During the next few months that Phædrus reflected he began to transpose the static-Dynamic division out of the moral conflict of Zuni into other seemingly unrelated areas. The negative esthetic quality of the hot stove in the earlier example was now given some added meaning by a static-Dynamic division of Quality. When the person who sits on the stove first discovers his low-Quality situation, the front edge of his experience is Dynamic. He does not think, This stove is hot, and then make a rational decision to get off. A dim perception of he knows not what gets him off Dynamically. Later he generates static patterns of thought to explain the situation.
A subject-object metaphysics presumes that this kind of Dynamic action without thought is rare and ignores it when possible. But mystic learning goes in the opposite direction and tries to hold to the ongoing Dynamic edge of all experience, both positive and negative, even the Dynamic ongoing edge of thought itself. Phædrus thought that of the two kinds of students, those who study only subject-object science and those who study only meditative mysticism, it would be the mystic students who would get off the stove first. The purpose of mystic meditation is not to remove oneself from experience but to bring one’s self closer to it by eliminating stale, confusing, static, intellectual attachments of the past.
In a subject-object metaphysics morals and art are worlds apart, morals being concerned with the subject quality and art with object quality. But in the Metaphysics of Quality that division doesn’t exist. They’re the same. They both become much more intelligible when references to what is subjective and what is objective are completely thrown away and references to what is static and what is Dynamic are taken up instead.
He found an example within the field of music. He said, imagine that you walk down a street past, say, a car where someone has the radio on and it plays a tune you’ve never heard before but which is so fantastically good it just stops you in your tracks. You listen until it’s done. Days later you remember exactly what that street looked like when you heard that music. You remember what was in the store window you stood in front of. You remember what the colors of the cars in the street were, where the clouds were in the sky above the buildings across the street, and it all comes back so vividly you wonder what song they were playing, and so you wait until you hear it again. If it’s that good you’ll hear it again because other people will have heard it too and have had the same feelings and that will make it popular.
One day it comes on the radio again and you get the same feeling again and you catch the name and you rush down the street to the record store and buy it and can hardly wait until you can get it home and play it.
You get home. You play it. It’s really good. It doesn’t quite transform the whole room into something different but it’s really good. You play it again. Really good. You play it another time. Still good, but you’re not so sure you want to play it again. But you play it again. It’s OK but now you definitely don’t want to play it again. You put it away.
The next day you play it again, and it’s OK, but something is gone. You still like it and always will, you say. You play it again. Yeah, that’s sure a good record. But you file it away and once in a while play it again for a friend and maybe months or years later bring it out as a memory of something you were once crazy about.
Now what has happened? You can say you’ve gotten tired of the song but what does that mean? Has the song lost its quality? If it has, why do you still say it’s a good record? Either it’s good or it’s not good. If it’s good why don’t you play it? If it’s not good why do you tell your friend it’s good?
If you think about this question long enough you will come to see that the same kind of division between Dynamic Quality and static quality that exists in the field of morals also exists in the field of art. The first good, that made you want to buy the record, was Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality comes as a sort of surprise. What the record did was weaken for a moment your existing static patterns in such a way that the Dynamic Quality all around you shone through. It was free, without static forms. The second good, the kind that made you want to recommend it to a friend, even when you had lost your own enthusiasm for it, is static quality. Static quality is what you normally expect.
Soon after that Phædrus ran across another example that concerned neither art nor morality but referred indirectly to mystic reality itself.
It was in an essay by Walker Percy called The Delta Factor. It asked,
Why is a man apt to feel bad in a good environment, say suburban Short Hills, New Jersey, on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon? Why is the same man apt to feel good in a very bad environment, say in an old hotel in Key Largo, in a hurricane..? Why is it that a man riding a good commuter train from Larchmont to New York, whose needs and drives are satisfied, who has a good home, loving wife and family, good job, and enjoys unprecedented cultural and recreational facilities often feels bad without knowing why?
Why is it that if such a man suffers a heart attack and, taken off the train at New Rochelle, regains consciousness and finds himself in a strange place, he then comes to himself for the first time in years, perhaps in his life, and begins to gaze at his own hand with a sense of wonder and delight?
These are haunting questions, but with Quality divided into Dynamic and static components, a way of approaching them emerges. A home in suburban Short Hills, New Jersey, on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon is filled with static patterns. A hurricane in Key Largo promises a Dynamic relief from static patterns. The man who suffers a heart attack and is taken off the train at New Rochelle has had all his static patterns shattered, he can’t find them, and in that moment only Dynamic Quality is available to him. That is why he gazes at his own hand with a sense of wonder and delight.
Phædrus saw that not only a man recovering from a heart attack but also a baby gazes at his hand with mystic wonder and delight. He remembered the child Poincare referred to who could not understand the reality of objective science at all but was able to understand the reality of value perfectly. When this reality of value is divided into static and Dynamic areas a lot can be explained about that baby’s growth that is not well explained otherwise.
One can imagine how an infant in the womb acquires awareness of simple distinctions such as pressure and sound, and then at birth acquires more complex ones of light and warmth and hunger. We know these distinctions are pressure and sound and light and warmth and hunger and so on but the baby doesn’t. We could call them stimuli but the baby doesn’t identify them as that. From the baby’s point of view, something, he knows not what, compels attention. This generalized something, Whitehead’s dim apprehension, is Dynamic Quality. When he is a few months old the baby studies his hand or a rattle, not knowing it is a hand or a rattle, with the same sense of wonder and mystery and excitement created by the music and heart attack in the previous examples.
If the baby ignores this force of Dynamic Quality it can be speculated that he will become mentally retarded, but if he is normally attentive to Dynamic Quality he will soon begin to notice differences and then correlations between the differences and then repetitive patterns of the correlations. But it is not until the baby is several months old that he will begin to really understand enough about that enormously complex correlation of sensations and boundaries and desires called an object to be able to reach for one. This object will not be a primary experience. It will be a complex pattern of static values derived from primary experience.