"Actually the issue before him was not whether there should be a metaphysics of
Quality or not.
There already is a metaphysics of quality. A subject-object metaphysics is in
fact a metaphysics
in which the first division of Quality - the first slice of undivided
experience -
is into subjects and objects. Once you have made that slice, all of human
experience
is supposed to fit into one of these two boxes. The trouble is, it doesn't.
What he
had seen is that there is a metaphysical box that sits above these two boxes,
Quality
itself. And once he'd seen this he also saw a huge number of ways in which
Quality
can be divided. Subjects and objects are just one of the ways.
The question was, which way was best?
Different metaphysical ways of dividing up reality have, over the centuries,
tended to fan out into a structure that resembles a book on chess openings.
If you say that the world is 'one,' then somebody can ask, 'Then why does it
look like more than one?' And if you answer that it is due to faulty
perception,
he can ask, 'How do you know which perception is faulty and which is real?'
Then you have to answer that, and so on.
Trying to create a perfect metaphysics is like trying to create a perfect
chess strategy, one that will win every time. You can't do it. It's out of
the range of human capability. No matter what position you take on a
metaphysical question someone will always start masking questions that
will lead to more positions that lead to more questions in this endless
intellectual chess game. The game is supposed to stop when it is agreed
that a particular line of reasoning is illogical. This is supposed to be
similar to a checkmate. But conflicting positions go on for centuries
without any such checkmate being agreed upon.
Phaedrus had spent an enormous amount of time following what turned out
to be lousy openings. A particularly large amount of this time had been
spent trying to lay down a first line of division between the classic
and romantic aspects of the universe he'd emphasized in his first book.
In that book his purpose had been to show how Quality could unite the two.
But the fact that Quality was the best way of uniting the two was no
guarantee that the reverse was true - that the classic-romantic split
was the best way of dividing Quality. It wasn't. For example, American
Indian mysticism is the same platypus in a world divided primarily into
classic and romantic patterns as under a subject-object division. When
an American Indian
goes into isolation and fasts in order to achieve a vision, the vision
he seeks is not a romantic understanding of the surface beauty of the world.
Neither is it a vision of the world's classic intellectual form. It is
something else. Since this whole metaphysics had started with an attempt
to explain Indian mysticism Phaedrus finally abandoned this classic-romantic
split as a choice for a primary division of the Metaphysics of Quality.
The division he finally settled on was one he didn't really choose in any
deliberative way. It was more as if it chose him. He'd been reading
Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture without any particular search in mind,
when a relatively minor anecdote stopped him. It stayed with him for weeks.
He couldn't get it out of his mind.
The anecdote was a case-history in which there was a conflict of morality.
It concerned a Pueblo Indian who lived in Zuni, New Mexico, in the
nineteenth century. Like a Zen koan (which also originally meant
'case-history')
the anecdote didn't have any single right answer but rather a number of
possible meanings that kept drawing Phaedrus deeper and deeper into the moral
situation that was involved."
"The story was of a struggle between good and evil, but the koan it raised was,
'Which was which?'
Was this person really good or was he perhaps also evil?"
"Phaedrus thought that the story of the old Pueblo Indian, seen in this way,
made deep and broad sense,
and justified the enormous feeling of drama that it produced. After many months
of thinking about it,
he was left with a reward of two terms: Dynamic good and static good, which
became the basic division
of his emerging Metaphysics of Quality."
-Lila chptr 9
"But in the Metaphysics of Quality, what is evolving isn't patterns of atoms.
What's evolving is static patterns of value, and while that doesn't change
the data of evolution it completely up-ends the interpretation that can be
given to evolution.
Historically this assumption by a subject-object metaphysics that all the world
is composed of
substance put a strain on the Theory of Evolution right from its beginning. At
the time of its
origin it wasn't yet understood that at the level of photons and electrons and
other small
particles the laws of cause and effect no longer apply; that electrons and
photons simply
appear and disappear without individual predictability and without individual
cause. So today
we have as a result a theory of evolution in which 'man' is ruthlessly
controlled by the
cause-and-effect laws of the universe while the particles of his body are not.
The absurdity
of this seems to be neglected. The problem doesn't lie in anyone's department.
Physicists
can ignore it because they are not concerned with man. Social scientists can
ignore it
because they are not concerned with subatomic particles.
So although modern physics pulled the rug out from under the deterministic
explanation
of evolution many decades ago, it has survived by default because no other more
plausible
explanation has been available. But right from the beginning, substance-caused
evolution
has always had a puzzling aspect that it has never been able to eliminate. It
goes into
many volumes about how the fittest survive but never once answers the question
of why."
-Lila chptr 12
"But although the four systems are exhaustive they are not exclusive. They all
operate at the same time and in ways that are almost independent of each other.
This classification of patterns is not very original, but the Metaphysics of
Quality allows an assertion about them that is unusual. It says they are not
continuous. They are discreet. They have very little to do with one another.
Although each higher level is built on a lower one it is not an extension of
that lower level. Quite the contrary. The higher level can often be seen to
be in opposition to the lower level, dominating it, controlling it where
possible for its own purposes.
This observation is impossible in a substance-dominated metaphysics where
everything has to be an
extension of matter. But now atoms and molecules are just one of four levels
of static patterns of quality and there is no intellectual requirement that
any level dominate the other three."
-Lila chpter12
". There is the materialist school that says reality is all matter, which
creates mind.
There is the idealist school that says it is all mind, which creates matter.
There is
the positivist school which says this argument could go on forever; drop the
subject.
That would be nice if you could, but unfortunately it is one of the most
tormenting
problems of the physics to which positivism looks for guidance. The torment
occurs
not because of anything discovered in the laboratory. Data are data. It is the
intellectual framework with which one deals with the data that is at fault. The
fault is within subject-object metaphysics itself.
A conventional subject-object metaphysics uses the same four static patterns as
the Metaphysics of Quality, dividing them into two groups of two:
inorganic-biological
patterns called 'matter,' and social-intellectual patterns called 'mind.' But
this
division is the source of the problem. When a subject-object metaphysics
regards
matter and mind as eternally separate and eternally unalike, it creates a
platypus bigger than the solar system.
It has to make this fatal division because it gives top position in its
structure to subjects and objects. Everything has got to be object or subject,
substance or non-substance, because that's the primary division of the
universe.
Inorganic-biological patterns are composed of 'substance,' and are therefore
'objective.' Social-intellectual patterns are not composed of 'substance' and
are therefore called 'subjective.' Then, having made this arbitrary division
based on 'substance,' conventional metaphysics then asks, 'What is the
relationship between mind and matter, between subject and object?'
One answer is to fudge both mind and matter and the whole question that
goes with them into another platypus called 'man.' 'Man' has a body
(and therefore is not himself a body) and he also has a mind
(and therefore is not himself a mind). But if one asks what is
this 'man' (which is not a body and not a mind) one doesn't
come up with anything. There isn't any 'man' independent of
the patterns. Man is the patterns.
This fictitious 'man' has many synonyms; 'mankind,' 'people,' 'the public,'
and even such pronouns as 'I,' 'he,' and 'they.' Our language is so
organized around them and they are so convenient to use it is impossible
to get rid of them. There is really no need to. Like 'substance'
they can be used as long as it is remembered that they're terms for
collections of patterns and not some independent primary
reality of their own."
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