Richard Kearney

Clearly, imagining cannot be expected to mean exactly the same thing today as it did in the Middle Ages or antiquity. For one thing, Aristotle and Aquinas never watched television.

If it is indeed the business of imagination to make politics distrust itself - reminding it that its principles are not literal facts but constructs of imagination - it is also its business to encourage politics to remake itself by remaking its images of the good life.

If it is true that we cannot possess knowledge of what is good in any absolute sense, it is equally true that we have an ethical duty to decide between what is better and what is worse.

Narrative is an open-ended invitation to ethical and poetical responsiveness. Storytelling invites us to become not just agents of our own lives, but narrators and readers as well. It shows us that the untold life is not worth living. There will always be someone there to say, 'tell me a story', and someone there to respond. Were this not so, we would no longer be fully human.

If we possess narrative sympathy - enabling us to see the world from other's point of view - we cannot kill. If we do not, we cannot love.

While food makes us live, stories are what make our lives worth living.