Tarentino

The sheer pleasure of stumbling across a writer you'd never heard of. I don't think he's published much and I couldn't find a picture of him - and that all adds to the charm (a bit like finding Breece). But it's not just the 'stumbling' bit that is of interest; ultimately it's the thought and the clarity of writing itself. I don't know who Francis Slade is -and perhaps I have no need to know. But the thought..that's well worth trying to become acquainted with. Here are some parts of his ontological priority of ends (whence the picture above). Heady stuff. 

What happens when end is reduced to purpose and consequence becomes visible in the films of Quentin Tarentino, which picture a "world" in which there are only the purposes of human beings, a "world without ends." In such a world there cannot be any congruity or incongruity of purposes with ends. There being no ends by which purposes can be measured. all purposes are in themselves incommensurate and incongruous with one other. This is a world in which everything is violent. because there is no natural way for anything to move. But a world in which everything is violent means that violence becomes ordinary, the usual, the way things are. The violent displaces and becomes "the natural." Nietzsche observed that "[o]nce you know that there are no ends, you also know that there is no accident; for it is only beside a world of ends (zweck) that the word 'accident' has meaning."The violence shocks because we are not nihilists, because we are still measuring what people do in these films by a world in which there are ends, not just human purposes. Tarentino says he doesn't take violence seriously and finds it funny. "To me. violence is a totally aesthetic subject." Commenting on these films Michael Wood says: 

"[T]he violence mainly suggests that everyone and everything is out of control. that no rules apply and chaos is come again. What interests Tarentino is not violence ... but fiasco. The sense that life is a mess even in fiction. And then into this mess he introduces not order but style and a peculiar kind of innocence."

A world of purposes only is a world of cross-purposes, the definition of fiasco. What is intended in the portrayal of such a world is not, of course, a "classic form.'' The manifestation of an order, "things held together in a living way with the sense of life going on," but the manifestation of an author. Style, then, not order. Where there are only the purposes of human beings. there are no actions to imitate; there are events to be strung together, not stories to be told. Life must be a string of events strung together "anyhow." Just how must depend upon the postures assumed by the author. Works such as these films reveal-and are intended to reveal-the sensibility of their creators, in this instance "a peculiar kind of innocence." A "peculiar kind of innocence" for there is no place for dismay that what is done wrecks havoc. In such a world that is a "natural" result of anything anyone does. A world of fiasco is a world in which guilt is impossible, because guilt requires responsibility for actions, and there are actions only if purposes are measured by ends. Wood remarks that in Tarentino's films:

"A desperate ordinariness might inhabit the most extreme of circumstances." The ordinariness is human purpose desperate when detached from ends, because detached from ends there are no "reasons" other than our purposes for doing anything. Wood continues: 

"There is also the sense that if you can't get a plausible reason for behaving the way you want to, an implausible one will have to do." Reason reduced to purpose produces the most extreme of circumstances. 

Macbeth inhabits a world in which he acknowledges only human purposes, a world in which he must ceaselessly strive to become the master of consequences. When the achievements of great ambition fall apart, his life seems to him, as all lives seem to him, "a tale told by an idiot. full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Macbeth cannot tell the story of his own life. But Shakespeare could and we understand Macbeth's life because we see it within the context of the whole which human life is as apprehended by Shakespeare. The screenplays of Tarentino are and are intended precisely to be "tales full of sound and fury signifying nothing"-but without paying the price of having to regard himself as an idiot. Pulp Fiction and True Romance, the titles he chose for two of his films, suggest that Tarentino believes that he can maintain a distance between himself and the tales that he tells. "Pulp fiction" and "true romance" do not describe Tarentino's view of his own films, but the character and status he attributes to the stories human beings tell in the effort to understand and give substance to their lives. which these films expose (supposedly) as "pulp fiction" and "true romance." Tarentino, self-indulgently, ridicules all purposes except his own. But if there are no ends, what privileges the purposes of the artist?