At La Pine we stop. I tell Chris to order me ham and eggs for breakfast while I stay outside to change the oil.
At a filling station next to the restaurant I pick up a quart of oil, and in a gravelly lot back of the restaurant remove the drain plug, let the oil drain, replace the plug, add the new oil, and when I’m done the new oil on the dipstick shines in the sunlight almost as clear and colorless as water. Ahhhhh!
I repack the wrench, enter the restaurant and see Chris and, on the table, my breakfast. I head into the washroom, clean up and return.
“Am I hungry!” he says.
“It was a cold night”, I say. “We burned up a lot of food just staying alive.”
The eggs are good. The ham too. Chris talks about the dream and how it frightened him and then that’s done with. He looks as though he’s about to ask a question, then doesn’t, then stares out the window into the pines for a while, then comes back with it.
“Dad?”
“What?”
“Why are we doing this?”
“What?”
“Just riding all the time.”
“Just to see the country — vacation.”
The answer doesn’t seem to satisfy him. But he can’t seem to say what’s wrong with it.
A sudden despair wave hits, like that at dawn. I lie to him. That’s what’s wrong.
“We just keep going and going”, he says.
“Sure. What would you rather do?”
He has no answer.
I don’t either.
On the road an answer comes that we’re doing the highest Quality thing I can think of right now, but that wouldn’t satisfy him any more than what I told him. I don’t know what else I could have said. Sooner or later, before we say goodbye, if that’s how it goes, we’ll have to do some talking. Shielding him like this from the past may be doing him more harm than good. He’ll have to hear about Phædrus, although there’s much he can never know. Particularly the end.
Phædrus arrived at the University of Chicago already in a world of thought so different from the one you or I understand, it would be difficult to relate, even if I fully remembered everything. I know that the acting chairman admitted him during the Chairman’s absence on the basis of his teaching experience and apparent ability to converse intelligently. What he actually said is lost. Afterward he waited for a number of weeks for the Chairman to return in hopes of obtaining a scholarship, but when the Chairman did appear an interview took place which consisted essentially of one question and no answer.
The Chairman said, “What is your substantive field?”
Phædrus said, “English composition.”
The Chairman bellowed, “That is a methodological field!” And for all practical purposes that was the end of the interview. After some inconsequential conversation Phædrus stumbled, hesitated and excused himself, then went back to the mountains. This was the characteristic of his that had failed him out of the University before. He had gotten stuck on a question and hadn’t been able to think about anything else, while the classes moved on without him. This time, however, he had all summer to think about why his field should be substantive or methodological, and all that summer that is what he did.
In the forests near the timberline he ate Swiss cheese, slept on pine-bough beds, drank mountain stream water and thought about Quality and substantive and methodological fields.
Substance doesn’t change. Method contains no permanence. Substance relates to the form of the atom. Method relates to what the atom does. In technical composition a similar distinction exists between physical description and functional description. A complex assembly is best described first in terms of its substances: its subassemblies and parts. Then, next, it is described in terms of its methods: its functions as they occur in sequence. If you confuse physical and functional description, substance and method, you get all tangled up and so does the reader.
But to apply these classifications to a whole field of knowledge such as English composition seemed arbitrary and impractical. No academic discipline is without both substantive and methodological aspects. And Quality had no connection that he could see with either one of them. Quality isn’t a substance. Neither is it a method. It’s outside of both. If one builds a house using the plumb-line and spirit-level methods he does so because a straight vertical wall is less likely to collapse and thus has higher Quality than a crooked one. Quality isn’t method. It’s the goal toward which method is aimed.
“Substance” and “substantive” really corresponded to “object” and “objectivity”, which he’d rejected in order to arrive at a nondualistic concept of Quality. When everything is divided up into substance and method, just as when everything’s divided up into subject and object, there’s really no room for Quality at all. His thesis not be a part of a substantive field, because to accept a split into substantive and methodological was to deny the existence of Quality. If Quality was going to stay, the concept of substance and method would have to go. That would mean a quarrel with the committee, something he had no desire for at all. But he was angry that they should destroy the entire meaning of what he was saying with the very first question. Substantive field? What kind of Procrustean bed were they trying to shove him into? he wondered.
He decided to examine more closely the background of the committee and did some library digging for this purpose. He felt this committee was off into some entirely alien pattern of thought. He didn’t see where this pattern and the large pattern of his own thought joined together.
He was especially disturbed by the quality of the explanations of the committee’s purpose. They seemed extremely confusing. The entire description of the committee’s work was a strange pattern of ordinary enough words put together in a most unordinary way, so that the explanation seemed far more complex than the thing he was trying to have explained. This wasn’t the bells ringing he’d heard before.
