[MD] The Greeks?

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Mary,

Mary said:
You play your cards close to the vest, but me?  Ask me 
anything.

Matt:
I've tried to get in the habit of trying not to say everything 
at once all the time.  It usually isn't effective writing, and 
just stirs more hornets nests than anything else.  But as I 
would hope, one could likewise ask me anything (though I 
can't always promise an interesting answer).

Mary said:
Pirsig, for instance, makes a pretty impressive case that 
IPOVs really needed Socrates to grind that good 'ole 
Dharma/DQ of the Iliad into proper 'form'.

Matt:
Maybe.  That's too vague a statement for me to be able to 
agree to or not.  (Particularly if there's still a lingering 
question of what, exactly, constitutes an intellectual pattern, 
a smell I still sense in the air.)  For example, I thought you 
had just got done saying that we don't need to know 
anything about Greek culture to understand the MoQ, but I 
have to imagine you need to know something to get the gist 
of why that claim would be true.  And what's more, the more 
one reads about Greek culture, the more one would be 
inclined to tread carefully with lending agreement (e.g., the 
notion that the arete of the Iliad is solely the warrior's).

Mary said:
I've never cared much for the emotional appeal, as in Ch. 29 
of ZMM.  But he just sounds harmlessly excited with the 
discovery of a new idea.

Matt:
What is the appeal are you referring to?  There is a lot of 
excitement in that chapter, but there are so many 
important formulations laid out in that chapter, I'd hate for 
you to be referring to one of the ones I like.

Matt said:
For example, if one were so inclined to say "the Intellectual 
Level had its first defender in Socrates, and codifier in Plato," 
then you'd have an interestingly controversial set of old 
antagonisms to think through...

Mary said:
Yeah, well that's why I asked the question.

Matt:
Really?  I took you at cross purposes, then.  Because these 
two questions, "Does it matter to the MoQ whether the 
Intellectual Level existed before or after Socrates?  Is there 
some critical point of order I'm missing?" seemed rhetorical, 
with the implication--I took it--that you _didn't_ think the 
Socrates question was important to understanding the MoQ, 
especially when you closed with, "The argument doesn't 
seem to have anything to do with the value of the MoQ itself."

It sounded to me like I needed to defend the idea that the 
historical narrative has some importance to the interpretation 
of the philosophy.  Which was the limited, tight-to-the-vest 
point I was aiming at suggesting.

Matt said:
Identifying the intellectual level with Socrates is often an 
old philosopher's trick to get other people to think that 
what they do (as footnotes to Plato) _is_ (rather than 
_was_) a culturally momentous task.

Mary said:
that's an interesting statement you make there.  I'll see 
your statement and raise you one.  As far as I know, no 
one but Pirsig has ever mentioned an "Intellectual Level" 
in their work.

Matt:
I'm not sure how seriously you mean for me to take that.  
Taking it on it's face would be like taking Natalie Portman's 
character at full seriousness in Garden State when she 
performs her feat of utter uniqueness--"This is your one 
opportunity to do something that no one has ever done

before and that no one will copy throughout human 
existence."  It's funny because of how silly that one thing 
she does that no one will ever copy (would one want to?) 
and because, when push comes to shove, the idea is 
predicated on spatialtemporal uniqueness (meaning every 
moment in our lives is unique).  Pirsig, at the beginning of 
ZMM, was echoing T. S. Eliot's famous declamation in 
"Tradition and the Individual Talent" that the pursuit of the 
New for the sake of Newness was a sad dereliction of the 
Great, creating as Pirsig says, "an endless parade of trivia 
and fashion, the silt of tomorrow." (Ch. 1)  

I'm not even sure Pirsig was the first to ever cobble 
together the word "intellectual" next to the word "level" in 
a sentence--I wouldn't even want to take that bet--but 
even if he were, why should I care that he was the first to 
use some particular idiosyncratic vocable?  The only reason 
I should care is if we've previously established its conceptual 
power.  And as it sounded like you only cared about the 
power and not the uniqueness, the statement seems a little 
besides the point.  And, it doesn't appear to have a direct 
relation to what I said about the philosopher's proclivity for 
self-aggrandizement.  

