Phædrus, in contrast, sometimes forgot the cart but was fascinated by the horse. He thought the best way to examine the contents of various philosophological carts is first to figure out what you believe and then to see what great philosophers agree with you. There will always be a few somewhere. These will be much more interesting to read since you can cheer what they say and boo their enemies, and when you see how their enemies attack them you can kibitz a little and take a real interest in whether they were right or wrong.
With this technique you can approach someone like William James in a much different way than an ordinary philosophologist would. Since you’ve already done your creative thinking before you read James, you don’t just go along with him. You get all kinds of fresh new ideas by contrasting what he’s saying with what you already believe. You’re not limited by any dead-ends of his thought and can often see ways of going around him. This was occurring in what Phædrus had read so far. He was getting a definite impression that James' philosophy was incomplete and that the Metaphysics of Quality might actually improve on it. A philosophologist would normally be indignant at the impertinence of someone thinking he could improve on the great Harvard philosopher, but James himself, to judge from what Phædrus had read so far, would have been very enthusiastic about the effort. He was, after all, a philosopher.
Anyway, the reason Phædrus bought these books on James was that it was necessary to bone up a little in order to protect his Metaphysics of Quality against attack. So far he had pretty much ignored the philosophologists and they had pretty much returned the compliment. But with this next book he was unlikely to be so lucky, since a metaphysics is something anyone can pick to pieces. Some of them, at least, would be at it, picking and sneering in the time-honored tradition of literary critics, musicologists, and art historians, and he had better be ready for them.
A review of his book in the Harvard Educational Review had said that his idea of truth was the same as James. The London Times said he was a follower of Aristotle. Psychology Today said he was a follower of Hegel. If everyone was right he had certainly achieved a remarkable synthesis. But the comparison with James interested him most because it looked like there might be something to it.
It was also very good philosophological news. James is usually considered a very solid mainstream American philosopher, whereas Phædrus' first book had often been described as a cult book. He had a feeling the people who used that term wished it was a cult book and would go away like a cult book, perhaps because it was interfering with some philosophological cultism of their own. But if philosophologists were willing to accept the idea that the Metaphysics of Quality is an offshoot of James' work, then that cult charge was shattered. And this was good political news in a field where politics is a big factor.
In his undergraduate days Phædrus had given James very short shrift because of the title of one of his books: The Varieties of Religious Experience. James was supposed to be a scientist, but what kind of scientist would pick a title like that? With what instrument was James going to measure these varieties of religious experience? How would he empirically verify his data? It smelt more like some Victorian religious propagandist trying to smuggle God into the laboratory data. They used to do that to try to counteract Darwin. Phædrus had read early nineteenth-century chemistry texts telling how the exact combination of hydrogen and oxygen to produce water told of the wondrous workings of the mind of God. This looked like more of the same.
However, in his rereading of James, he had so far found three things that were beginning to dissolve his early prejudice. The first wasn’t really a reason but was such an unlikely coincidence Phædrus couldn’t get it out of his mind. James was the godfather of William James Sidis, the child prodigy who could speak five languages at the age of five and who thought colonial democracy came from the Indians. The second was a reference to James' dislike of the dichotomy of the universe into subjects and objects. That, of course, put him automatically on the side of Phædrus' angels. But the third thing, which might also seem irrelevant, but which was doing more than anything else to dissolve Phædrus' early prejudice, was an anecdote James told about a squirrel.
James and a group of friends were on an outing somewhere and one of them chased the squirrel around a tree. The squirrel instinctively clung to the opposite side of the tree and moved so that as the man circled the tree the squirrel also circled it on the opposite side.
After observing this, James and his friends engaged in a philosophic discussion of the question: did the man go around the squirrel or didn’t he? The group broke into two philosophical camps and Phædrus didn’t remember how the argument was resolved. What impressed him was James' interest in the question. It showed that although James was no doubt an expert philosophologist (certainly he had to be to teach the stuff at Harvard) he was also a philosopher in the creative sense. A philosophologist would have been mildly contemptuous of such a discussion because it had no importance, that is, no body of philosophical writings existed about it. But to a creative philosopher like James the question was like catnip.
It had the smell of what it is that draws real philosophers into philosophy. Did the man go around the squirrel or didn’t he? He was north, south, east and west of the squirrel, so he must have gone around it. Yet at no time had he ever gone to the back or to the side of the squirrel. That squirrel could say with absolute scientific certitude, That man never got around me.
Who is right? Is there more than one meaning of the word around? That’s a surprise! That’s like discovering more than one true system of geometry. How many meanings are there and which one is right?
It seems as though the squirrel is using the term around in a way that is relative to itself but the man is using it in a way that is relative to an absolute point in space outside of the squirrel and himself. But if we dop the squirrel’s relative point of view and we take the absolute fixed point of view, what are we letting ourselves in for? From a fixed point in space every human being on this planet goes around every other human being to the east or west of him once a day. The whole East River does a half-cartwheel over the Hudson each morning and another one under it each evening. Is this what we want to mean by around? If so, how useful is it? And if the squirrel’s relative point of view is false, how useless is it?
What emerges is that the word around, which seems like one of the most clear and absolute and fixed terms in the universe suddenly turns out to be relative and subjective. What is around depends on who you are and what you’re thinking about at the time you use it. The more you tug at it the more things start to unravel. One such philosophic tugger was Albert Einstein, who concluded that all time and space are relative to the observer.
We are always in the position of that squirrel. Man is always the measure of all things, even in matters of space and dimension. Persons like James and Einstein, immersed in the spirit of philosophy, do not see things like squirrels circling trees as necessarily trivial, because solving puzzles like that are what they’re in philosophy and science for. Real science and real philosophy are not guided by preconceptions of what subjects are important to consider.