One may attempt to sing the bull to sleep. Phædrus could have told his questioners that the answer to this dilemma was beyond his humble powers of solution, but the fact that he couldn’t find an answer was no logical proof that an answer couldn’t be found. Wouldn’t they, with their broader experience, try to help him find this answer? But it was way too late for lullabies like that. They could simply have replied, “No, we’re way too square. And until you do come up with an answer, stick to the syllabus so that we don’t have to flunk out your mixed-up students when we get them next quarter.”
A third rhetorical alternative to the dilemma, and the best one in my opinion, was to refuse to enter the arena. Phædrus could simply have said, “The attempt to classify Quality as subjective or objective is an attempt to define it. I have already said it is undefinable ”, and left it at that. I believe DeWeese actually counseled him to do this at the time.
Why he chose to disregard this advice and chose to respond to this dilemma logically and dialectically rather than take the easy escape of mysticism, I don’t know. But I can guess. I think first of all that he felt the whole Church of Reason was irreversibly in the arena of logic, that when one put oneself outside logical disputation, one put oneself outside any academic consideration whatsoever. Philosophical mysticism, the idea that truth is indefinable and can be apprehended only by nonrational means, has been with us since the beginning of history. It’s the basis of Zen practice. But it’s not an academic subject. The academy, the Church of Reason, is concerned exclusively with those things that can be defined, and if one wants to be a mystic, his place is in a monastery, not a University. Universities are places where things should be spelled out.
I think a second reason for his decision to enter the arena was an egoistic one. He knew himself to be a pretty sharp logician and dialectician, took pride in this and looked upon this present dilemma as a challenge to his skill. I think now that trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles.
I see a deer move about two hundred yards ahead and above us through the pines. I try to point it out to Chris, but by the time he looks it’s gone.
The first horn of Phædrus’ dilemma was, If Quality exists in the object, why can’t scientific instruments detect it?
This horn was the mean one. From the start he saw how deadly it was. If he was going to presume to be some super-scientist who could see in objects Quality that no scientist could detect, he was just proving himself to be a nut or a fool or both. In today’s world, ideas that are incompatible with scientific knowledge don’t get off the ground.
He remembered Locke’s statement that no object, scientific or otherwise, is knowable except in terms of its qualities. This irrefutable truth seemed to suggest that the reason scientists cannot detect Quality in objects is because Quality is all they detect. The “object” is an intellectual construct deduced from the qualities. This answer, if valid, certainly smashed the first horn of the dilemma, and for a while excited him greatly.
But it turned out to be false. The Quality that he and the students had been seeing in the classroom was completely different from the qualities of color or heat or hardness observed in the laboratory. Those physical properties were all measurable with instruments. His Quality… “excellence”, “worth”, “goodness”… was not a physical property and was not measurable. He had been thrown off by an ambiguity in the term quality. He wondered why that ambiguity should exist, made a mental note to do some digging into the historic roots of the word quality, then put it aside. The horn of the dilemma was still there.
He turned his attention to the other horn of the dilemma, which showed more promise of refutation. He thought, So Quality is whatever you like? It angered him. The great artists of history… Raphael, Beethoven, Michelangelo… they were all just putting out what people liked. They had no goal other than to titillate the senses in a big way. Was that it? It was angering, and what was most angering about it was that he couldn’t see any immediate way to cut it up logically. So he studied the statement carefully, in the same reflective way he always studied things before attacking them.
Then he saw it. He brought out the knife and excised the one word that created the entire angering effect of that sentence. The word was “just.” Why should Quality be just what you like? Why should “what you like” be “just”? What did “just” mean in this case? When separated out like this for independent examination it became apparent that “just” in this case really didn’t mean a damn thing. It was a purely pejorative term, whose logical contribution to the sentence was nil. Now, with that word removed, the sentence became “Quality is what you like”, and its meaning was entirely changed. It had become an innocuous truism.
He wondered why that statement had angered him so much in the first place. It had seemed so natural. Why had it taken so long to see that what it really said was “What you like is bad, or at least inconsequential.” What was behind this smug presumption that what pleased you was bad, or at least unimportant in comparison to other things? It seemed the quintessence of the squareness he was fighting. Little children were trained not to do “just what they liked” but — but what? — Of course! What others liked. And which others? Parents, teachers, supervisors, policemen, judges, officials, kings, dictators. All authorities. When you are trained to despise “just what you like” then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others… a good slave. When you learn not to do “just what you like” then the System loves you.
But suppose you do just what you like? Does that mean you’re going to go out and shoot heroin, rob banks and rape old ladies? The person who is counseling you not to do “just as you like” is making some remarkable presumptions as to what is likable. He seems unaware that people may not rob banks because they have considered the consequences and decided they don’t like to. He doesn’t see that banks exist in the first place because they’re “just what people like”, namely, providers of loans. Phædrus began to wonder how all this condemnation of “what you like” ever seemed such a natural objection in the first place.
