguably, novels allowed people windows into the minds and experiences of others, thus fostering empathy and a new sense of the connectedness and unity of the human race. 

In the mid-1800s, Gustav Freytag, a German playwright, conceived, in proper German style, a more systematized and structured theory of good storytelling. Known as Freytag’s pyramid, the model argues that a successful story should have seven parts, with which any eighth-grade English student will be familiar: exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, and denouement. His framework showed us the stuff of good stories—and helped us try to grasp why certain stories stand the test of time. 

Everything Is Copy 

We live our lives through story. We’re surrounded by them. Today, we enjoy them overtly in film, photography, and television shows, but often we miss the stories that surround us in our everyday lives. Sometimes, in failing to think critically about the stories we live by, we miss opportunities to harness the power of storytelling to improve our lives. For example, in re-casting a narrative, we can transform tragedies and traumas into triumphs.

Stories can humanize us because they help us see and appreciate the humanity in others—if we let them. 

Pascal’s insight about the greatness and wretchedness of man reminds us of an additional power and benefit of stories, too. They can help foster reflection and introspection, an exercise that humans alone enjoy, and help us define for ourselves who we want to be, and what we would like out of life. 

As human beings, we are capable of great good and great evil. The human condition is tragic but also beautiful. Stories help bring beauty out of tragedy. They help us cope. They help us understand it. Stories can make the tragedy of life make sense, and seem worthwhile—at least momentarily. Stories contextualize us. 

They help us grapple with the splendor and the absurdity of life. Despite differences in era, place, and language, in many ways, human nature doesn’t change. We can let stories such as this remind us of the high rewards on offer for those that choose life in community with others, grounded in empathy and compassion for our fellow man, and lead better, richer, more meaningful lives. 

The exercise of exploring great stories told by others can help us use the power of storytelling in our own lives. We can be encouraged to mine our own lives and experiences for stories and insights into the human experience—a practice used by wise people across time and place, and a core part of both the examined life and the life well lived. 

Poet W. H. Auden once said that “Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.” In engaging in great stories—and works of art—from across history and culture, we are invited to encounter the wisdom of the past and reflect on what these stories tell us about leading better lives today. 

Stories are how we define and understand our significance—as a species, but also as individuals. They help us cultivate our sense of self—even, at times, helping us to live on after we’ve shed our mortal coil. 

As Hamlet says to Horatio at the end of Shakespeare’s famous play, revealing an all-too-human desire to create our stories, and then have them told. 

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity a while,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain/ To tell my story.