On the Trichotomy, Method, and the Theory of Learning.
Imagine two people: the novelist and the professor of
literature. The novelist is in the position of the Artist to whom a certain
Being, in Heidegger’s sense – the work of Art – has been revealed. The novelist
encodes within language this profound idea as though he or she were not merely
translating it but in fact preparing it as a gift that is encased in language
and must be opened with language. The professor of literature then opens the
gift before his students in a relationship that depends as much upon the
students as it does upon the professor. He “cracks” it, as it were, to show
what lies inside.
A fine instance of a writer who breaks with convention is
Kurt Vonnegut. He is akin to the director Tarantino in his infamously
non-linear narratives; he often-times tells stories out of chronological order.
This allows him to maintain a thematic continuity whilst sacrificing,
temporarily, a chronological continuity, although not in the continuity of the
Actual Plot but in the way that that Plot is Presented; it is a lapse in the
Formality of the Presentation rather than the integrity of the Continuity. This
aesthetic appeal also draws attention to the fact that human beings, as well as
artists, do not live their lives linearly, on one level. They “jump around”,
recalling events from childhood that relate to their present condition,
irrespective of the events in the interim, relating those events in the interim
to an imagined future, and even involving the present, as an object of mind, in
these games. One might pedantically draw a thematic contrast between the
Tralfamadorian, Determinisitic perspective in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and the peculiar experiences of an unwitting
time-traveler named Billy Pilgrim to show by foil that the novel is an allegory
for the absurdity of Determinism in light of the Actuality of human experience.
By not only telling the story out of order, in the conventional fashion of
writing a non-linear narrative, but by in fact overstepping that boundary
between “Plot” and “Presentation” and challenging the reader to believe that
the order of presentation is in fact the chronological order of events, (from
the protagonist’s perspective) Vonnegut not only breaks the fourth wall
separating Billy from the reader but also draws attention to the disparate ways
in which human beings view time itself.
Should a professor wish to analyse this work, he or she
could imagine (Vonnegut, prior to the conception of the book, or any of his
readers afterwards) taking a number of index-cards, each meant to designate a
given chapter, arranging them on the floor in a circle, and either drawing
lines between them or connecting them with a piece of string. Each card would
have had, written upon it, the main events and the key thematic elements. The
circumference of the circle would have had the cards arranged either in the
order of the chronological Plot or of its Presentation. Whichever had not been allotted
the dignity of the circumference would have been represented by a thread.
Perhaps in the instance of Slaughterhouse-Five, the thread
would have run more or less along the circumference. This would have been a
testament to Vonnegut’s own cleverness. In most instances, however, of a
non-linear narrative, the thread would have run not along the circumference but
at a series of chords penetrating the interior of the circle seemingly at
random. Further lines, were they drawn between cards having in common the
development of a particular literary theme, would have intersected and clashed
with the other Chords in a similarly continuous but ultimately apparently
arbitrary fashion.
In presenting the plot in a lecture hall, one would have the
choice of whether to adhere stringently to the strictly chronological
presentation (that one would find usually in Spark Notes) or to “jump around a
bit”, discussing different chapters that would seem randomly selected only to
the inattentive student. The latter approach would be almost certainly, in
Nietzsche’s terms, the Appollonian appeal, whereas the former would be a Socratic
appeal that would drain the lecture almost entirely of its thematic
significance, although the Sophist would merely marginalize, in this instance,
the Appollonian appeal as mere aestheticism in ignorance of the actual facts.
The former approach would be, in terms of my own trichotomy,
dependent entirely upon the Formal. It is confined to the relationship between
Words and Ideas, dealing with the Method according to which we present them.
Because it is relatively unrelated to the Being Itself, it is not only
independent of any concrete Reality and open to interpretation but also
relatively ungrounded. Should one become so divorced from the Beings that one
would live entirely in terms of the Formal appeal, one would then run the risk
of elevating it to God-like proportions and insisting upon only one stringent
artificial way in which pedagogy (or any Method in any other profession or
work) “can” or “should” be done. This is the origin of Dogmatic Propriety. The
Sophist would therefore be hypocritical simply because it is his or her own
perpetuation* of a given AESTHETIC that keeps him or her ensnared naively in a
narrow view that filters out and conceals the underlying Truth of any phenomenon.
The latter approach, the Appollonian, would be also the Artistic
according to my trichotomy. It relates directly to the Beings and is concerned
with the degree to which verbal truth PRESENTS those beings to the listener
and, in the process of presentation, reveals them to the speaker. The latter
method also, insofar as it allots one the freedom to keep the Beings in view –
that is, without “losing sight” by turning away from them for too long to
describe them or by “enshrouding” them in the very descriptions of them –
serves the purpose of the Practical: The direct relationship between the Beings
and the Mind in the absence of language and its potential interference.
Dm.A.A.
* Formally, the "perpetuation" of this sort of ignorance is a kind of madness because it is repetition with the anticipation of different results, since the very process of Life is the anticipation of new results.
