Oop! There he goes. He’s fallen down. He’s not getting up. It was an awfully neat fall, not very accidental- looking. Now he looks at me with hurt and anger, searching for condemnation from me. I don’t show him any. I sit down next to him and see he’s almost defeated.
“Well”, I say, “we can stop here, or we can go ahead, or we can go back. Which do you want to do?”
“I don’t care”, he says, “I don’t want to — ”
“You don’t want to what?”
“I don’t care!” he says, angrily.
“Then since you don’t care, we’ll keep on going”, I say, trapping him.
“I don’t like this trip”, he says. “It isn’t any fun. I thought it was going to be fun.”
Some anger catches me off guard too. “That may be true”, I reply, “but it’s a hell of a thing to say.”
I see a sudden flick of fear in his eyes as he gets up.
We go on.
The sky over the other wall of the canyon has become overcast, and the wind in the pines around us has become cool and ominous.
At least the coolness makes it easier hiking.
I was talking about the first wave of crystallization outside of rhetoric that resulted from Ph?drus’ refusal to define Quality. He had to answer the question, If you can’t define it, what makes you think it exists?
His answer was an old one belonging to a philosophic school that called itself realism. “A thing exists”, he said, “if a world without it can’t function normally. If we can show that a world without Quality functions abnormally, then we have shown that Quality exists, whether it’s defined or not.” He thereupon proceeded to subtract Quality from a description of the world as we know it.
The first casualty from such a subtraction, he said, would be the fine arts. If you can’t distinguish between good and bad in the arts they disappear. There’s no point in hanging a painting on the wall when the bare wall looks just as good. There’s no point to symphonies, when scratches from the record or hum from the record player sound just as good.
Poetry would disappear, since it seldom makes sense and has no practical value. And interestingly, comedy would vanish too. No one would understand the jokes, since the difference between humor and no humor is pure Quality.
Next he made sports disappear. Football, baseball, games of every sort would vanish. The scores would no longer be a measurement of anything meaningful, but simply empty statistics, like the number of stones in a pile of gravel. Who would attend them? Who would play?
Next he subtracted Quality from the marketplace and predicted the changes that would take place. Since quality of flavor would be meaningless, supermarkets would carry only basic grains such as rice, cornmeal, soybeans and flour; possibly also some ungraded meat, milk for weaning infants and vitamin and mineral supplements to make up deficiencies. Alcoholic beverages, tea, coffee and tobacco would vanish. So would movies, dances, plays and parties. We would all use public transportation. We would all wear G.I. shoes.
A huge proportion of us would be out of work, but this would probably be temporary until we relocated in essential non-Quality work. Applied science and technology would be drastically changed, but pure science, mathematics, philosophy and particularly logic would be unchanged.
Ph?drus found this last to be extremely interesting. The purely intellectual pursuits were the least affected by the subtraction of Quality. If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged. That was odd. Why would that be?
He didn’t know, but he did know that by subtracting Quality from a picture of the world as we know it, he’d revealed a magnitude of importance of this term he hadn’t known was there. The world can function without it, but life would be so dull as to be hardly worth living. In fact it wouldn’t be worth living. The term worth is a Quality term. Life would just be living without any values or purpose at all.
He looked back over the distance this line of thought had taken him and decided he’d certainly proved his point. Since the world obviously doesn’t function normally when Quality is subtracted, Quality exists, whether it’s defined or not.
After conjuring up this vision of a Qualityless world, he was soon attracted to its resemblance to a number of social situations he had already read about. Ancient Sparta came to mind, Communist Russia and her satellites. Communist China, the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley and the 1984 of George Orwell. He also remembered people from his own experience who would have endorsed this Qualityless world. The same ones who tried to make him quit smoking. They wanted rational reasons for his smoking and, when he didn’t have any, acted very superior, as though he’d lost face or something. They had to have reasons and plans and solutions for everything. They were his own kind. The kind he was now attacking. And he searched for a long time for a suitable name to sum up just what characterized them, so as to get a handle on this Qualityless world.
It was intellectual primarily, but it wasn’t just intelligence that was fundamental. It was a certain basic attitude about the way the world was, a presumptive vision that it ran according to laws… reason… and that man’s improvement lay chiefly through the discovery of these laws of reason and application of them toward satisfaction of his own desires. It was this faith that held everything together. He squinted at this vision of a Qualityless world for a while, conjured up more details, thought about it, and then squinted some more and thought some more and then finally circled back to where he was before.
Squareness.
That’s the look. That sums it. Squareness. When you subtract quality you get squareness. Absence of Quality is the essence of squareness.
Some artist friends with whom he had once traveled across the United States came to mind. They were Negroes, who had always been complaining about just this Qualitylessness he was describing. Square. That was their word for it. Way back long ago before the mass media had picked it up and given it national white usage they had called all that intellectual stuff square and had wanted nothing to do with it. And there had been a fantastic mismeshing of conversations and attitudes between him and them because he was such a prime example of the squareness they were talking about. The more he had tried to pin them down on what they were talking about the vaguer they had gotten. Now with this Quality he seemed to say the same thing and talk as vaguely as they did, even though what he talked about was as hard and clear and solid as any rationally defined entity he’d ever dealt with.
Quality. That’s what they’d been talking about all the time. “Man, will you just please, kindly dig it”, he remembered one of them saying, “and hold up on all those wonderful seven-dollar questions? If you got to ask what is it all the time, you’ll never get time to know.” Soul. Quality. The same?
The wave of crystallization rolled ahead. He was seeing two worlds, simultaneously. On the intellectual side, the square side, he saw now that Quality was a cleavage term. What every intellectual analyst looks for. You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two… hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic… and the split is clean. There’s no mess. No slop. No little items that could be one way or the other. Not just a skilled break but a very lucky break. Sometimes the best analysts, working with the most obvious lines of cleavage, can tap and get nothing but a pile of trash. And yet here was Quality; a tiny, almost unnoticeable fault line; a line of illogic in our concept of the universe; and you tapped it, and the whole universe came apart, so neatly it was almost unbelievable. He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it. That master diamond cutter. He would see. Hold Quality undefined. That was the secret.
Ph?drus wrote, with some beginning awareness that he was involved in a strange kind of intellectual suicide, “Squareness may be succinctly and yet thoroughly defined as an inability to see quality before it’s been intellectually defined, that is, before it gets all chopped up into words. We have proved that quality, though undefined, exists. Its existence can be seen empirically in the classroom, and can be demonstrated logically by showing that a world without it cannot exist as we know it. What remains to be seen, the thing to be analyzed, is not quality, but those peculiar habits of thought called ‘squareness’ that sometimes prevent us from seeing it.”
Thus did he seek to turn the attack. The subject for analysis, the patient on the table, was no longer Quality, but analysis itself. Quality was healthy and in good shape. Analysis, however, seemed to have something wrong with it that prevented it from seeing the obvious.
