From: david buchanan (dmbuchanan@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Aug 07 2005 - 02:37:16 BST
Ian, Paul, Bo - plus Sam, Matt and all MOQers:
I've been thinking about rhetoric and the Sophists lately and have noticed
mention of it here too. I extracted some quotes from chapter 29 of ZAMM.
There are explanations and supporting details between the quotes, but I
think these four paragraphs sketch out a pretty clear picture of the big
idea. And what's the big idea? I think nearly everyone basically agrees that
the intellect was declairing its independence from the social level and that
rhetoric was one of the evolutionary steps in the West's transition from
mythological to scientific worldviews. But that's not really what the big
idea is all about. Its important to understand that something big was
happening and there's no denying that rhetoric is discussed in that context,
but I think the big idea is really about the loss of Quality, about how
mysticism was lost in the West.
"Phaedrus reads further and further into pre-Socratic Greek thought to find
out (Plato's real purpose), and eventually comes to the view that Plato's
hatred of the rhetoricians was part of a much larger struggle in which the
reality of 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. Truth won, the Good lost, and that is why today we
have so little difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so much
difficulty accepting the reality of Quality, even though there is no more
agreement in one area than in the other." ZAMM 335
Sam and Matt are hailed at the top because I have repeatedly suggested that
there is a cultural blind spot with respect to mysticism and that their
views exhibit that bias. I get the impression that I'm merely insulting them
as in, "you're so blind". So here I hope to put this blind spot on the
display in a way that is not connected to anything you said. Its just a
picture of where this blindspot began.
"Lightening hits!"
"QUALITY! VIRTUE! DHARMA! THAT is what the Sophists were teaching! NOT
ethical relativism. NOT pristine 'virtue'. But ARETE. Excellence. DHARMA!
Before the church of reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and
matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first
teachers of the Western world were teaching QUALITY, and the medium they had
chosen was that of rhetoric. He had been doing it right all along." ZAMM 340
You know why they chose rhetoric as a medium? Because they hadn't lost touch
with Quality, they were teaching Quality, which means they were talking
about the mystical One, which can't be known in any fixed or rigid way and
which "can only be described allegorically, through the use of analogy, of
figures of imagination and speech". They chose rhetoric as a medium for the
same reason that Pirsig presents his philosophy in the form of a novel. Art
is what it takes to convey the One while dialectic, logic and science tend
to preclude its discussion.
"Phaedrus remembered a line from Thoreau: "You never gain something but that
you lose something". And now he began to see for the first time the
unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and
rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires
of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous
manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth - but for this he had
exhanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of
what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it." ZAMM 342
The autobiographical portion of the book that runs along side this
discussion of rhetoric and occurs just before the climax. He finally
realizes that his intellectual pursuit of Quality is a fool's errand and he
gets stuck in a very big way. He can't go back and he can't go forward. Its
all over. Only when "madness" comes does he finally understand what Quality
is. That's not a philosophy or an idea, its an experience. See, its not so
much the rhetoric. Rhetoric is just more appropriate for teaching Quality. I
think the Sophists that Pirsig relates to were philosophical mystics who
chose the most appropriate mode of expression. They were artists because
their subject demanded it.
"And the bones of the Sophists long ago turned to dust and what they said
turned to dust with them and the dust was buried under the rubble of
declining Athens through its fall and Macedonia through its decline and
fall. Through the decline and death of ancient Rome and Byzantium and the
Ottoman Empire and the modern states - buried so deep and with such
ceremoniousness and such unction and such evil that only a madman centuries
later could discover the clues needed to uncover them and see with horror
what had been done." ZAMM 345
Buried so deep. See, the blindspot was not caused by the Anglican Church or
by Richard Rorty. I'm just saying they both suffer from it.
Thanks,
dmb
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