Bo said:
"Teaching quality" how exactly was that carried out? "To-day well have a
dynamic math lesson without static rules and fixed numbers ..." There is only
one way to teach quality and that is to teach the MOQ where intellect-as-SOM is
the final stage before....
dmb quotes from the classroom scenes in ZAMM:
And that door leads to Sarah's office. Sarah! Now it comes down! She came
trotting by with her watering pot between those two doors, going from the
corridor to her office, and she said, ``I hope you are teaching Quality to your
students.'' This in a la-de-da, singsong voice of a lady in her final year
before retirement about to water her plants. That was the moment it all
started. That was the seed crystal.
The one sentence ``I hope you are teaching Quality to your students'' was said
to him, and within a matter of a few months, growing so fast you could almost
see it grow, came an enormous, intricate, highly structured mass of thought,
formed as if by magic. (ZAMM p. 180)
Others wondered at the time, ``Why should he get so excited about `quality'?''
But they saw only the word and its rhetoric context. They didn't see his past
despair over abstract questions of existence itself that he had abandoned in
defeat. If anyone else had asked, What is Quality? it would have been just
another question. But when he asked it, because of his past, it spread out for
him like waves in all directions simultaneously, not in a hierarchic structure,
but in a concentric one. At the center, generating the waves, was Quality.
(ZAMM p. 210)
What you're supposed to do in most freshman-rhetoric courses is to read a
little essay or short story, discuss how the writer has done certain little
things to achieve certain little effects, and then have the students write an
imitative little essay or short story to see if they can do the same little
things. He tried this over and over again but it never jelled. The students
seldom achieved anything, as a result of this calculated mimicry, that was
remotely close to the models he'd given them. More often their writing got
worse. It seemed as though every rule he honestly tried to discover with them
and learn with them was so full of exceptions and contradictions and
qualifications and confusions that he wished he'd never come across the rule in
the first place. A student would always ask how the rule would apply in a
certain special circumstance. Phædrus would then have the choice of trying to
fake through a made-up explanation of how it worked, or follow the selfless
route and say what he really thought. And what he really thought was that the
rule was pasted on to the writing after the writing was all done. It was post
hoc, after the fact, instead of prior to the fact. And he became convinced that
all the writers the students were supposed to mimic wrote without rules,
putting down whatever sounded right, then going back to see if it still sounded
right and changing it if it didn't. There were some who apparently wrote with
calculating premeditation because that's the way their product looked. But that
seemed to him to be a very poor way to look. It had a certain syrup, as
Gertrude Stein once said, but it didn't pour. But how're you to teach something
that isn't premeditated? It was a seemingly impossible requirement. (ZAMM p.
176)
To reinforce the idea that they already knew what Quality was he developed a
routine in which he read four student papers in class and had everyone rank
them in estimated order of Quality on a slip of paper. He did the same himself.
He collected the slips, tallied them on the blackboard and averaged the
rankings for an overall class opinion. Then he would reveal his own rankings,
and this would almost always be close to, if not identical with the class
average. Where there were differences it was usually because two papers were
close in quality. At first the classes were excited by this exercise, but as
time went on they became bored. What he meant by Quality was obvious. They
obviously knew what it was too, and so they lost interest in listening. Their
question now was ``All right, we know what Quality is. How do we get it?'' Now,
at last, the standard rhetoric texts came into their own. The principles
expounded in them were no longer rules to rebel against, not ultimates in
themselves, but just techniques, gimmicks, for producing what really counted
and stood independently of the techniques...Quality. What had started out as a
heresy from traditional rhetoric turned into a beautiful introduction to it.
He singled out aspects of Quality such as unity, vividness, authority, economy,
sensitivity, clarity, emphasis, flow, suspense, brilliance, precision,
proportion, depth and so on; kept each of these as poorly defined as Quality
itself, but demonstrated them by the same class reading techniques. He showed
how the aspect of Quality called unity, the hanging-togetherness of a story,
could be improved with a technique called an outline. The authority of an
argument could be jacked up with a technique called footnotes, which gives
authoritative reference. Outlines and footnotes are standard things taught in
all freshman composition classes, but now as devices for improving Quality they
had a purpose. (ZAMM, pp. 207-8)
Now that was over with. By reversing a basic rule that all things which are to
be taught must first be defined, he had found a way out of all this. He was
pointing to no principle, no rule of good writing, no theory...but he was
pointing to something, nevertheless, that was very real, whose reality they
couldn't deny. The vacuum that had been created by the withholding of grades
was suddenly filled with the positive goal of Quality, and the whole thing fit
together. Students, astonished, came by his office and said, ``I used to just
hate English. Now I spend more time on it than anything else.'' Not just one or
two. Many. The whole Quality concept was beautiful. It worked. It was that
mysterious, individual, internal goal of each creative person, on the
blackboard at last. (ZAMM, p. 209)
BUT HE BEGAN TO WONDER WHY IT WORKED AND SOON REALIZED THAT THIS WAS NO MERE
GIMMMICK AND THAT HE’D STUMBLED ONTO SOMETHING BIG.
Time to get on with the Chautauqua and the second wave of crystallization, the
metaphysical one.
This was brought about in response to Phædrus' 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 Phædrus 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. (ZAMM pp. 228-9)
The knife of subjectivity-and-objectivity had cut Quality in two and killed it
as a working concept. If he was going to save it, he couldn't let that knife
get it. And really, the Quality he was talking about wasn't classic Quality or
romantic Quality. It was beyond both of them. And by God, it wasn't subjective
or objective either, it was beyond both of those categories. Actually this
whole dilemma of subjectivity-objectivity, of mind-matter, with relationship to
Quality was unfair. That mind-matter relationship has been an intellectual
hang-up for centuries. They were just putting that hang-up on top of Quality to
drag Quality down. How could he say whether Quality was mind or matter when
there was no logical clarity as to what was mind and what was matter in the
first place? And so: he rejected the left horn. Quality is not objective, he
said. It doesn't reside in the material world. Then: he rejected the right
horn. Quality is not subjective, he said. It doesn't reside merely in the mind.
And finally: Phædrus, following a path that to his knowledge had never been
taken before in the history of Western thought, went straight between the horns
of the subjectivity-objectivity dilemma and said Quality is neither a part of
mind, nor is it a part of matter. It is a third entity which is independent of
the two. (ZAMM p. 237)
HE DIDN’T REALIZE IT AT THE TIME BUT WILLIAM JAMES HAD SAID SOMETHING VERY
SIMILAR
I don't know how much thought passed before he arrived at this, but eventually
he saw that Quality couldn't be independently related with either the subject
or the object but could be found only in the relationship of the two with each
other. It is the point at which subject and object meet. That sounded warm.
Quality is not a thing. It is an event. Warmer. It is the event at which the
subject becomes aware of the object. And because without objects there can be
no subject...because the objects create the subject's awareness of
himself...Quality is the event at which awareness of both subjects and objects
is made possible. Hot.
Now he knew it was coming.
This means Quality is not just the result of a collision between subject and
object. The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the
Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects,
which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Quality!
Now he had that whole damned evil dilemma by the throat. The dilemma all the
time had this unseen vile presumption in it, for which there was no logical
justification, that Quality was the effect of subjects and objects. It was not!
He brought out his knife. ``The sun of quality,'' he wrote, ``does not revolve
around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively
illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has created them.
They are subordinate to it! And at that point, when he wrote that, he knew he
had reached some kind of culmination of thought he had been unconsciously
striving for over a long period of time. (ZAMM pp. 239-40)
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