[MD] philosophers stone

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Marsha]
Wow!  I admit to making it a quick read, but that introduction made 
me dizzy.  Seems there was a lot of flip-flopping.  Was there a SOM 
thread running through the last 2,500 years?  I didn't get that there was.

[Arlo]
I don't think Hall's vision was on pinpointing an SOM demarcation. 
That said, I think there is quite a lot of overlap between the time 
Hall points to as "losing" its esoteric center and the time Pirsig 
points to as the onset of an SOM paradigm. Certainly Hall's 
sympathies are with the very Sophists that Pirsig also champions, and 
as a self-professed "Neo-Platonist" he distances himself from the 
Aristotelian school. "Briefly described, Neo-Platonism is a 
philosophic code which conceives every physical or concrete body of 
doctrine to be merely the shell of a spiritual verity which may be 
discovered through meditation and certain exercises of a mystic 
nature." (Hall). I'd contend that that "spiritual verity" is Quality 
itself, by the way.

As I said, I think the demise of esoteric understandings coincides 
with the arrival of a dominant SOM paradigm (and also the erosion of 
any mythological frames). They may not be the same thing, of course, 
and one may very well be the "cause" of the other, or they could both 
be symptomatic of a larger malady. Hall may support the idea that the 
loss of esoteric, mystic thinking left people with two polar choices; 
unquestioned "faith" or purely logical reason. Western Philosophy 
championed the latter, while Western Religion championed the former, 
and the science and religion we see in America today evidence this schism.

By the way, as a quick note... Hall wrote this entire book at the age 
of 27! And it was written in 1928. Hall also founded the Philosophic 
Research Society (http://prs.org/).