Hi Squad,
> Seen in the light of the MOQ, what is it that is described in the last
part of
> ZMM (The Greeks). Is it the emergence of SOM, the"coming of age" of the
> Intellectual level, or...?
Elements of subject/object thought must have greatly predated the Greek
philosophers.
Linguistically, subject and object entities are apparent throughout the
Indo-European language group and even in other language groups. This pushes
back the concepts tens of thousands of years.
Intellectual patterns surely emerged greatly before the Greeks. I would
characterise intellect as a capacity to "reason", to achieve things by
DESIGN rather than by trial and error. Natural evolution proceeds in small
increments. Human planning produces dramatic results, expected (i.e.
planned) but greatly removed from previous experience.
Human planning created agriculture, built the pyramids, circumnavigated the
globe, put men on the moon, exploded atom bombs ...
IMHO, what happened with the Greeks is that the dialectic became dominant
because of its extreme utility as an intellectual tool. We see this in the
spectacular progress of science and technology at the time. However, with
Socrates and Plato, the dialectic was also given an ethical primacy which it
hadn't enjoyed before. This ethical primacy means that the dialectic became
the standard measure of everything else.
Since the Greeks, we've seen human beliefs and myths eroded as they fail to
measure up in dialectical terms. According to Pirsig, that erosion became a
landslide as a result of WW1.
The "fatal flaw" that Pirsig saw is that we have now forgotten to even
consider how the dialectic itself "measures up".
Jonathan
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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