At the heart of our life’s stories lies the heart: On making (fictional) sense of reality

Abstract

In our multifarious (contextual) ways of making sense of reality as embodied personhood, lies the heart: an embodied heart. From a powerful historical and multi-disciplinary exploration of the metaphoric significance of the “heart” and its constitutive fictional role in making sense of our realities, my article argues for a broader and life-affirming understanding of a model of rationality, shaped and constrained by our evolutionary biological makeup and our cognitive-affective ways in relating to, experiencing and engaging with our realities. It’s not an argumentative plea for irrationality, but for a deeper and broader multi-disciplinary pursuit for the understanding of the manners in which being human as personhood finds clues in our linguistic traditions in the context of theology-science discourses for (wholeheartedly) making sense of reality, and the contextual capturing of the meaningfulness of life.