The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phædrus had called Quality in his first book, is not a metaphysical chess piece. Quality doesn’t have to be defined. You understand it without definition, ahead of definition. Quality is a direct experience independent of and prior to intellectual abstractions.
Quality is indivisible, undefinable and unknowable in the sense that there is a knower and a known, but a metaphysics can be none of these things. A metaphysics must be divisible, definable and knowable, or there isn’t any metaphysics. Since a metaphysics is essentially a kind of dialectical definition and since Quality is essentially outside definition, this means that a Metaphysics of Quality is essentially a contradiction in terms, a logical absurdity.
It would be almost like a mathematical definition of randomness. The more you try to say what randomness is the less random it becomes. Or zero, or space for that matter. Today these terms have almost nothing to do with nothing. Zero and space are complex relationships of somethingness. If he said anything about the scientific nature of mystic understanding, science might benefit but the actual mystic understanding would, if anything, be injured. If he really wanted to do Quality a favor he should just leave it alone.
What made all this so formidable to Phædrus was that he himself had insisted in his book that Quality cannot be defined. Yet here he was about to define it. Was this some kind of a sell-out? His mind went over this many times.
A part of it said, Don’t do it. You’ll get into nothing but trouble. You’re just going to start up a thousand dumb arguments about something that was perfectly clear until you came along. You’re going to make ten-thousand opponents and zero friends because the moment you open your mouth to say one thing about the nature of reality you automatically have a whole set of enemies who’ve already said reality is something else.
The trouble was, this was only one part of himself talking. There was another part that kept saying, Ahh, do it anyway. It’s interesting. This was the intellectual part that didn’t like undefined things, and telling it not to define Quality was like telling a fat man to stay out of the refrigerator, or an alcoholic to stay out of bars. To the intellect the process of defining Quality has a compulsive quality of its own. It produces a certain excitement even though it leaves a hangover afterward, like too many cigarettes, or a party that has lasted too long. Or Lila last night. It isn’t anything of lasting beauty; no joy forever. What would you call it? Degeneracy, he guessed. Writing a metaphysics is, in the strictest mystic sense, a degenerate activity.
But the answer to all this, he thought, was that a ruthless, doctrinaire avoidance of degeneracy is a degeneracy of another sort. That’s the degeneracy fanatics are made of. Purity, identified, ceases to be purity. Objections to pollution are a form of pollution. The only person who doesn’t pollute the mystic reality of the world with fixed metaphysical meanings is a person who hasn’t yet been born — and to whose birth no thought has been given. The rest of us have to settle for being something less pure. Getting drunk and picking up bar-ladies and writing metaphysics is a part of life.
That was all he had to say to the mystic objections to a Metaphysics of Quality. He next turned to those of logical positivism:
Positivism is a philosophy that emphasizes science as the only source of knowledge. It sharply distinguishes between fact and value, and is hostile to religion and traditional metaphysics. It is an outgrowth of empiricism, the idea that all knowledge must come from experience, and is suspicious of any thought, even a scientific statement, that is incapable of being reduced to direct observation. Philosophy, as far as positivism is concerned, is limited to the analysis of scientific language.
Phædrus had taken a course in symbolic logic from a member of logical positivism’s famed Vienna circle, Herbert Feigl, and he remembered being fascinated by the possibility of a logic that could extend mathematical precision to solve problems of philosophy and other areas. But even then the assertion that metaphysics is meaningless sounded false to him. As long as you’re inside a logical, coherent universe of thought you can’t escape metaphysics. Logical positivism’s criteria for meaningfulness were pure metaphysics, he thought.
But it didn’t matter. The Metaphysics of Quality not only passes the logical positivists' tests for meaningfulness, it passes them with the highest marks. The Metaphysics of Quality restates the empirical basis of logical positivism with more precision, more inclusiveness, more explanatory power than it has previously had. It says that values are not outside of the experience that logical positivism limits itself to. They are the essence of this experience. Values are more empirical, in fact, than subjects or objects.
Any person of any philosophic persuasion who sits on a hot stove will verify without any intellectual argument whatsoever that he is in an undeniably low-quality situation: that the value of his predicament is negative. This low quality is not just a vague, woolly-headed, crypto-religious, metaphysical abstraction. It is an experience. It is not a judgment about an experience. It is not a description of experience. The value itself is an experience. As such it is completely predictable. It is verifiable by anyone who cares to do so. It is reproducible. Of all experience it is the least ambiguous, least mistakable there is. Later the person may generate some oaths to describe this low value, but the value will always come first, the oaths second. Without the primary low valuation, the secondary oaths will not follow.
The reason for hammering on this so hard is that we have a culturally inherited blind spot here. Our culture teaches us to think it is the hot stove that directly causes the oaths. It teaches that the low values are a property of the person uttering the oaths.
Not so. The value is between the stove and the oaths. Between the subject and the object lies the value. This value is more immediate, more directly sensed than any self or any object to which it might be later assigned. It is more real than the stove. Whether the stove is the cause of the low quality or whether possibly something else is the cause is not yet absolutely certain. But that the quality is low is absolutely certain. It is the primary empirical reality from which such things as stoves and heat and oaths and self are later intellectually constructed.
Once this primary relationship is cleared up an awful lot of mysteries get solved. The reason values seem so woolly-headed to empiricists is that empiricists keep trying to assign them to subjects or objects. You can’t do it. You get all mixed up because values don’t belong to either group. They are a separate category all their own.
What the Metaphysics of Quality would do is take this separate category, Quality, and show how it contains within itself both subjects and objects. The Metaphysics of Quality would show how things become enormously more coherent — fabulously more coherent — when you start with an assumption that Quality is the primary empirical reality of the world… but showing that, of course, was a very big job… He noticed a strange noise, unlike any boat sound he was used to. He listened for a while and then realized that it was coming from the forecabin. It was Lila. She was snoring. He heard her mutter something. Then she was quiet again…