Qua: A Short Disquisition

I don't know why I became interested in "qua." Perhaps it was when, as an undergraduate, I learned that its usage differed from that of the Flint School. Or it may have been from the stock phrases in which it appears, "sine qua non" and "qua propter dicetur." But I suspect it was more a case of just liking the way the word "qua" sounded, twinned with the all ways it was used at the Flint School to denote what the program aspired to make of us: we worked to accumulate enough Qua Points so that our names might appear on the Qua Ten List, strove to improve others (or "get them qua" in the words of the data card), wished to avoid the shame attaching to "unsponsored non-qua association" (Don't recall this? Seamanship Manual, p. 45), and of course sought to live according to the nature of "man qua man."

The phrase "man qua man" is traceable to Aristotle, specifically to his lecture notes on the nature of the real that appeared centuries later as the Metaphysics. Aristotle, though, was referring to the nature of existence (viz. "being qua being"; transliterates into the Latin alphabet as "on hêi on") rather than to the nature of human agents. Consider also that "qua" is Aristotle's Greek comparative Latinized; the translation comes courtesy of the Schoolmen, and has been in use ever since.

The following excerpt contains one of the rare occurrences of the phrase "man qua man" — at least in text wholly unassociated with Ayn Rand and her circle. It is taken from Oxford don A.L. Rowse's The Use of History, a book that seems to answer historicists such as E.H. Carr. Rowse wants us to consider the case for transcendent values.

There are things of beauty [...] that come across to us still with undiminished force. But it would not be common sense to deny that there are other values that come across to us too with authority and command our assent — ethical values. For the plain fact is that underlying all the flux and change of history, the mutually contradictory claims of religions, the parochial squabbles of the sects of our allegiance, the indisputable tendency of individual egoism to assert itself as universal — underneath all the change of circumstances and condition there is a certain continuum to which all standards may be related for their validity: the nature of man qua man. It is that that gives substance, a real basis to our moral judgements, however conditioned by time, so that we may as historians condemn Nero for a bad man and acclaim Jesus as a good man.

New Orleans novelist Walker Percy's remark below is in the humanistic tradition of Rowse's. Trained as a medical doctor and a convert to Catholicism, Percy was interested in the relation between science and faith, or more accurately in the unease of the scientific mindset in an age of religious skepticism. The following passage is from a 1989 interview with Percy prefatory to his Jefferson Lecture at the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The trouble is, the sciences for the last two hundred years have been spectacularly successful in dealing with subhuman reality, subhuman creatures, the chemistry and physics of matter, and with the extraordinary progress in learning about the cosmos; but also an extraordinary lack of success in dealing with man as man, man qua man. I think it's very curious: here the scientists know a tremendous amount about everything except what he or she is. Despite the extraordinary successes of science, we do not presently have even the rudiments of a coherent science of man.

What catches my eye here is that "man qua man" follows directly upon "man as man." It isn't clear to me whether Percy meant to equate the two phrases, or was somehow distinguishing between them. This may be relevant, as we'll see further on.

Behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner might not have taken issue with the thrust of Percy's remarks, but his approach was from a completely different tradition. The excerpt below is from his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Skinner's project was to show that we human beings are just high-order animals, hence trainable but not educable. As such, we can be conditioned to live in peace and harmony, provided we cease to be "defended by the literatures of freedom and dignity." I certainly don't share Skinner's beliefs, but I confess to a grudging admiration for the sheer dyspeptic fervor that this passage evinces.

Autonomous man is a device used to explain what we cannot explain in any other way. He has been constructed from our ignorance, and as our understanding increases, the very stuff of which he is composed vanishes. Science does not dehumanize man, it de-homunculizes him, and it must do so if it is to prevent the abolition of the human species. To man qua man we readily say good riddance. Only by dispossessing him can we turn to the real causes of human behavior. Only then can we turn from the inferred to the observed, from the miraculous to the natural, from the inaccessible to the manipulable.

The phrase "man qua man" in foreign languages seems merely to be a calque on the English template (der Mensch als Mensch, l'uomo come uomo, etc.) and is overwhelmingly found in Objectivist materials. One of the few selections I've come across that falls outside that category is from a 1997 treatise by Belgian legal scholar Frank van Dun. The sentence below refers to Thomas Aquinas.

Meer dan andere kerkvaders heeft Thomas bijgedragen tot de erkenning van de waardigheid van de mens qua mens, los van enige religieuze affiliatie.

In my translation:

More than other Church fathers, Thomas contributed to the recognition of the worth of man qua man, free of any religious affiliation.

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The word "qua" actually merits an entry in H.W. Fowler's Modern English Usage. In English, the use of this word signals an elevated style; in Dutch, it occurs in everyday settings. The image here is of a magazine advertisement for income insurer De Amersfoortse Verzekeringen, and the text in the claret-colored field is in a fanciful spelling meant to convey a Slavic accent. Here's my translation: "That Russian interpreter (53) knows exactly what he's doing. (As far as income goes, that is.)"

