On the Trichotomy, Method, and the Theory of Learning.

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.