Mary said:
SOL is an old term around here that to my amazement I'm 
finding few to remember the original meaning of.  Basically, 
anything that has an ego.  My dog, for instance.  So easy 
to hurt her feelings or delight her.  But yes, the basic ability 
to care about the difference between self and not-self.

Not at all the same thing as SOM.

You ready to show me some cards?

Matt:
Okay, how about this: I still don't find the acronym "SOL" a 
useful label for the ability of an organism to tell the difference 
between itself and the "not Me," as Emerson put it (which 
may have something to do with why no one remembers its 
"original meaning"--people don't find it useful enough to 
bother remembering).  But you're right: the power of 
discrimination is not inherently a metaphysics (nor is anything 
else inherently a metaphysics, or metaphysical--not even the 
appeareance/reality distinction, or between mind/matter).

Aside from that, I'm not sure what cards you want to see.  
To risk the grand pronoucements John kindly thinks I avoid 
(I guarantee if you type "I've already said this repeatedly" 
into moq.org's search engine, you'll come up with more 
than a few of my own entries), if you think I'm too 
close-fisted in conversation, you can always puruse the 
few writings I have on Pirsig on my website, and related 
material like "The Metaphysics Series" (that never made it 
past two).  There's no lack of cards there if you wanted to 
see them.  Or the few essays I've written for moq.org.  I 
have recently written retrospective intros to those essays 
on my site:

http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/p/moqorg-essays.html

Or my two short intros to Pirsig:

http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/05/introduction-to-pirsig.html
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/07/short-pirsig-presentation.html

Or I have snippets of bits at the top of my rightnav bar, 
like this one called "Ass-Pennies and Humanity's Taint":

-----
The ultimate parody of the struggle between the Sophists 
and
Platonists, between not knowing what to teach and 
teaching something,
comes to us in the form of an Upright 
Citizens Brigade sketch. The
younger brother asks his older, 
successful brother for advice for an
upcoming interview, 
whether he has a secret weapon. The older, wiser
brother 
makes him promise not to tell anybody and, noting that it is

kind of a long-term strategy, asks him how much time he has. 
The
younger brother says he has only a week, and the older 
brother says
that it still might work. His secret wisdom, the 
secret to all of his
success, the strategy he has employed? 
"Every time a penny passes
through your hands, stick it up 
your ass. And then spend it." ... "That's a lot of ass-pennies 
I've got out there, my friend. And here's
where the magic 
comes in: when I meet someone who intimidates me, who

puts me on edge, a real 'hard ass,' I just think to myself, 
'they've
probably handled one of my ass-pennies.' In fact, 
they probably got one
in their pocket right then. That just 
seems to sort of give me the upper-hand. I mean, hey, I 
haven't touched anything that's been in
their ass."

And that is what has happened to political
philosophy. Plato 
made wisdom ineffable, which means the secret of life
could 
be, according to the philosophers, sticking pennies in your 
ass.
Nothing is closer to the heart of the human experiment 
than our negotiations with each other over how we are to 
function together--but
is that the essence of humanity? 
"Go ahead, defend that thesis. I will
destroy it," says the 
ghost of Socrates. Plato thought the wisdom of
Socrates 
was the idea of an ineffable object of supremacy that was 
pure
and holy and so extraordinarily not human, totally free 
of humanity's
taint. What we should come to acknowledge 
as the wisdom of Socrates, however, is not the 
inhumanness of abstraction, but the total inanity
of looking 
for abstract essences that somehow control particular,

specific human activities. No general definition of arete is 
going to tell us how to teach it as a general techne. Though 
the Sophists thought of themselves as teaching a general 
skill
called "success," careers spent in service to wisdom, 
what they were
actually doing was something more specific, 
teaching Athenians how to
survive in the Greek city-state 
environment.
-----

from "What Happened to Political Philosophy?", a post with 
a little bit about arete in it.

http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2008/05/what-happened-to-political-philosophy.html

Matt
 		 	   		  
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