He studied everything he could find that the Chairman had written and here again was found the strange pattern of language seen in the confusing description of the committee. It was a puzzling style because it was completely different from what he’d seen of the Chairman himself. The Chairman, in a brief interview, had impressed him with great quickness of mind, and an equally swift temper. And yet here was one of the most ambiguous, inscrutable styles Phædrus had ever read. Here were encyclopedic sentences that left subject and predicate completely out of shouting distance. Parenthetic elements were unexplainably inserted inside other parenthetic elements, equally unexplainably inserted into sentences whose relevance to the preceding sentences in the reader’s mind was dead and buried and decayed long before the arrival of the period.
But most remarkable of all were the wondrous and unexplained proliferations of abstract categories that seemed freighted with special meanings that never got stated and whose content could only be guessed at; these piled one after another so fast and so close that Phædrus knew he had no possible way of understanding what was before him, much less take issue with it.
At first Phædrus presumed the reason for the difficulty was that all this was over his head. The articles assumed a certain basic learning which he didn’t have. Then, however, he noticed that some of the articles were written for audiences that couldn’t possibly have this background, and this hypothesis was weakened.
His second hypothesis was that the Chairman was a “technician”, a phrase he used for a writer so deeply involved in his field that he’d lost the ability to communicate with people outside. But if this were so, why was the committee given such a general, nontechnical title as “Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods”? And the Chairman didn’t have the personality of a technician. So that hypothesis was weak too.
In time, Phædrus abandoned the labor of pounding his head against the Chairman’s rhetoric and tried to discover more about the background of the committee, hoping that would explain what this was all about. This, it turned out, was the correct approach. He began to see what his t
rouble was.
The Chairman’s statements were guarded… guarded by enormous, labyrinthine fortifications that went on and on with such complexity and massiveness it was almost impossible to discover what in the world it was inside them he was guarding. The inscrutability of all this was the kind of inscrutability you have when you suddenly enter a room where a furious argument has just ended. Everyone is quiet. No one is talking.
I have one tiny fragment of Phædrus standing in the stone corridor of a building, evidently within the University of Chicago, addressing the assistant chairman of the committee, like a detective at the end of a movie, saying: “In your description of the committee, you have omitted one important name.”
“Yes?” says the assistant chairman.
“Yes”, says Phædrus omnisciently, “ — Aristotle — ”
The assistant chairman is shocked for a moment, then, almost like a culprit who has been discovered but feels no guilt, laughs loud and long.
“Oh, I see”, he says. “You didn’t know — anything about. — ” Then he thinks better of what he is going to say and decides not to say anything more.
We arrive at the turnoff to Crater Lake and go up a neat road into the National Park… clean, tidy and preserved. It really shouldn’t be any other way, but this doesn’t win any prizes for Quality either. It turns it into a museum. This is how it was before the white man came… beautiful lava flows, and scrawny trees, and not a beer can anywhere… but now that the white man is here, it looks fake. Maybe the National Park Service should set just one pile of beer cans in the middle of all that lava and then it would come to life. The absence of beer cans is distracting.
At the lake we stop and stretch and mingle affably with the small crowd of tourists holding cameras and children yelling, “Don’t go too close!” and see cars and campers with all different license plates, and see the Crater Lake with a feeling of “Well, there it is”, just as the pictures show. I watch the other tourists, all of whom seem to have out-of-place looks too. I have no resentment at all this, just a feeling that it’s all unreal and that the quality of the lake is smothered by the fact that it’s so pointed to. You point to something as having Quality and the Quality tends to go away. Quality is what you see out of the corner of your eye, and so I look at the lake below but feel the peculiar quality from the chill, almost frigid sunlight behind me, and the almost motionless wind.
“Why did we come here?” Chris says.
“To see the lake.”
He doesn’t like this. He senses falseness and frowns deep, trying to find the right question to expose it. “I just hate this”, he says.
A tourist lady looks at him with surprise, then resentment.
“Well, what can we do, Chris?” I ask. “We just have to keep going until we find out what’s wrong or find out why we don’t know what’s wrong. Do you see that?”
He doesn’t answer. The lady pretends not to be listening, but her motionlessness reveals that she is. We walk toward the motorcycle, and I try to think of something, but nothing comes. I see he’s crying a little and now looks away to prevent me from seeing it.
We wind down out of the park to the south.
I said the assistant chairman for the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods was shocked. What he was so shocked about was that Phædrus didn’t know he was at the locus of what is probably the most famous academic controversy of the century, what a California university president described as the last attempt in history to change the course of an entire university.
Phædrus’ reading turned up a brief history of that famous revolt against empirical education that had taken place in the early thirties. The Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study of Methods was a vestige of that attempt. The leaders of the revolt were Robert Maynard Hutchins, who had become president of the University of Chicago; Mortimer Adler, whose work on the psychological background of the law of evidence was somewhat similar to work being done at Yale by Hutchins; Scott Buchanan, a philosopher and mathematician; and most important of all for Phædrus, the present chairman of the committee, who was then a Columbia University Spinozist and medievalist.
