Plato's idealism tells us that true reality is not ascribed to the phenomena available to the senses, rather to spirit, mind, divinity and eternal form. If that sounds rather metaphysical, if that sounds unscientific, you are right. Quality is unscientific, and the sooner you learn that, the sooner you will recognize quality. Quality is a metaphysic. In fact, although you believed you were reading the thoughts of a scientific mind, which in its purest form is a materialist, in fact you are reading the thoughts of a realist. The question, "Where does quality come from?" is a metaphysical question, not a scientific question since quality cannot be directly observed, hypothesized, tested or evaluated using scientific methods. But wait! Don’t be alarmed! Many subjects are not scientific and you must not believe that because something is not scientific that it is not true. An obvious example is love. You love your spouse, mom, puppy, backrubs, whatever. You may say that the love I experience is simply a chemical reaction preceding my amore, but I say nay. From a philosophic view, Occam's razor says that love exists because it requires the fewest assumptions. From a scientific view, parsimony says that love exists because it is the least complicated explanation of behavior. If you remain unconvinced, then argue with Plato; I'm moving forward on the grounds that metaphysics can be true, if not real.

In Parmenides, Plato posited that there are eternal, unchanging qualities that exist outside of the tangible world. This became known as the Theory of Forms. In the Republic, he expounded by saying that the world can be divided between being and becoming, between intelligible and sensible. This is not as hard to understand as it may sound. The world of being - that is, the sensible world - is what you see around you: a desk, a computer screen, and very simple perceptions like the orthodoxy that good is preferable to bad. The world of becoming – that is, the intelligible world – is higher order reasoning and insight: writing lengthy metaphysical blogs, mathematics, and solving the Rubix cube. From the world of the intelligible, we finally arrive at the concept I believe is pivotal to understanding quality, the archetype.

In Platonic philosophy, the archetype is the "first thing", the entity against which all other entities are compared. It is a complete, perfect, and intangible ideal. Notice I said "ideal", not a "thing". An archetype is not a thing! Now, this is a concept that a programmer like me can really dig his teeth into, since object-oriented programming borrows from this concept! In object-oriented programming the class is the archetype (the pattern), and the object is the instance (the thing that is derived from the pattern). Therefore, the difference between the class and the object is similar to Plato's distinction between the world of the intelligible and the world of the sensible. The class is the "being" and the object is the "becoming". Real life example: "car" is an archetype, whereas "1994 Toyota Corolla" is the phenomena. Although you might say, "I drove my car to the allergist", that's just an abstraction for "I drove my 1994 Toyota Corolla to the allergist." Now, you say, "Jeff, a 1994 Toyota Corolla is a really sucky car!" You may be correct, but by what criteria do you judge? You have an ideal, an archetype of a car, against which you make a conceptual comparison. Read that sentence again. Who has an ideal? Who makes a comparison? Uh-huh, you can see where this is going.

Let's take a breather from the history lesson and check our progress. My original question was, "Where does quality come from?" You just learned from Plato that the world is divided between being and becoming, between intelligible and sensible. Where do you think Plato would say quality comes from? Is it a simple perception, like the pain behind your eyes from reading this blog for so long, or is it the insightful result of higher order reason? Hrm...

At this point, I have bad news: Plato himself destroyed the theory of forms later in the Republic. And to make sure the theory was dead, his student, Aristotle completely rejected it as well. If you are scientifically inclined, you will pounce on that fact, since Aristotle is considered the father of modern science and the scientific method. But here's something for you to consider: even though he fathered the method it does not mean that he ascribed to, or even followed, the method. In fact, Aristotle's central idea was that "A deduction is speech (logos) in which, certain things having been supposed, something different from those supposed results of necessity because of their being so." (Prior Analytics I.2). Taken in a modern context, this indicates that deduction – pure logic – permeates all that is rational, and therefore is the basis for intelligence, which may be expressed as conceptual thought, expressive language, or communicative writing. While all this talk of deduction sounds scientific, Aristotle left out about half of the method: testing and evaluation! Although he mentions "results of necessity", meaning the actual outcome of the deduction or test, he didn't develop that idea enough for it to become meaningful. In fact, this resulted in some rather astonishingly incorrect claims! For example, he claimed that the leader of a beehive is male, and that males of a species have more teeth than females. It would have been easy enough to test these statements against, you know, reality, but that didn't fit his method. (Question for you: Did Aristotle conduct quality science? How do you know?)

Now, even though Aristotle threw out Plato's forms, he seemed to replace it with categories. In his book named, well, Categories, he introduced the first category, ousia, which came to be known as substance, or subject. To accompany subject, Aristotle introduced the concept predicate. (BTW, if this sounds like a linguistics lesson, you would be correct. To Aristotle, good linguistics was simply an expression of good logic.) To explain subject and predicate he said:

One thing is predicated of another, all that which is predicable of the predicate will be predicable also of the subject. Thus, 'man' is predicated of the individual man; but 'animal' is predicated of 'man'; it will, therefore, be predicable of the individual man also: for the individual man is both 'man' and 'animal'. If genera are different and co-ordinate, their differentiae are themselves different in kind. Take as an instance the genus 'animal' and the genus 'knowledge'. 'With feet', 'two-footed', 'winged', 'aquatic', are differentiae of 'animal'; the species of knowledge are not distinguished by the same differentiae. One species of knowledge does not differ from another in being 'two-footed'. But where one genus is subordinate to another, there is nothing to prevent their having the same differentiae: for the greater class is predicated of the lesser, so that all the differentiae of the predicate will be differentiae also of the subject.

HEY!! I caught you sleeping. Don't try to deny it. (You have spittle on your chin. Clean it up.)

If you were snoozing, this is what you missed: According to Aristotle, things (subjects) are categorized under other things (more subjects) and are related under abstract categories (genera), which are categorized under even more abstract categories (more genera). Furthermore, categories (genera) are made distinct by differentiae. In other words, by how much they differ. Now, did I just miss something, or did we just catch Aristotle in a little mix-up, here? Did he not just describe the archetype? The same archetype that he threw out with Plato's theory of forms? That's a rhetorical question: yes, he did. Now, he got to it by deduction rather than metaphysics, but the destination is the same. A genus is a deductive (rational, logical, etc.) category, which is a collection of real things under an abstraction. In plain English, you can't own a mammal, but you can own a dog. You can't own a dog, but you can own a Cocker Spaniel. You can't own a Cocker Spaniel, but you can own that golden, hairy thing humping your leg.¹

Let's take another breather and check our progress. My original question was, "Where does quality come from?" You just learned from Aristotle that the world could be described as subject-predicate, that subjects relate to other subjects, and are abstracted into categories that differ from one another. Where do you think Aristotle would say quality comes from? The subject or from the genus? Which describes the "first thing", the thing against which all other things are compared? Better yet, how do you determine the genus of the golden, hairy thing humping your leg? Is it a Cocker Spaniel (dog) or a Golden Persian (cat)? Who decides and on what criteria? Hrm...

Having convincingly shown that the world is broken down into things (subjects) and ideals (archetypes), make sure to read next week's stunning conclusion. Oh! Stunning conclusion, continued!

¹ For more information on how Aristotle created concepts similar to Plato's archetype, read his writing on essences in Metaphysics Z.4.