He then proceeded in terms of the trinity to answer the question, Why does everybody see Quality differently? This was the question he had always had to answer speciously before. Now he said, “Quality is shapeless, formless, indescribable. To see shapes and forms is to intellectualize. Quality is independent of any such shapes and forms. The names, the shapes and forms we give Quality depend only partly on the Quality. They also depend partly on the a priori images we have accumulated in our memory. We constantly seek to find, in the Quality event, analogues to our previous experiences. If we didn’t we’d be unable to act. We build up our language in terms of these analogues. We build up our whole culture in terms of these analogues.”
The reason people see Quality differently, he said, is because they come to it with different sets of analogues. He gave linguistic examples, showing that to us the Hindi letters da, da, and dha all sound identical to us because we don’t have analogues to them to sensitize us to their differences. Similarly, most Hindi-speaking people cannot distinguish between da and the because they are not so sensitized. It is not uncommon, he said, for Indian villagers to see ghosts. But they have a terrible time seeing the law of gravity.
This, he said, explains why a classful of freshman composition students arrives at similar ratings of Quality in the compositions. They all have relatively similar backgrounds and similar knowledge. But if a group of foreign students were brought in, or, say, medieval poems out of the range of class experience were brought in, then the students’ ability to rank Quality would probably not correlate as well.
In a sense, he said, it’s the student’s choice of Quality that defines him. People differ about Quality, not because Quality is different, but because people are different in terms of experience. He speculated that if two people had identical a priori analogues they would see Quality identically every time. There was no way to test this, however, so it had to remain just speculation.
In answer to his colleagues at school he wrote:
“Any philosophic explanation of Quality is going to be both false and true precisely because it is a philosophic explanation. The process of philosophic explanation is an analytic process, a process of breaking something down into subjects and predicates. What I mean (and everybody else means) by the word quality cannot be broken down into subjects and predicates. This is not because Quality is so mysterious but because Quality is so simple, immediate and direct.”
“The easiest intellectual analogue of pure Quality that people in our environment can understand is that ‘Quality is the response of an organism to its environment’ (he used this example because his chief questioners seemed to see things in terms of stimulus-response behavior theory). An amoeba, placed on a plate of water with a drip of dilute sulfuric acid placed nearby, will pull away from the acid (I think). If it could speak the amoeba, without knowing anything about sulfuric acid, could say, ‘This environment has poor quality.’ If it had a nervous system it would act in a much more complex way to overcome the poor quality of the environment. It would seek analogues, that is, images and symbols from its previous experience, to define the unpleasant nature of its new environment and thus ‘understand’ it.”
“In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.”
“Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself.”
I remember this fragment more vividly than any of the others, possibly because it is the most important of all. When he wrote it he felt momentary fright and was about to strike out the words “All of it. Every last bit of it.” Madness there. I think he saw it. But he couldn’t see any logical reason to strike these words out and it was too late now for faintheartedness. He ignored his warning and let the words stand.
He put his pencil down and then — felt something let go. As though something internal had been strained too hard and had given way. Then it was too late.
He began to see that he had shifted away from his original stand. He was no longer talking about a metaphysical trinity but an absolute monism. Quality was the source and substance of everything.
A whole new flood of philosophic associations came to mind. Hegel had talked like this, with his Absolute Mind. Absolute Mind was independent too, both of objectivity and subjectivity.
However, Hegel said the Absolute Mind was the source of everything, but then excluded romantic experience from the “everything” it was the source of. Hegel’s Absolute was completely classical, completely rational and completely orderly.
Quality was not like that.
Phædrus remembered Hegel had been regarded as a bridge between Western and Oriental philosophy. The Vedanta of the Hindus, the Way of the Taoists, even the Buddha had been described as an absolute monism similar to Hegel’s philosophy. Phædrus doubted at the time, however, whether mystical Ones and metaphysical monisms were introconvertable since mystical Ones follow no rules and metaphysical monisms do. His Quality was a metaphysical entity, not a mystic one. Or was it? What was the difference?
He answered himself that the difference was one of definition. Metaphysical entities are defined. Mystical Ones are not. That made Quality mystical. No. It was really both. Although he’d thought of it purely in philosophical terms up to now as metaphysical, he had all along refused to define it. That made it mystic too. Its indefinability freed it from the rules of metaphysics.
Then, on impulse, Phædrus went over to his bookshelf and picked out a small, blue, cardboard-bound book. He’d hand-copied this book and bound it himself years before, when he couldn’t find a copy for sale anywhere. It was the 2,400-year-old Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu. He began to read through the lines he had read many times before, but this time he studied it to see if a certain substitution would work. He began to read and interpret it at the same time.