Soon he saw there was much more to this than he had been aware of. When people said, Don’t do just what you like, they didn’t just mean, Obey authority. They also meant something else.
This “something else” opened up into a huge area of classic scientific belief which stated that “what you like” is unimportant because it’s all composed of irrational emotions within yourself. He studied this argument for a long time, then knifed it into two smaller groups which he called scientific materialism and classic formalism. He said the two are often found associated in the same person but logically are separate.
Scientific materialism, which is commoner among lay followers of science than among scientists themselves, holds that what is composed of matter or energy and is measurable by the instruments of science is real. Anything else is unreal, or at least of no importance. “What you like” is unmeasurable, and therefore unreal. “What you like” can be a fact or it can be a hallucination. Liking does not distinguish between the two. The whole purpose of scientific method is to make valid distinctions between the false and the true in nature, to eliminate the subjective, unreal, imaginary elements from one’s work so as to obtain an objective, true, picture of reality. When he said Quality was subjective, to them he was just saying Quality is imaginary and could therefore be disregarded in any serious consideration of reality.
On the other hand is classic formalism, which insists that what isn’t understood intellectually isn’t understood at all. Quality in this case is unimportant because it’s an emotional understanding unaccompanied by the intellectual elements of reason.
Of these two main sources of that epithet “just”, Phædrus felt that the first, scientific materialism, was by far the easiest to cut to ribbons. This, he knew from his earlier education, was naïve science. He went after it first, using the reductio ad absurdum. This form of argument rests on the truth that if the inevitable conclusions from a set o
f premises are absurd then it follows logically that at least one of the premises that produced them is absurd. Let’s examine, he said, what follows from the premise that anything not composed of mass… energy is unreal or unimportant.
He used the number zero as a starter. Zero, originally a Hindu number, was introduced to the West by the Arabs during the Middle Ages and was unknown to the ancient Greeks and Romans. How was that? he wondered. Had nature so subtly hidden zero that all the Greeks and all the Romans… millions of them… couldn’t find it? One would normally think that zero is right out there in the open for everyone to see. He showed the absurdity of trying to derive zero from any form of mass-energy, and then asked, rhetorically, if that meant the number zero was “unscientific.” If so, did that mean that digital computers, which function exclusively in terms of ones and zeros, should be limited to just ones for scientific work? No trouble finding the absurdity here.
He then went on with other scientific concepts, one by one, showing how they could not possibly exist independently of subjective considerations. He ended up with the law of gravity, in the example I gave John and Sylvia and Chris on the first night of our trip. If subjectivity is eliminated as unimportant, he said, then the entire body of science must be eliminated with it.
This refutation of scientific materialism, however, seemed to put him in the camp of philosophic idealism… Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Bradley, Bosanquet… good company all, logical to the last comma, but so difficult to justify in “common sense” language they seemed a burden to him in his defense of Quality rather than an aid. The argument that the world was all mind might be a sound logical position but it was certainly not a sound rhetorical one. It was way too tedious and difficult for a course in freshman composition. Too “far-fetched.”
At this point the whole subjective horn of the dilemma looked almost as uninspiring as the objective one. And the arguments of classical formalism, when he started to examine them, made it even worse. These were the extremely forceful arguments that you shouldn’t respond to your immediate emotional impulses without considering the big rational picture.
Kids are told, “Don’t spend your whole allowance for bubble gum [immediate emotional impulse] because you’re going to want to spend it for something else later [big picture].” Adults are told, “This paper mill may smell awful even with the best controls [immediate emotions], but without it the economy of the whole town will collapse [big picture].” In terms of our old dichotomy, what’s being said is, “Don’t base your decisions on romantic surface appeal without considering classical underlying form.” This was something he kind of agreed with.
What the classical formalists meant by the objection “Quality is just what you like” was that this subjective, undefined “quality” he was teaching was just romantic surface appeal. Classroom popularity contests could determine whether a composition had immediate appeal, all right, but was this Quality? Was Quality something that you “just see” or might it be something more subtle than that, so that you wouldn’t see it at all immediately, but only after a long period of time?
The more he examined this argument the more formidable it appeared. This looked like the one that might do in his whole thesis.
What made it so ominous was that it seemed to answer a question that had arisen often in class and which he always had to answer somewhat casuistically. This was the question, If everyone knows what quality is, why is there such a disagreement about it?
His casuist answer had been that although pure Quality was the same for everyone, the objects that people said Quality inhered in varied from person to person. As long as he left Quality undefined there was no way to argue with this but he knew and he knew the students knew that it had the smell of falseness about it. It didn’t really answer the question.
Now there was an alternative explanation: people disagreed about Quality because some just used their immediate emotions whereas others applied their overall knowledge. He knew that in any popularity contest among English teachers, this latter argument which bolstered their authority would win overwhelming endorsement.
