Philosophy for Writers: Free Will vs. the Plot

Plato and Aristotle, as painted by Raphael

Back in graduate school, we read Aristotle’s Poetics, and several of us rolled our eyes. Wow, several of us Creative Writing types thought, what a load of hooey! Not only did Aristotle waste the audience’s time on windy discursions about linguistic rhythm, which only make sense in classical Greek; but his hierarchy of qualities in well-written stories made plot the most important element. Can you imagine, we scoffed in unison.

When I attended grad school in the 2000s, the predominant idea held that character, not plot, drove the narrative. Standard academic precepts agreed with this for years before I formally studied the field; I remember encountering the idea that plot arose from character interaction, in textbooks from the 1980s, and I presume the idea predates that. Characters don’t serve the story, standard textbooks insisted; story arose from the characters.

Imagine my surprise, then, when ads for plot generation tools and software began crossing my social media feed with increasing frequency. Selling books, and more recently software, to struggling or apprentice writers has a long history. Whatever these tools peddled, I suspect, reflected the attitudes about what makes commercially successful content. To judge by ads, the trend is moving back toward plot-driven narrative, with character retreating to second place.

Admittedly, that’s a generalization, but it piqued my curiosity. Ruminating on the question, I realized an important cultural variable. Exactly how much characters are beholden to plot, and vice versa, possibly reflects how beholden we, the reading public, believe ourselves are to outside forces. The debate, then, isn’t between plot and character; it’s between free will and determinism. And that debate is shifting during our lifetimes.

Marcus Aurelius

Aristotle didn’t critique “literature” abstractly. His Poetics addressed specifically the Homeric epics, and the classic tragedies performed at the City Dionysia of Athens, a major act of civic religion. The sharing aloud of Homeric epic, and the public performance of tragedies, served to bind the community in shared values, an act of liturgy almost completely missing from modern society. Imagine the Super Bowl, with literally all Americans attending.

As acts of religion, these performances reinforced the Greek traditions, and reminded everyone of classical cosmology. Ancient Greeks believed the Three Fates spun destiny for everyone, humans and gods alike, before they were born. Oedipus Rex, which Aristotle praises for its tightly woven plot, stars a man beholden to destiny, though he resists. That play reminds us that the gods bring rebellious and willful humans to heel.

Greek thought, therefore, is deterministic. Humans live out a narrative pre-scripted by supernatural beings. Character doesn’t matter, because our stories are already written. The fact that Aristotle believes plot dominates good writing, reflects the cultural acceptance of deterministic order. In other words, characters in Greek tragedy aren’t free, because Greeks don’t perceive themselves as free.

Christianity monkey-wrenched this belief. Admittedly, Christianity holds that humans are beholden to Original Sin, forever doomed to fall short of God’s glory; but Christianity doesn’t perceive humanity as necessarily deterministic. Christ stands at the door and knocks, giving humans the option whether to answer. Medieval Christian literature, like Piers Ploughman and The Book of Margery Kempe, depicts humans torn between individual freedom and divine destiny.

Roland Barthes

The rise of the novel as literature’s highest form, in about the 18th century, corresponds roughly with the retreat of religion into a subordinate social role. Human agency, not divine predestination, became the dominant social model. Though some systems, like John Calvin’s aristocracy of the elect, remain active, they generally haven’t mattered much to how we actually live for a while. Humans, today, are regarded as essentially free.

So are our literary characters, unyoked from plots which Roland Barthes disparaged, appropriately, as “theological.”

Except that’s reversing. A rising philosophical tide, driven by neuroscientists like Sam Harris, and philosophers like Daniel Dennett, calls free will into question. Though Harris and Dennett are outspoken atheists, their form of biological determinism grants authority to external forces which serve the god-like role Aristotle accorded the Olympians. Contemporary gods are impersonal, vague, and soulless, but the outcomes are, for all practical purposes, identical.

The recent rise in “plot generation” tools for writers reflects the resurgence of determinism in moral philosophy. Exactly how free fictional characters are, or how beholden to plot, reflects our human belief in how free our wills are. As quasi-theological determinism makes a comeback, so does the theological narrative plot. The debate’s resolution is hardly a foregone conclusion. But perhaps writers, not philosophers, are the bellwether of how the debate is actually going.