“In my sleep, you mean.”
“No, about the mountain ”
Something is odd here. “I don’t know anything about a mountain, Chris.”
“Well, you talked all night about it. You said at the top of the mountain we’d see everything. You said you were going to meet me there.”
I think he’s been dreaming. “How could I meet you there when I’m already with you?”
“I don’t know. You said it.” He looks upset. “You sounded like you were drunk or something.”
He’s still half asleep. I’d better let him wake up peacefully. But I’m thirsty and remember I left the canteen behind, thinking we’d find enough water as we traveled. Dumb. There’ll be no breakfast now until we’re up over the ridge and far enough down to the other side where we can find a spring. “We’d better pack up and go”, I say, “if we’re going to get some water for breakfast.” It’s already warm out and probably will be hot this afternoon.
The tent comes down easily and I’m pleased to see that everything stayed dry. In a half-hour we’re packed. Now except for beaten-down grass the area looks as if no one had been here.
We still have a lot of climbing to do, but on the trail we discover it’s easier than yesterday. We’re getting to the rounded upper portion of the ridge and the slope isn’t as steep. It looks as though the pines have never been cut here. All direct light is shut out from the forest floor and there’s no underbrush at all. Just a springy floor of needles that’s open and spacious and easy hiking.
Time to get on with the Chautauqua and the second wave of crystallization, the metaphysical one.
This was brought about in response to Ph?drus’ wild meanderings about Quality when the English faculty at Bozeman, informed of their squareness, presented him with a reasonable question: “Does this undefined ‘quality’ of yours exist in the things we observe?” they asked. “Or is it subjective, existing only in the observer?” It was a simple, normal enough question, and there was no hurry for an answer.
Hah. There was no need for hurry. It was a finisher-offer, a knockdown question, a haymaker, a Saturday- night special… the kind you don’t recover from.
Because if Quality exists in the object, then you must explain just why scientific instruments are unable to detect it. You must suggest instruments that will detect it, or live with the explanation that instruments don’t detect it because your whole Quality concept, to put it politely, is a large pile of nonsense.
On the other hand, if Quality is subjective, existing only in the observer, then this Quality that you make so much of is just a fancy name for whatever you like.
What Ph?drus had been presented with by the faculty of the English department of Montana State College was an ancient logical construct known as a dilemma. A dilemma, which is Greek for “two premises”, has been likened to the front end of an angry and charging bull.
If he accepted the premise that Quality was objective, he was impaled on one horn of the dilemma. If he accepted the other premise that Quality was subjective, he was impaled on the other horn. Either Quality is objective or subjective, therefore he was impaled no matter how he answered.
He noticed that from a number of faculty members he was receiving some good-natured smiles.
Ph?drus, however, because of his training in logic, was aware that every dilemma affords not two but three classic refutations, and he also knew of a few that weren’t so classic, so he smiled back. He could take the left horn and refute the idea that objectivity implied scientific detectability. Or, he could take the right horn, and refute the idea that subjectivity implies “anything you like.” Or he could go between the horns and deny that subjectivity and objectivity are the only choices. You may be sure he tested out all three.
In addition to these three classical logical refutations there are some illogical, “rhetorical” ones. Ph?drus, being a rhetorician, had these available too.
One may throw sand in the bull’s eyes. He had already done this with his statement that lack of knowledge of what Quality is constitutes incompetence. It’s an old rule of logic that the competence of a speaker has no relevance to the truth of what he says, and so talk of incompetence was pure sand. The world’s biggest fool can say the sun is shining, but that doesn’t make it dark out. Socrates, that ancient enemy of rhetorical argument, would have sent Ph?drus flying for this one, saying, “Yes, I accept your premise that I’m incompetent on the matter of Quality. Now please show an incompetent old man what Quality is. Otherwise, how am I to improve?” Ph?drus would have been allowed to stew around for a few minutes, and then been flattened with questions that proved he didn’t know what Quality was either and was, by his own standards, incompetent.
One may attempt to sing the bull to sleep. Ph?drus 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. Ph?drus 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 Ph?drus’ 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.
