[MD] The Sophists as the Last Philosophical Mystics

[skutvik at online.no]

Hi DMB always a pleasure to talk with you. 

On 31 Dec. you wrote: 

> dmb says:
> My strange mystical turn? Nothing about Arete being mystical? Huh?
> When is the last time you read Lila, where it says that when "DQ is
> identified with religious mysticism it produces an avalanche of
> information as to what DQ is." (page377) Or how about the quote from
> ZAMM. Isn't it clear that Pirsig is here equating Quality and
> Arete?...

I have no problems with the basics of the MOQ; that reality is 
Quality - nor that this may correspond to Dharma - and if this is 
mystical so be it, but I have the sinking feeling that your kind of 
mysticism means that the next turn; the static levels, yes the 
MOQ itself is foreign to DQ. In other words that DQ is outside the 
MOQ, and as the SOL balances on this fulcrum I go no further.    

Except this:

> That makes no sense. You're trying to read ZAMM in terms of the static
> levels, which hadn't yet been concieved. (Not to mention using the
> classic/romantic split to read Lila, which had been dropped by then, but
> more about that later.) Further, the important difference between Plato
> and the Sophists, as Pirsig explains it, is NOT a difference of static
> levels or between subjective SOMers and objective SOMers, but is the
> difference between static and Dynamic Quality. As I already explained back
> on the 17th,..

To align ZMM and LILA is one of our greatest challenges and that 
the romantic/classic split matches the social/intellectual one is 
obvious  ... unless you are principally against all that this person 
says.  Let me ask how you explain that the "classic" half of the 
R/C is subtitled "intellect" and splits into "subjective/ objective" 
(mind/matter)?     

Another thing is that you accuse me of reading ZMM in terms of 
the levels, while you yourself speak about the Sophists' being a 
dynamic vs static issue. That split had not been conceived of 
either. See how we are bound to see ZMM in a MOQ light.

Bo