From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sat Dec 14 2002 - 04:48:03 GMT
Sam, Wim and all:
Sam said:
But, be that as it may, it would probably best if you had a crack at
outlining what you think Pirsig thinks about ritual. (I'm asking for you to
set it out in a more formal fashion). I will then come back at you on that,
in terms of whether I think you've articulated Pirsig's own position. I
think it would be best for you to start because you have more sympathy with
Pirsig's overall position on level 3 and level 4. What I have in mind is
working up something together that we can both sign up to as 'Pirsig's
understanding of ritual', or at
least to append little footnotes to it acknowledging where we disagree. What
do you think? Would you be on for something systematic like this?
DMB says:
Set out Pirsig's views on ritual? In a more formal fashion? Spell out the
3rd and 4th levels in a systematic way? Sure, I'd be up for something like
that. That's close to what I've been thinking about lately, but not exactly.
I went back to ZAMM, which I hadn't dusted off in a long time, to look again
at his take on the transition period. Interestingly, this same search led me
to see some things about mysticism that I'd forgotten, or never noticed. It
seems mysticism was very much apart of what was happening. It'll be a
cumbersome beast, but I'll try to lay it all out this weekend. It'll be
something like a response to issues you've raised in recent threads. Try to
connect some dots, paint the broad view, or something like that. Until then,
here's a little something to get us started. All are welcome!
"Plato is the essential Buddha-seeker who appears again and again in each
generation, moving onward and upward toward the 'one'." (P331)
"...Phaedrus was clearly a Platonist by temperment and when the classes
shifted to Plato he was greatly relieved. His Quality and Plato's Good were
so similar that if it hadn't been for some notes Phaedrus left I might have
thought they were identical" (331-2)
"Phaedrus...eventually comes to the view that Plato's hatred the
rhetoricians was part of a much larger struggle in which the reality o the
Good, represented by the Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented
by the dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle for the future mind of
man." (P335)
"It is here that the classica mind, for the first time, took leave of its
romantic oritgins and said, 'The Good and the True are not necessarily the
same," and goes its seperate way." (P336)
"Now Plato's hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and Socrates are
defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they
consider to be the decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which
is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal that Socrates died
for. The ideal that Greece alone possesses for the first time in the history
of the world. It is a very fragile thing. It can disappear completely. Plato
abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint ...because they threaten
mankind's first beginning grasp of the idea of truth. That's what it is all
about. The results...are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as
we know it." (P337-8)
"Plato HADN'T tried to destroy ARETE. He had ENCAPSULATED it: made a
permanent fixed idea of of it; he had CONVERTED it to a rigid, immobile
Immortal Truth. ... That was why the Quality Phaedrus had arrived at in the
classroom had seemed so close to Plato's Good. Plato's Good was TAKEN from
the rhetoricians. (P342)
"The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving
idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an idea at all. The Good was
not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, and ultimately
unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way. " (P342)
"What Phaedrus has been talking about as Quality, Socrates appears to have
described as the soul, self-moving, the source of all things. There is no
contradiction." (P349)
See where I'm going yet? Thanks for your time,
DMB
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