Zoologists, to cover up their problem, had to invent a patch. They created a new order, monotremata, that includes the platypus, the spiny anteater, and that’s it. This is like a nation consisting of two people.
In a subject-object classification of the world, Quality is in the same situation as that platypus. Because they can’t classify it the experts have claimed there is something wrong with it. And Quality isn’t the only such platypus. Subject-object metaphysics is characterized by herds of huge, dominating, monster platypi. The problems of free will versus determinism, of the relation of mind to matter, of the discontinuity of matter at the sub-atomic level, of the apparent purposelessness of the universe and the life within it are all monster platypi created by the subject-object metaphysics. Where it is centered around the subject-object metaphysics, Western philosophy can almost be dejined as platypus anatomy. These creatures that seem like such a permanent part of the philosophical landscape magically disappear when a good Metaphysics of Quality is applied.
The world comes to us in an endless stream of puzzle pieces that we would like to think all fit together somehow, but that in fact never do. There are always some pieces like platypi that don’t fit and we can either ignore these pieces or we can give them silly explanations or we can take the whole puzzle apart and try other ways of assembling it that will include more of them. When one takes the whole ill-shaped, misfitting structure of a subject-object explained universe apart and puts it back together in a value-centered metaphysics, all kinds of orphaned puzzle pieces fit beautifully that never fit before.
Almost as great as this value platypus is another one handled by the Metaphysics of Quality: the scientific reality platypus. This is a very large monster that has been disturbing a lot of people for a long time. It was identified a century ago by the mathematician and astronomer, Henri Poincare, who asked, Why is the reality most acceptable to science one that no small child can be expected to understand?
Should reality be something that only a handful of the world’s most advanced physicists understand? One would expect at least a majority of people to understand it. Should reality be expressible only in symbols that require university-level mathematics to manipulate? Should it be something that changes from year to year as new scientific theories are formulated? Should it be something about which different schools of physics can quarrel for years with no firm resolution on either side? If this is so then how is it fair to imprison a person in a mental hospital for life with no trial and no jury and no parole for failing to understand reality? By this criterion shouldn’t all but a handful of the world’s most advanced physicists be locked up for life? Who is crazy here and who is sane?
In a value-centered Metaphysics of Quality this scientific reality platypus vanishes. Reality, which is value, is understood by every infant. It is a universal starting place of experience that everyone is confronted with all the time. Within a Metaphysics of Quality, science is a set of static intellectual patterns describing this reality, but the patterns are not the reality they describe.
A third major platypus handled by the Metaphysics of Quality is the causation platypus. It has been said for centuries that, empirically speaking, there is no such thing as causation. You never see it, touch it, hear it or feel it. You never experience it in any way. This has not been a minor philosophic or scientific platypus. This has been a real show-stopper. The amount of paper consumed in dissertations on this one metaphysical problem must equal whole forests of pulpwood.
In the Metaphysics of Quality causation is a metaphysical term that can be replaced by value. To say that A causes B or to say that B values precondition A is to say the same thing. The difference is one of words only. Instead of saying A magnet causes iron filings to move toward it, you can say Iron filings value movement toward a magnet. Scientifically speaking neither statement is more true than the other. It may sound a little awkward, but that’s a matter of linguistic custom, not science. The language used to describe the data is changed but the scientific data itself is unchanged. The same is true in every other scientific observation Phædrus could think of. You can always substitute B values precondition A for A causes B without changing any facts of science at all. The term cause can be struck out completely from a scientific description of the universe without any loss of accuracy or completeness.
The only difference between causation and value is that the word cause implies absolute certainty whereas the implied meaning of value is one of preference. In classical science it was supposed that the world always works in terms of absolute certainty and that cause is the more appropriate word to describe it. But in modern quantum physics all that is changed. Particles prefer to do what they do. An individual particle is not absolutely committed to one predictable behavior. What appears to be an absolute cause is just a very consistent pattern of preferences. Therefore when you strike cause from the language and substitute value you are not only replacing an empirically meaningless term with a meaningful one; you are using a term that is more appropriate to actual observation.
The next platypus to fall is substance. Like causation, substance is a derived concept, not anything that is directly experienced. No one has ever seen substance and no one ever will. All people ever see is data. It is assumed that what makes the data hang together in consistent patterns is that they inhere in this substance. But as John Locke pointed out in the seventeenth century, if we ask what this substance is, devoid of any properties, we find ourselves thinking of nothing whatsoever. The data of quantum physics indicate that what are called subatomic particles cannot possibly fill the definition of a substance. The properties exist, then disappear, then exist, and then disappear again in little bundles called quanta. These bundles are not continuous in time, yet an essential, defined characteristic of substance is that it is continuous in time. Since the quantum bundles are not substance and since it is a usual scientific assumption that these subatomic particles compose everything there is, then it follows that there is no substance anywhere in the world nor has there ever been. The whole concept is a grand metaphysical illusion. In his first book, Phædrus had railed against the conjuror, Aristotle, who invented the term and started it all.