Adler’s study of evidence, cross-fertilized by a reading of classics of the Western world, resulted in a conviction that human wisdom had advanced relatively little in recent times. He consistently harked back to St. Thomas Aquinas, who had taken Plato and Aristotle and made them part of his medieval synthesis of Greek philosophy and Christian faith. The work of Aquinas and of the Greeks, as interpreted by Aquinas, was to Adler the capstone of the Western intellectual heritage. Therefore they provided a measuring rod for anyone seeking the good books.
In the Aristotelian tradition as interpreted by the medieval scholastics, man is counted a rational animal, capable of seeking and defining the good life and achieving it. When this “first principle” about the nature of man was accepted by the president of the University of Chicago, it was inevitable that it would have educational repercussions. The famous University of Chicago Great Books program and the reorganization of the University structure along Aristotelian lines and the establishment of the “College”, in which a reading of classics was initiated in fifteen-year-old students, were some of the results.
Hutchins had rejected the idea that an empirical scientific education could automatically produce a “good” education. Science is “value free.” The inability of science to grasp Quality, as an object of enquiry, makes it impossible for science to provide a scale of values.
Adler and Hutchins were concerned fundamentally with the “oughts” of life, with values, with Quality and with the foundations of Quality in theoretical philosophy. Thus they had apparently been traveling in the same direction as Phædrus but had somehow ended with Aristotle and stopped there.
There was a clash.
Even those who were willing to admit Hutchins’ preoccupation with Quality were unwilling to grant the final authority to the Aristotelian tradition to define values. They insisted that no values can be fixed, and that a valid modern philosophy need not reckon with ideas as they are expressed in the books of ancient and medieval times. The whole business seemed to many of them merely a new and pretentious jargon of weasel concepts.
Phædrus didn’t know quite what to make of this clash. But it certainly seemed to be close to the area he wished to work in. He also felt that no values can be fixed but that this is no reason why values should be ignored or that values do not exist as reality. He also felt antagonistic to the Aristotelian tradition as a definer of values, but he didn’t feel this tradition should be left unreckoned with. The answer to all this was somehow deeply enmeshed in it and he wanted to know more.
Of the four who had created such a furor, the present chairman of the committee was the only one now left. Perhaps because of this reduction in rank, perhaps for other reasons, his reputation among persons Phædrus talked to wasn’t one of geniality. His geniality was confirmed by none and sharply refuted by two, one the head of a major University department who described him as a “holy terror” and another who held a graduate degree in philosophy from the University of Chicago who said the chairman was well known for graduating only carbon copies of himself. Neither of these advisers was by nature vindictive and Phædrus felt what they said was true. This was further confirmed by a discovery made at the department office. He wanted to talk to two graduates of the committee to find out more of what it was about, and had been told that the committee had granted only two Ph.D.’s in its history. Apparently to find room in the sun for a reality of Quality he would have to fight and overcome the head of his own committee, whose Aristotelian outlook made it impossible even to get started and whose temperament appeared to be extremely intolerant of opposing ideas. It all added up to a very gloomy picture.
He then sat down and penned, to the Chairman of the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Methods at the University of Chicago, a letter which can only be described as a provocation to dismissal, in which the writer refuses
to skulk quietly out the back door but instead creates a scene of such proportions the opposition is forced to throw him out the front door, thus giving weight to the provocation it didn’t formerly have. Afterward he picks himself up out of the street and, after making sure the door is completely closed, shakes his fist at it, dusts himself off and says, “Oh well, I tried”, and in this way absolves his conscience.
Phædrus’ provocation informed the Chairman that his substantive field was now philosophy, not English composition. However, he said, the division of study into substantive and methodological fields was an outgrowth of the Aristotelian dichotomy of form and substance, which nondualists had little use for, the two being identical.
He said he wasn’t sure, but the thesis on Quality appeared to turn into an anti-Aristotelian thesis. If this was true he had chosen an appropriate place to present it. Great Universities proceeded in a Hegelian fashion and any school which could not accept a thesis contradicting its fundamental tenets was in a rut. This, Phædrus claimed, was the thesis the University of Chicago was waiting for.
He admitted the claim was grandiose and that value judgments were actually impossible for him to make since no person could be an impartial judge of his own cause. But if someone else were to produce a thesis which purported to be a major breakthrough between Eastern and Western philosophy, between religious mysticism and scientific positivism, he would think it of major historic importance, a thesis which would place the University miles ahead. In any event, he said, no one was really accepted in Chicago until he’d rubbed someone out. It was time Aristotle got his.
Just outrageous.
And not just provocation to dismissal either. What comes through even more strongly is megalomania, delusions of grandeur, of complete loss of ability to understand the effect of what he was saying on others. He had become so caught up in his own world of Quality metaphysics he couldn’t see outside it anymore, and since no one else understood this world, he was already done for.