He read:
The quality that can be defined is not the Absolute Quality.
That was what he had said.
The names that can be given it are not Absolute names.
It is the origin of heaven and earth.
When named it is the mother of all things.
Exactly.
Quality [romantic Quality] and its manifestations [classic Quality] are in their nature the same. It is given different names [subjects and objects] when it becomes classically manifest.
Romantic quality and classic quality together may be called the “mystic.”
Reaching from mystery into deeper mystery, it is the gate to the secret of all life.
Quality is all-pervading.
And its use is inexhaustible!
Fathomless!
Like the fountainhead of all things —
Yet crystal clear like water it seems to remain.
I do not know whose Son it is.
An image of what existed before God.
– Continuously, continuously it seems to remain. Draw upon it and it serves you with ease — Looked at but cannot be seen — listened to but cannot be heard — grasped at but cannot be touched — these three elude all our inquiries and hence blend and become one.
Not by its rising is there light,
Not by its sinking is there darkness
Unceasing, continuous
It cannot be defined
And reverts again into the realm of nothingness
r /> That is why it is called the form of the formless
The image of nothingness
That is why it is called elusive
Meet it and you do not see its face
Follow it and you do not see its back
He who holds fast to the quality of old
Is able to know the primeval beginnings
Which are the continuity of quality.
Phædrus read on through line after line, verse after verse of this, watched them match, fit, slip into place. Exactly. This was what he meant. This was what he’d been saying all along, only poorly, mechanistically. There was nothing vague or inexact about this book. It was as precise and definite as it could be. It was what he had been saying, only in a different language with different roots and origins. He was from another valley seeing what was in this valley, not now as a story told by strangers but as a part of the valley he was from. He was seeing it all.
He had broken the code.
He read on. Line after line. Page after page. Not a discrepancy. What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything.
Then his mind’s eye looked up and caught his own image and realized where he was and what he was seeing and — I don’t know what really happened — but now the slippage that Phædrus had felt earlier, the internal parting of his mind, suddenly gathered momentum, as do the rocks at the top of a mountain. Before he could stop it, the sudden accumulated mass of awareness began to grow and grow into in avalanche of thought and awareness out of control; with each additional growth of the downward tearing mass loosening hundreds of times its volume, and then that mass uprooting hundreds of times its volume more, and then hundreds of times that; on and on, wider and broader, until there was nothing left to stand.
No more anything.
It all gave way from under him.
21
“You’re not very brave, are you?” Chris says.
“No”, I answer, and pull the rind of a slice of salami between my teeth to remove the meat. “But you’d be astonished at how smart I am.”
We’re down quite a way from the summit now, and the mixed pines and leafy underbrush are much higher here and more closed in than they were at this altitude on the other side of the canyon. Evidently more rain gets into this canyon. I gulp down a large quantity of water from a pot Chris has filled at the stream here, then look at him. I can see by his expression that he’s resigned himself to going down and there’s no need to lecture him or argue. We finish the lunch off with a part of a bag of candy, wash it down with another pot of water and lay back on the ground for a rest. Mountain springwater has the best taste in the world.
After a while Chris says, “I can carry a heavier load now.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure”, he says, a little haughtily.
Gratefully I transfer some of the heavier stuff to his pack and we put the packs on, wriggling through the shoulder straps on the ground and then standing up. I can feel the difference in weight. He can be considerate when he’s in the mood.
From here on it looks like a slow descent. This slope has evidently been logged and there’s a lot of underbrush higher than our heads that makes it slow going. We’ll have to work our way around it.
What I want to do now in the Chautauqua is get away from intellectual abstractions of an extremely general nature and into some solid, practical, day-to-day information, and I’m not quite sure how to go about this.
One thing about pioneers that you don’t hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers. They go forging ahead, seeing only their noble, distant goal, and never notice any of the crud and debris they leave behind them. Someone else gets to clean that up and it’s not a very glamorous or interesting job. You have to depress for a while before you can get down to doing it. Then, once you have depressed into a really low-key mood, it isn’t so bad.
To discover a metaphysical relationship of Quality and the Buddha at some mountaintop of personal experience is very spectacular. And very unimportant. If that were all this Chautauqua was about I should be dismissed. What’s important is the relevance of such a discovery to all the valleys of this world, and all the dull, dreary jobs and monotonous years that await all of us in them.
Sylvia knew what she was talking about the first day when she noticed all those people coming the other way. What did she call it? A “funeral procession.” The task now is to get back down to that procession with a wider kind of understanding than exists there now.