But if there is no substance, it must be asked, then why isn’t everything chaotic? Why do our experiences act as if they inhere in something? If you pick up a glass of water why don’t the properties of that glass go flying off in different directions? What is it that keeps these properties uniform if it is not something called substance? That is the question that created the concept of substance in the first place.
The answer provided by the Metaphysics of Quality is similar to that given for the causation platypus. Strike out the word substance wherever it appears and substitute the expression stable inorganic pattern of value. Again the difference is linguistic. It doesn’t make a whit of difference in the laboratory which term is used. No dials change their readings. The observed laboratory data are exactly the same.
The greatest benefit of this substitution of value for causation and substance is that it allows an integration of physical science with other areas of experience that have been traditionally considered outside the scope of scientific thought. Phædrus saw that the value which directed subatomic particles is not identical with the value a human being gives to a painting. But he saw that the two are cousins, and that the exact relationship between them can be defined with great precision. Once this definition is complete a huge integration of the humanities and sciences appears in which platypi fall by the hundreds. Thousands.
One of the first to fall, he was happy to note, was the one that got all this started in the first place — the Theory of Anthropology platypus. If science is a study of substances and their relationships, then the field of cultural anthropology is a scientific absurdity. In terms of substance there is no such thing as a culture. It has no mass, no energy. No scientific laboratory instrument has ever been devised that can distinguish a culture from a non-culture.
/> But if science is a study of stable patterns of value, then cultural anthropology becomes a supremely scientific field. A culture can be defined as a network of social patterns of value. As the Values Project anthropologist Kluckhohn had said, patterns of value are the essence of what an anthropologist studies.
Kluckhohn’s enormous mistake was his attempt to define values. He assumed that a subject-object view of the world would allow such a definition. What was destroying his case was not the accuracy of his observations. What was destroying his case were these substance-oriented metaphysical assumptions of anthropology that he failed to detach from his observations. Once this detachment is made anthropology is out of the metaphysical quicksand and onto hard ground at last.
Phædrus found again and again that a Quality-centered map of the universe provides overwhelming clarity of explanation where all has been fog before. In the arts, which are primarily concerned with value, this was expected. A surprise, however, came in fields that were supposed to have little to do with value. Mathematics, physics, biology, history, law — all of these had value foundations built into them that now came under scrutiny and all sorts of surprising things were revealed.
Once a thief is caught a whole string of crimes is often solved.
9
In any hierarchy of metaphysical classification the most important division is the first one, for this division dominates everything beneath it. If this first division is bad there is no way you can ever build a really good system of classification around it.
In his book Phædrus had tried to save Quality from metaphysics by refusing to define it, by placing it outside the dialectical chess board. Anything that is undefined is outside metaphysics, since metaphysics can only function with defined terms. If you can’t define it you can’t argue about it. He had demonstrated that even though you can’t define Quality you still must agree that it exists, since a world from which value is subtracted becomes unrecognizable.
But he realized that sooner or later he was going to have to stop carping about how bad subject-object metaphysics was and say something positive for a change. Sooner or later he was going to have to come up with a way of dividing Quality that was better than subjects and objects. He would have to do that or get out of metaphysics entirely. It’s all right to condemn somebody else’s bad metaphysics but you can’t replace it with a metaphysics that consists of just one word.
By even using the term Quality he had already violated the nothingness of mystic reality. The use of the term Quality sets up a pile of questions of its own that have nothing to do with mystic reality and walks away leaving them unanswered. Even the name, Quality, was a kind of definition since it tended to associate mystic reality with certain fixed and limited understandings. Already he was in trouble. Was the mystic reality of the universe really more immanent in the higher-priced cuts of meat in the butcher shop? These were Quality meats, weren’t they? Was the butcher using the term incorrectly? Phædrus had no answers… That was the problem this morning too, with Rigel. Phædrus had no answers. If you’re going to talk about Quality at all you have to be ready to answer someone like Rigel. You have to have a ready-made Metaphysics of Quality that you can snap at him like some catechism. Phædrus didn’t have a Catechism of Quality and that’s why he got hit.
Actually the issue before him was not whether there should be a metaphysics of Quality or not. There already is a metaphysics of quality. A subject-object metaphysics is in fact a metaphysics in which the first division of Quality — the first slice of undivided experience — is into subjects and objects. Once you have made that slice, all of human experience is supposed to fit into one of these two boxes. The trouble is, it doesn’t. What he had seen is that there is a metaphysical box that sits above these two boxes, Quality itself. And once he’d seen this he also saw a huge number of ways in which Quality can be divided. Subjects and objects are just one of the ways.
The question was, which way was best?
