From: skutvik@online.no
Date: Mon Feb 09 2004 - 11:33:40 GMT
Mark and All.
What has happened. Polite and "godly" ..and no HTML?
On 7 Feb. you wrote:
> Mark 7-02-04: Robert Pirsig is a Sophist. He tells us this when
he
> meets the Chairman. Many sophists were pragmatists (Protagoras for
> example); they know truth is contingent upon value. The American
> pragmatists of the 20th century are continuing what Protagoras was
> exploring, and Pirsig is a culmination of that thread.
Yes, it is clear that Phaedrus of ZMM's sympathy was with the
Sophists and also that they may be regarded as pragmatics, but
they did not speak about "truth as contingent upon value". not
even about "Aretê being the measure of all things", no,
Protagoras said that MAN is the measure of all things.
Plato's insight was of TRUTH above MAN and he hated the
Sophists because they said that truth was something that could
be manipulated by rhetorics. I am not peddling the SOLQAI here,
but why did ZMM emphasize this Plato vs Sophists conflict if not
representing something terribly important? And in light of LILA it
becomes the birth of Intellect with the Sophists as Society's last
stand? If the Sophists had been the first intellectuals then the
struggle would have between them (the Sophists) and some Myth
aspect.
> > Bo:
> > That aretê is excellence - or Quality - there is no question about, but
> > the MOQ says that there are four static levels of Aretê - and the
> > problem is what INTELLECTUAL ARETÊ is. "Intellectual pursuit" in your
> > words sounds like mere mathematical prowess, in that case
> > pre-intellectual LEVEL cultures had many excellent intellectuals, and
> > this make no sense.
> Mark 7-02-04: No. This is a fundamental misunderstanding on your part.
> Aretê IS Quality. The sophists taught Quality. This is why Robert
> Pirsig regarded himself as a sophist - he taught Quality.
I know that Aretê is Quality, and I accept Pirsig's thesis, but find
your imposing MOQ on the ancient time unsound. It's a
superimposition and we better understand that.
> Bo:
> Hold it Mr Maxwell. The strange thing is that in ZMM social
> quality DOES seem to be Aretê, i.e: Quality itself.
> Mark 7-02-04: God bless you, No. Aretê is Quality full stop. In J.O.
> Urmson's famous commentary on Aristotle's Ethics, he tells us that ALL
> Greek translations of Aretê should be Excellence. Everything, but
> everything is measured by excellence what ever that may be. Everything
> is Quality.
>
> PIRSIG (ZMM p.391)
> > > "Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from
> > > rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of
> > > ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any
> > > application of common sense. The poetry and the myths are the
> > > response of a prehistoric people to the universe around them made
> > > on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is
> > > the generator of everything we know."
> Mark 7-02-04: That is what J.O. Urmson and Robert Pirsig are saying.
> Kato also. Quality is everything. When a philosopher says he is better
> than a sophist, what the philosopher is saying is that a pragmatic
> view of Quality - a view shared by the 20th century American
> pragmatists and Protagoras - is bad. The philosopher wants us to
> reject a pragmatic view of Quality and make Quality, Aretê, an idea.
> You cannot make Quality an idea, because Quality is a word which
> merely points to the indefinable source of everything. The word Aretê
> serves the same function.
Maybe Pirsig should have dropped writing LILA and the MOQ
and let everybody have their woolly take of the ZMM, but like
ZMM reaches back and rearranges the previous view of what
took place in Antique Greece, LILA somehow rearranges what is
written in ZMM. It's not very useful to say that the Sophists taught
Quality, after the MOQ the question is what STATIC value they
taught.
> > Bo:
> > Dialectics represents SOM and above Pirsig says that it comes
> > from Rhetorics which is from the ancient Mythos, but in LILA and the MOQ
> > the mythological past IS the social level ("The Mythos is the social
> > structure ..." (LILA p 386)
> Mark 7-02-04: God bless you, No. The Socratic elenchus, as revealed in
> the early Platonic dialogues, and which is the forerunner of Plato's
> dialectic, is a method by which it may be shown that now one can
> define Quality. Well, that is hardly damn surprising is it?
What are you "no"-ing? Pirsig in LILA? Yes, Socrates ('elenchus' I
did not find) was the forerunner ...etc. and dialectics was their
tool to arrive at TRUTH, which in turn ranged over the dreaded
man-made opinion that the Sophists were excellent in
manipulating. Neither spoke about Aretê other than claiming to
represent the highest Aretê.
PIRSIG in ZMM:
> "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 aretê, which was a synonym for Quality."
The mythos-to-logos transition! Yes, there was on such and as
Pirsig in LILA says that the mythological reality represents the
social structure then LOGOS must be the intellectual structure.
It's written all over the place! How can anyone avoid seeing this?
Is it some plot? ;-)
> Aretê is a synonym for Quality.
Yes, it became so by the Quality Metaphysics!
The Sophists never tried to define it,
Well according to Protagoras the human being was the source of
everything, necessarily of Aretê too.
> and Socrates could not define it. Neither could Plato or Aristotle,
> although they tried, and that lead to Substance is real, Quality is
> not.
It was a long development from the first search for "..what was
imperishable ...etc." to Aristotle where the new intellectual reality
it found its first somish form of Appearance/Substance
> Had Protagoras been able to present his views for himself, we
> would have had American C20 pragmatist - like ideas challenging
> Substance, and suggesting that Quality is real but indefinable, while
> Substance was just one way among many of categorising past experience.
> Because Aristotle's ideas had full social acceptance our mythos has
> been a history filled with a very rigid structure. But, the
> intellectual views of Protagoras have never gone away...
We DO have Protagoras among us in the shape of Matthew P.
Kundert! and he is not exactly your darling, but those who
confront him are powerless as long as the MOQ is treated as
some intellectual "Born-Again" Sophism with rationality (SOM) a
"bad" intellectual idea. It plays straight into his hands.
IMO
Bo
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