First of all I should say that I don’t know whether Phædrus’ claim that Quality is the Tao is true. I don’t know of any way of testing it for truth, since all he did was simply compare his understanding of one mystic entity with another. He certainly thought they were the same, but he may not have completely understood what Quality was. Or, more likely, he may not have understood the Tao. He certainly was no sage. And there’s plenty of advice for sages in that book he would have done well to heed.
I think, furthermore, that all his metaphysical mountain climbing did absolutely nothing to further either our understanding of what Quality is or of what the Tao is. Not a thing.
That sounds like an overwhelming rejection of what he thought and said, but it isn’t. I think it’s a statement he would have agreed with himself, since any description of Quality is a kind of definition and must therefore fall short of its mark. I think he might even have said that statements of the kind he had made, which fall short of their mark, are even worse than no statement at all, since they can be easily mistaken for truth and thus retard an understanding of Quality.
No, he did nothing for Quality or the Tao. What benefited was reason. He showed a way by which reason may be expanded to include elements that have previously been unassimilable and thus have been considered irrational. I think it’s the overwhelming presence of these irrational elements crying for assimilation that creates the present bad quality, the chaotic, disconnected spirit of the twentieth century. I want to go at these now in as orderly a manner as possible.
We’re on steep mucky soil now that’s hard to keep a footing in. We grab branches and shrubs to steady ourselves. I take a step, then figure where my next step will be, then take this step, then look again. Soon the brush becomes so thick I see we will have to hack through it. I sit down while Chris gets the machete from the pack on my back. He hands it to me, then, hacking and chopping, I head into the brush. It’s slow going. Two or three branches must be cut for every step. It may go on like this for a long time.
The first step down from Phædrus’ statement that “Quality is the Buddha” is a statement that such an assertion, if true, provides a rational basis for a unification of three areas of human experience which are now disunified. These three areas are Religion, Art and Science. If it can be shown that Quality is the central term of all three, and that this Quality is not of many kinds but of one kind only, then it follows that the three disunified areas have a basis for introconversion.
The relationship of Quality to the area of Art has been shown rather exhaustively through a pursuit of Phædrus’ understanding of Quality in the Art of rhetoric. I don’t think much more in the way of analysis need be made there. Art is high-quality endeavor. That is all that really needs to be said. Or, if something more high-sounding is demanded: Art is the Godhead as revealed in the works of man. The relationship established by Phædrus makes it clear that the two enormously different sounding statements are actually identical.
In the area of Religion, the rational relationship of Quality to the Godhead needs to be more thoroughly established, and this I hope to do much later on. For the time being one can meditate on the fact that the old English roots for the Buddha and Quality, God and good, appear to be identical. It’s in the area of Science that I want to focus attention in the immediate future, for this is the area that most badly need
s the relationship established. The dictum that Science and its offspring, technology, are “value free”, that is, “quality free”, has got to go. It’s that “value freedom” that underlines the death-force effect to which attention was brought early in the Chautauqua. Tomorrow I intend to start on that.
For the remainder of the afternoon we climb down over grey weathered trunks of deadfalls and angle back and forth on the steep slope.
We reach a cliff, angle along its edge in search of a way down, and eventually a narrow draw appears which we’re able to descend. It continues down through a rocky crevice in which there is a little rivulet. Shrubs and rocks and muck and roots of huge trees watered by the rivulet fill the crevice. Then we hear the roar of a much larger creek in the distance.
We cross the creek using a rope, which we leave behind, then on the road beyond find some other campers who give us a ride into town.
In Bozeman it’s dark and late. Rather than wake up the DeWeeses and ask them to drive in, we check in at the main downtown hotel. Some tourists in the lobby stare at us. With my old Army clothes, walking stick, two-day beard and black beret I must look like some old-time Cuban revolutionary, in for a raid.
In the hotel room we exhaustedly dump everything on the floor. I empty into a waste basket the stones picked up by my boots from the rushing water of the stream, then set the boots by a cold window to dry slowly. We collapse into the beds without a word.
22
The next morning we check out of the hotel feeling refreshed, say goodbye to the DeWeeses, and head north on the open road out of Bozeman. The DeWeeses wanted us to stay, but a peculiar itching to move west and get on with my thoughts has taken over. I want to talk today about a person whom Phædrus never heard of, but whose writings I’ve studied quite extensively in preparation for this Chautauqua. Unlike Phædrus, this man was an international celebrity at thirty-five, a living legend at fifty-eight, whom Bertrand Russell has described as “by general agreement, the most eminent scientific man of his generation.” He was an astronomer, a physicist, a mathematician and philosopher all in one. His name was Jules Henri Poincare.