Different metaphysical ways of dividing up reality have, over the centuries, tended to fan out into a structure that resembles a book on chess openings. If you say that the world is one, then somebody can ask, Then why does it look like more than one? And if you answer that it is due to faulty perception, he can ask, How do you know which perception is faulty and which is real? Then you have to answer that, and so on.
Trying to create a perfect metaphysics is like trying to create a perfect chess strategy, one that will win every time. You can’t do it. It’s out of the range of human capability. No matter what position you take on a metaphysical question someone will always start masking questions that will lead to more positions that lead to more questions in this endless intellectual chess game. The game is supposed to stop when it is agreed that a particular line of reasoning is illogical. This is supposed to be similar to a checkmate. But conflicting positions go on for centuries without any such checkmate being agreed upon.
Phædrus had spent an enormous amount of time following what turned out to be lousy openings. A particularly large amount of this time had been spent trying to lay down a first line of division between the classic and romantic aspects of the universe he’d emphasized in his first book. In that book his purpose had been to show how Quality could unite the two. But the fact that Quality was the best way of uniting the two was no guarantee that the reverse was true — that the classic-romantic split was the best way of dividing Quality. It wasn’t. For example, American Indian mysticism is the same platypus in a world divided primarily into classic and romantic patterns as under a subject-object division. When an American Indian goes into isolation and fasts in order to achieve a vision, the vision he seeks is not a romantic understanding of the surface beauty of the world. Neither is it a vision of the world’s classic intellectual form. It is something else. Since this whole metaphysics had started with an attempt to explain Indian mysticism Phædrus finally abandoned this classic-romantic split as a choice for a primary division of the Metaphysics of Quality. The division he finally settled on was one he didn’t really choose in any deliberative way. It was more as if it chose him. He’d been reading Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture without any particular search in mind, when a relatively minor anecdote stopped him. It stayed with him for weeks. He couldn’t get it out of his mind.
The anecdote was a case-history in which there was a conflict of morality. It concerned a Pueblo Indian who lived in Zuni, New Mexico, in the nineteenth century. Like a Zen koan (which also originally meant case-history) the anecdote didn’t have any single right answer but rather a number of possible meanings that kept drawing Phædrus deeper and deeper into the moral situation that was involved.
Benedict wrote: Most ethnologists have had… experiences in recognizing that persons who are put outside the pale of society with contempt are not those who would be placed there by another culture…
The dilemma of such an individual is often most successfully solved by doing violence to his strongest natural impulses and accepting the role the culture honours. In case he is a person to whom social recognition is necessary it is ordinarily his only possible course.
She said the person concerned was one of the most striking individuals in Zuni.
In a society that thoroughly distrusts authority of any sort, he had native personal magnetism that singled him out in any group. In a society that exalts moderation and the easiest way, he was turbulent and could act violently upon occasion. In a society that praises a pliant personality that talks lots — that is, that chatters in a friendly fashion — he was scornful and aloof. Zuni’s only reaction to such personalities is to brand them as witches. He was said to have been peering through a window from outside, and this is a sure mark of a witch. At any rate he got drunk one day and boasted that they could not kill him. He was taken before the war priests who hung him by his thumbs from the rafters till he should confess to his witchcraft. This is the usual procedure in a charge of witchcraft. However he dispatched a m
essenger to the government troops. When they came his shoulders were already crippled for life, and the officer of the law was left with no recourse but to imprison the war priests who had been responsible for the enormity. One of these war priests was probably the most respected and important in recent Zuni history and when he returned after imprisonment in the state penitentiary he never resumed his priestly offices. He regarded his power as broken. It was a revenge that is probably unique in Zuni history. It involved, of course, a challenge to the priesthoods, against whom the witch by his act openly aligned himself.
The course of his life in the forty years that followed this defiance was not, however, what we might easily predict. A witch is not barred from his membership in cult groups because he has been condemned, and the way to recognition lay through such activity. He possessed a remarkable verbal memory and a sweet singing voice. He learned unbelievable stores of mythology, of esoteric ritual, of cult songs. Many hundreds of pages of stories and ritual poetry were taken down from his dictation before he died, and he regarded his songs as much more extensive. He became indispensable in ceremonial life and before he died was the governor of Zuni. The congenital bent of his personality threw him into irreconcilable conflict with his society, and he solved his dilemma by turning an incidental talent to account. As we might well expect, he was not a happy man. As governor of Zuni and high in his cult groups, a marked man in his community, he was obsessed by death. He was a cheated man in the midst of a mildly happy populace.
It is easy to imagine the life he might have lived among the Plains Indians where every institution favoured the traits that were native to him. The personal authority, the turbulence, the scorn, would all have been honoured in the career he could have made his own. The unhappiness that was inseparable from his temperament as a successful priest and governor of Zuni would have had no place as a war chief of the Cheyenne; it was not a function of the traits of his native endowment but of the standards of the culture in which he found no outlet for his native responses.