Author Blog - Kingston University Press's Will Buckingham

Finding our SeaLegs: Ethics, Experiences and the Ocean of Stories (Kingston University Press, 2009)

When I sat down to write about ethics, I knew that I wanted to approach the subject through stories and storytelling. This, after all, is how we think about ethics in our everyday lives. Aristotle once said that ethics is like navigation; but perhaps it is the sea of stories – an image I have stolen from Salman Rushdie, who stole it, in turn, from ancient Indian texts – that we inevitably find ourselves navigating when we talk about right and wrong, justice and injustice.

This is where Finding Our Sea-Legs began, with these two ideas: ethics is navigation, and stories are like a sea. But when I sat down to write, I knew that I would have to do more than simply talking about stories, I would have to use storytelling as a method.

It soon became apparent that, once you introduce stories into the mix, strange things begin to happen. Stories are not particularly well-behaved beasts. They do not sit down quietly and do as they are told. Sometimes reading philosophy can be like visiting a natural history museum - fascinating, compelling, thought-provoking, perhaps, but when it comes down to it, all the animals are stuffed. I like to think that Finding Our Sea-Legs is less like a taxidermist's collection, and more like a zoo. Or, in keeping with the nautical theme, more like a zoo afloat, a raucous philosophical Noah's Ark, populated by talking fish, philosophical woodpeckers, rutting buffalo and palmwine-stealing gods.

As a writer, I alternate between fiction and philosophy. I see the two as closely linked: writing fiction is often a philosophical kind of business, and writing philosophy is often a matter of storytelling. My novel, Cargo Fever, published in 2007 by Tindal Street Press – a recasting of those classic woman and ape tales, like King Kong in miniature – is a book that, for all of its light-heartedness and anarchy, nevertheless arose out of philosophical questions about the limits of how we see ourselves as human beings: it is a book about gods and animals, ancestors and strangers, humans and non-humans, about the borderlines between "them" and "us". Conversely, Sea-Legs – although it tussles with the philosophers – is a book born out of my love of stories.

If I were pressed to say what it is that unites my love of philosophy and my love of fiction, I think I would say this: in approaching both, what I look for is a kind of movement, a kind of life, a kind of delight in the world. I have no time for the terrible and widespread prejudice that links gloom with profundity. Misery alone does not lead to greater wisdom, kindness or insight. Back in ancient Greece it was claimed that philosophy, the love of wisdom, might be a way of curing ailments and sicknesses of the soul. For those who find themselves queasy, I’d hope that Finding Our Sea-Legs, although it doesn’t offer any cure for this life afloat, might be able to quell a little of the sea-sickness, through philosophical arguments and reasons, through stories, through tales and yarns.

Will

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