What's interesting here is that the use of "qua" in this text, while idiomatic, is probably ungrammatical (either in Dutch or English), since the Latin adverb "quoad" does duty for constructions of the type "in so far as...is concerned." Fowler writes that "qua" is indicated only when "a person or thing spoken of can be regarded from more than one point of view or as the holder of various coexistent functions [...]."

P.G. Wodehouse uses the word precisely as Fowler prescribes. In The Code of the Woosters, Bertie renders judgment upon seeing the menacing fascist Sir Roderick Spode brought low:

Well, Spode, qua menace, is a spent egg.

Theodore Dalrymple also uses the word correctly in this excerpt from a Wall Street Journal article. He's describing Iran's capture of a female Royal Navy sailor in 2007.

But Faye Turney is entitled to no special sympathy qua woman [...] to no sympathy that is not extended in equal measure to the 14 men who were captured with her.

"Qua" is thus not simply a high-style stand-in for "as." I know this contradicts what George and Betty told us. But they also told us not to entrust our education to our teachers.

In Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett uses "qua" in much the same way the advertising copywriter does. In Act I, Pozzo asks:

What is there so extraordinary about [the sky]? Qua sky. It is pale and luminous like any sky at this hour of the day.

Beckett, though originally a Dubliner, was by this time living in Paris and writing his major works in French, then translating them into English. In his original text, he employs a standard construction (i.e. "en tant que"); "qua" in the translated, English text must have been an afterthought.

Qu'est-ce qu'il a de si extraordinaire? En tant que ciel? Il est pâle et lumineux, comme n'importe quel ciel à cette heure de la journée.

Later, in Lucky's harangue, Beckett treats us to novel "qua" strings; this he does in both the French-language original, and in his translation into English. Notice, however, that in the original there is a 4-"qua" string followed by a 2-"qua" string, whereas in the translation it is 4 and 4:

[...] un Dieu personnel quaquaquaqua à barbe blanche quaqua hors du temps de l'étendue qui du haut de sa divine apathie sa divine athambie sa divine aphasie nous aime bien à quelques exceptions près on ne sait pourquoi mais ça viendra [...]

[...] a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell [...]

"Quaquaversal" is not a Beckettian nonce word (in French, English, or even Irish); it is a technicism from structural geology that describes divergent strata. Here, "qua" is reiterated and functions interrogatively ("in what direction?"). Flann O'Brien collected some of his Irish Times columns under the heading "Quaquaversal Luminary."

At least one song has "qua" in its title, Romina Power's Italian novelty hit "Il ballo del qua qua." This "qua" is a quack; the song is about dancing ducks, among other things. "Stand and Deliver," by the oikish Adam Ant (birth name: Stuart Goddard), contains the refrain "Da diddley qua qua, da diddley qua qua." If Samuel Beckett managed to hear it, what did he think?

Mount Qua Qua is not found anywhere in Beckett either, and has nothing to do with "quaquaversal." It is a flat-topped, sandstone massif located in Grenada's Grand Étang National Park. This "qua" is Cariban rather than Latin, and the mount is known as Morne Fédon (Fédon's mountain) in both French and Kwèyòl.

Coincidentally, there is a Mount Qua Qua in South Africa (Free State), although "QwaQwa" seems to be the form that predominates. Certainly, the Web site for the nature park that takes its name from the mountain uses this spelling. One wonders whether this is Afrikaans orthography; the Universiteit van die Vrystaat has its "Qwaqwa-kampus." Both Australia (New South Wales) and Guyana (Berbice) have a Qua Qua Creek. What are the odds of that?

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The Japan Architectural Education and Information Center, headquartered in Tokyo, publishes a quarterly journal called QUA. There is also a Korean fashion glossy called QUA. It has some English-language headings, "My QUA," "Stars With QUA," "QUA Speak" and "QUA Girl" among them. This last has photos of a vivacious, smiling model. I recall Flint School "Qua girls" as dour, cloddish and sanctimonious. I surely wouldn't share my bottle of "cheongju" with a member of that group!

"Qua" appears in Vietnamese, which has had a modified Latin script since the 17th century. "Qua" functions as a sentence intensifier (adverb of manner), for example in a construction such as "How beautiful!" or "What a beautiful [noun]!" Any Vietnamese adjective can be followed by "qua" for emphasis. Other languages have the "qua" sound as well, among them Swahili and Huron-Wendat, an Indian language indigenous to what is now Québec. However, Huron was never a written language, and Swahili tends to render the sound as "kwa" in Latin script.

Morgan Bertram (aboard 1972-1975) has remarked, "Qua is as qua does" — a shrewd observation in any language.

— Scott Rasmussen

N.B. I thank my friend and fellow editor Mlle Clothilde Guilleminot, of Pétion-Ville and Nîmes, for her advice on how to structure the foregoing.

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This photograph appeared on a cover of the Italian edition of GQ. It has nothing to do with "qua" or even the Flint School, but it does show a nude Monica Bellucci smeared with caviar. Which is reason enough to post it here.

At some future date T.B.D. may be more musings, these under the rubric Words Have Inexact Meanings. I know, some among us are liable to have a vehement, if poorly founded, reaction to such heresy. To you I say: Read the first two chapters of Georges Steiner's After Babel and see if you still feel the same way.