ARGUMENTS
425
complacency and challenges him to continual refinement of under–
standing. Whenever the reader begins to relax into what he thinks
he understands and can accept, Dostoevsky introduces some fact,
some scene that contradicts what the reader expects, and
forces him
to rethink
[italics mine] the novel.
Or the movement of a mind, even the mind of a learner, over a prob–
lem, any problem, is at its best something akin to the process described
by Lucien Goldmann in
The Hidden God:
... Dialectical thought . . . affirms that there are never any ab–
solutely valid starting-points, no problems which are finally and def–
initely solved, and that consequently thought never moves forward in
a straight line, since each individual fact or idea assumes its
significance only when it takes up its place in the whole, in the
same way as the whole can be understood only by our increased
knowledge of the partial and incomplete facts which constitute it.
The advance of knowledge is thus to be considered as a perpetual
movement to and fro, from the whole to the parts and from the
parts back to the whole again, a movement in the course of which
the whole and the parts throw light upon one another.
This is how
King Lear
or
The Brothers Karamazov
is to be best ap–
prehended (and, I suspect, the nature of urban man or that of sub–
atomic particles or quasars as well).
Bell is not constructing an epistemology; so it is perhaps an in–
justice to belabor this point, but I do so belabor because I think it de–
cidedly in error to put at the heart of a pedagogical treatise a sim–
plified, and, I believe, erroneous, conceptual map of how
the
student
learns or how the mind operates in different fields. Furthermore, the
assumption that human knowledge divides itself neatly into a triad has
always been questionable and is now becoming more so. For the sacred
triad is not in the nature of things, as Bell knows. Rather like most
"happenings" in the academic world, it just happened, willy-nilly, got
built into the ,organization of universities and is now an administrative
holy cow. Thus at the University of California at Berkeley, for example,
there is not a trivium but a quadrivium: biological sciences, physical
sciences, social sciences and humanities. Does this mean that knowledge
is
really four-fold? Not at all. It means that at Berkeley it happened to
get organized that way. The Doty Committee at Harvard, as Bell re–
marks, paid scant attention to the trivium and suggested a two-fold
division of humanities (including history) and sciences (including be–
havioral). But all kinds of other arrangements could be made. It would
be,
for example, more logical to divide the whole thing into the study of
