[MD] The Sophists as the Last Philosophical Mystics

[skutvik at online.no]

Matt, DMB and Moqtalk.

I have noticed the Matt-DMB dispute from a distance, but due to 
my own with Paul I haven't had a chance to follow it,  then Matt 
suddenly introduced DMB's opening post from August. 

> 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.

I have seen DMB's strange mystical turn. Why I don't know, there 
is nothing about Aretê being mystical that I know. What is sure 
however is that the last millennium BC meant some great 
upheaval in the Mediterranean region and that it has been given 
various explanations by various writers/thinkers. Pirsig's, namely 
the transition from the third to the fourth level of his MOQ, is the 
most credible one I know.        

It's only from LILA we can see this level context. ZMM was about 
Pirsig's own Quality becoming associated with the ancient Greek 
Aretê (Social value) and then connecting the Sophists with it 
because they were said to teach Aretê, thereby alienating 
Socrates and Plato because they were the Sophists' antagonists. 
The thing is however that the latter were contemporaries of 
Socrates, more than a  thousand years after social value's 
heyday.      

> "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. 

Correct enough but in a level context we must take into 
consideration intellect's two trends, the "objective" one 
represented by the Cosmologists and the "subjective" by the 
Sophists. 

    "The pre-Socratic philosophers mentioned so far all 
    sought to establish a universal immortal principle in the 
    external world they found around them. Their common 
    effort united them into a group that may be called 
    Cosmologists. They all agreed that such a principle 
    existed but their disagreement as to what it was seems 
    irresolvable [.....] the resolution of the of the Cosmologists 
    argument came from a new direction entirely, from a 
    group Phaedrus seemed to feel were the early humanists. 
    They were teachers, but what they sought to teach was 
    not principles, but beliefs of men. Their object was not 
    any single absolute truth, but the improvement of men. All 
    principles, all truths, are relative, they said. "Man is the 
    measure of all things". These were the famous teachers 
    of wisdom, the Sophists of ancient Greece. To Phaedrus 
    this backlight from the conflict between the Sophists and 
    the Cosmologists adds an entirely new dimension to the 
    Dialogues of Plato. Socrates is not just expounding noble 
    ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between 
    those who think truth is relative ...etc  (ZMM 367) 


The Plato vs Sophists conflict is clearly an inter-intellectual one, 
in fact Pirsig calls the Sophists "early humanists", we see the first 
sign of intellect's famous culture vs nature dichotomy.           

> Truth won, the Good lost,

Maybe as Pirsig saw things in ZMM, but what was at stake in a 
level context was the first flare-up of intellect's internal  S/O 
conflict. Objectivity's "victory" didn't mean that subjectivity was 
eradicated, rather the two being inextricable linked to each other. 

> 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

"Today" here is the twentieth century long after intellect had 
reached the mind/matter stage and forced everything to fit either 
camp and values naturally being relegated to (our) minds. At the 
Sophist's time however neither this nor the subject/object 
distinction was known, it was the hitherto unknown intellectual 
level fist rearing its Janus head. 
   
> 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.

I haven't really understood how Matt particularly opposes this 
Sophist point, I had the impression that he opposes the very 
MOQ and Sam's "Eudaimonic" idea is just a weaker form of the 
SOL, so weak as to be meaningless. 
 
> "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

It's really no redescription but unless the Sophist's role is seen in 
a MOQ light we will be stuck with a lot of loose ends and 
difficulties, forcing Anthony McWatt to declaring that the two 
books to "have little to do with each other" which is complete 
frustration. ZMM's Romantic/Classic divide confers to LILA's 
Social/Intellectual one, it's plain as the day. The former appeared 
as Quality itself tp Pheadrus because it was (still is) non-dualist  

> 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.

IMO Rorty represents intellect's subjectivity's rebounding after 
centuries on the downturn. Regarding Sam's Angelican Church. 
Religions are social value representatives, but Christendom - 
particularly Protestantism - is so intellect-steeped that it no longer 
fits. Its "theology" (unknown to Judaism and Islam) once claimed 
to be scientific. 

But enough for now.

Bo