[MD] on defining Quality

[X Acto]

"Phasdrus thought it portended very well for his Metaphysics of Quality that both 
mysticism and science reject metaphysics for completely opposite reasons. It 
suggested that if there is a bridge between the two, between the understanding
 of the Indians and the
understanding of the anthropologists, metaphysics is where that bridge is located.
Of the two kinds of hostility to metaphysics he considered the mystics' hostility 
the more formidable. Mystics will tell you that once you've opened the door to 
metaphysics you can say goodbye to any genuine understanding of reality. Thought 
is not a path to reality. It sets obstacles in that path because when you try to 
use thought to approach something that is prior to thought your thinking does not
 carry you toward that something. It carries you away from it. To define something
 is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do 
that you destroy real understanding.
The central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus 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 Phaedrus 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 avoid
ance 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. 
-lila ch5

re-ephasis

"But the answer to all this, he thought, was that a ruthless, doctrinaire avoid
ance of degeneracy is a degeneracy of another sort. That's the degeneracy 
fanatics are made of."