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 Ph?drus 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 Ph?drus knew he had no possible way of understanding what was before him, much less take issue with it.
At first Ph?drus 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, Ph?drus 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 trouble 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 Ph?drus 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 Ph?drus 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 Ph?drus 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.
Ph?drus’ 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 Ph?drus, 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
