From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Mon Nov 25 2002 - 02:52:18 GMT
Sam and all:
I wonder what you think of the following Pirsig quote. Does it shed light on
your idea of eudaimonic values? I get the impression that this description
comes close. It comes from chapter 30.
"He'd traced Quality back into its origins in Greek philosophy and thought
he'd gone as far as he could go. Then he found he was able to go back to a
time BEFORE the Greek philosophers, to the rhetoricians. Philosophers
usually present their ideas as sprung from nature or sometimes from God but
Phaedrus thought neither of these was completely accurate. The logical order
of things which the philosophers study is dervied from the "mythos". The
mythos is the social culture and the rhetoric which the culture must invent
before philosophy becomes possible. Most of the old religious talk is
nonsense, of course, but nonsense or not, it is the PARENT of our midern
scientific talk. This "mythos over logos" thesis agreed with the MOQ's
assertion that intellectual static patterns of quality are built up out of
social static patterns of quality." (Emphasis is Pirsig's. Now here's the
good part.)
"Digging back into ancient Greek history, to the time when this mythos to
logos transition was taking place, Phaedrus noted that the ancient
rhetoricians of Greece, the Sophists, had taught what they called ARETE,
which is a synonym for Quality. Victorians had translated ARETE as "virtue"
but Victorian "virtue" connoted sexual abstinance, prissiness and a
holier-than-thou snobbery. This was a long way from what the ancient Greeek
meant. The early Greek literature, particularly the poetry of Homer, showed
that ARETE had been a central and vital term. With Homer Phaedrus was
certain he'd gone back as far as anyone could go, but one day he came across
some information that startled hime. It said that by following linguistic
analysis you could go even further back into the mythos tha Homer. ... The
Proto-Indo-European root of ARETE was the morpheme RT. ... RT refered to the
first, created, beautiful repetative order of moral and aesthetic
corrrectness."
Maybe you'll take a look and see if your eudaimonic values fit in with these
ancient ideas about Quality.
Thanks,
DMB
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Nov 25 2002 - 02:52:56 GMT