The Amphibian, Melioristic Agenda for Dividuals: Tropological Oscillations versus Tropological Settlements
Abstract
Some people often identify themselves too strongly with one particular belief system. Others, throughout their lives, travel from one belief system to another without necessarily weaving their experiences and gained bodies of knowledge in a complementary manner. This thesis discusses different frequencies and principles of this sort of settlements or oscillations. I argue that it is impossible to believe in perfectly purist ideologies that would not deviate from their putative, pre-established, holistic inner order. Through multiple literary, cinematic, and philosophical examples it is shown that people are of dividual (not individual) nature. That is to say, potentially we contain multiple dividual poles such as hedgehog versus fox, character versus author/agent, and different levels of authorship/agency, and a very large number of tropologies – a small, coherent system of different tropes that revolve around one axial trope – such as noise, silence, laughter, etc. Our level of authorship/agency depends on how often we oscillate between different dividual and tropological poles and how close is our relationship with them. These terms also allow us to look at the problem of determinism and free will from a slightly different conceptual angle.
This may pose two traditional questions: (i) Why act at all, if we are tropologically conditioned? (ii) What could be constructive principles for action? This thesis argues that even though we are incapable of controlling and predicted the consequences of people’s actions (entropology), we may still follow the principle of melioristic, amphibian, tropological and dividual oscillations and hope for serendipitous outcomes. Examples and cases from the areas of literature, arts, philosophy, and cultural studies used in this thesis seek to provide a rich conceptual framework and gain new synthesized perspectives. Comparisons of old and new intellectual production helps us understand why tropological and dividual oscillations are inevitable and more desirable than tropological and dividual settlements.