But this argument was completely devastating. Instead of one single, uniform Quality now there appeared to be two qualities; a romantic one, just seeing, which the students had; and a classic one, overall understanding, which the teachers had. A hip one and a square one. Squareness was not the absence of Quality; it was classic Quality. Hipness was not just presence of Quality; it was mere romantic Quality. The hip-square cleavage he’d discovered was still there, but Quality didn’t now seem to fall entirely on one side of the cleavage, as he’d previously supposed. Instead, Quality itself cleaved into two kinds, one on each side of the cleavage line. His simple, neat, beautiful, undefined Quality was starting to get complex.
He didn’t like the way this was going. The cleavage term that was going to unify the classic and romantic ways of looking at things had itself been cleaved into two parts and could no longer unify anything. It had been caught in an analytic meat grinder. The knife of subjectivity-and-objectivity had cut Quality in two and killed it as a working concept. If he was going to save it, he couldn’t let that knife get it.
And really, the Quality he was talking about wasn’t classic Quality or romantic Quality. It was beyond both of them. And by God, it wasn’t subjective or objective either, it was beyond both of those categories. Actually this whole dilemma of subjectivity-objectivity, of mind-matter, with relationship to Quality was unfair. That mind-matter relationship has been an intellectual hang-up for centuries. They were just putting that hang-up on top of Quality to drag Quality down. How could he say whether Quality was mind or matter when there was no logical clarity as to what was mind and what was matter in the first place?
And so: he rejected the left horn. Quality is not objective, he said. It doesn’t reside in the material world.
Then: he rejected the right horn. Quality is not subjective, he said. It doesn’t reside merely in the mind.
And finally: Phædrus, following a path that to his knowledge had never been taken before in the history of Western thought, went straight between the horns of the subjectivity-objectivity dilemma and said Quality is neither a part of mind, nor is it a part of matter. It is a third entity which is independent of the two.
He was heard along the corridors and up and down the stairs of Montana Hall singing softly to himself, almost under his breath, “Holy, holy, holy — blessed Trinity.”
And there is a faint, faint fragment of memory, possibly wrong, possibly just something I’m imagining, that says he just let the whole thought structure sit like that for weeks, without carrying it any further.
Chris shouts, “When are we going to get to the top?”
“Probably quite a way yet”, I reply.
“Will we see a lot?”
“I think so. Look for blue sky between the trees. As long as we can’t see sky we know it’s a way yet. The light will come through the trees when we round the top.”
Last night’s rain has soaked this soft duff of needles sufficiently to make them good walking. Sometimes when it’s really dry on a slope like this they become slippery and you have to dig your feet into them edgewise or you’ll slide down.
I say to Chris, “Isn’t it great when there’s no underbrush like this?”
“Why isn’t there any?” he asks.
“I think this area must never have been logged. When a forest is left alone like this for centuries, the trees shut out all the underbrush.”
“It’s like a park”, Chris says. “You can sure see all around.” His mood seems much better than yesterday. I think he’ll be a good traveler from here on. This forest silence improves anyone.
The world now, according to Phædrus, was composed of three things: mind, matter, and Quality. The fact that he had established no relationship between them didn’t bother him at first. If the relationship between mind and matter had been fought over for centuries and wasn’t yet resolved, wh
y should he, in a matter of a few weeks, come up with something conclusive about Quality? So he let it go. He put it up on a kind of mental shelf where he put all kinds of questions he had no immediate answers for. He knew the metaphysical trinity of subject, object and Quality would sooner or later have to be interrelated but he was in no hurry about it. It was just so satisfying to be beyond the danger of those horns that he relaxed and enjoyed it as long as he could.
Eventually, however, he examined it more closely. Although there’s no logical objection to a metaphysical trinity, a three-headed reality, such trinities are not common or popular. The metaphysician normally seeks either a monism, such as God, which explains the nature of the world as a manifestation of one single thing, or he seeks a dualism, such as mind-matter, which explains it as two things, or he leaves it as a pluralism, which explains it as a manifestation of an indefinite number of things. But three is an awkward number. Right away you want to know, Why three? What’s the relationship among them? And as the need for relaxation diminished Phædrus became curious about this relationship too.
He noted that although normally you associate Quality with objects, feelings of Quality sometimes occur without any object at all. This is what led him at first to think that maybe Quality is all subjective. But subjective pleasure wasn’t what he meant by Quality either. Quality decreases subjectivity. Quality takes you out of yourself, makes you aware of the world around you. Quality is opposed to subjectivity.
I don’t know how much thought passed before he arrived at this, but eventually he saw that Quality couldn’t be independently related with either the subject or the object but could be found only in the relationship of the two with each other. It is the point at which subject and object meet.
That sounded warm.
Quality is not a thing. It is an event.
Warmer.
It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object.