Saturday, August 2, 2014

Trinities in Frye’s Philosophy


 

From “The Anatomy of Criticism” by Northrup Frye:

“This is the division of ‘the good’ into three main areas, of which the world of art, beauty, feeling, and taste is the central one, and is flanked by two other worlds. One is the world of social action and events, the other the world of individual thought and ideas. Reading from left to right, this threefold structure divides human faculties into will, feeling, and reason. It divides the mental constructs which these faculties produce into history, art, and science and philosophy. It divides the ideals which form compulsions or obligations on these faculties into law, beauty, and truth…


“Similarly, we have portrayed the poetic symbol as intermediate between event and idea, example and precept, ritual and dream, and have finally displayed it as Aristotle’s ethos, human nature and the human situation, between and made up of mythos and dianoia, which are verbal imitations of action and thought respectively.”

I acknowledge the historicity of these divisions. These are such incredibly common metaphors that they are unavoidable when discussing Western art and philosophy because the artists and philosophers assumed their validity. If I had been born in the 12th Century I’d probably write this essay about how will, feeling, and reason reflect the holy trinity of Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost and my fellow monks and I would probably argue about which symbols from which trinity matched the symbols from the other while stomping around in grape buckets making wine.

Trinities of these natures abound in fiction.  The classic example from “Star Trek” has been Spock (mind and thesis), McCoy (heart and antithesis), and Kirk (will and synthesis), even if the original series focused on that more than the Kirk/Spock duality represented by the recent movies.  The tensions in “Harry Potter” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” have come from purposefully re-aligned trinities.  In the “Potter” books, true power resides not with the “will” but with the “heart,” while Ron merely wishes he was a hero and is frustrated. In “BtVS,” the power also lies with someone who doesn’t want it, and instilling the slayer power in women leaves the men around them often feeling inadequate; being men they do not take their secondary status as well as women do in these sorts of shows and movies.

But one of the lessons that really stuck with me when I read “Atlas Shrugged” was that will, reason, and feeling work out best when aligned rather than separated. All three come from our brain, and neuro-science has found plenty of evidence of how humans go wrong when reason and feeling are cut off from each other. When I am writing fiction, I am happiest with the result when my historical knowledge, philosophical beliefs, and artistic knowledge are working in tandem. I suspect the most common reason lawyers, for example, become unhappy is because their profession places them in situations that create contradictions, such as an idealistic law student finding himself defending oil companies.

On a more personal note, I do not believe I could marry a woman unless my heart, my mind, and my will (in this case my sex drive) agreed upon her. If any one of those ingredients was removed, a relationship of some sort is possible (heart + mind = friendship, heart + will = romantic relationship, mind + will = something a little more sordid), but marriage would probably be a bad idea.


Maybe this is why I’ve found so many artistic endeavors lacking. Many artists fall so hard on the side of emotions that I find myself shaking my head at their naivety. I don’t believe love reforms bad boys, I don’t believe that if you build it they will come, and I don’t believe running wild killing bad guys makes the world a better place.

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