[MD] Consciousness a la Ham

[david buchanan]

dmb quoted Pirsig from ZAMM:
But why? Phædrus wondered. Why destroy areté? And no sooner had he asked the question than the answer came to him. Plato hadn't tried to destroy areté. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made areté the Good, the highest form, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before.

Bo replied:
It is in MOQ's level light we must read ZAMM. It's clear as day that it describes intellect emerging from its social origin. If you have some other interpretation please tell. ...

dmb says:
Well, yes we can read ZAMM in light of the MOQ but the way to understand these comments is in terms of static versus dynamic, not in terms of the social and intellectual levels. We see this more clearly, even explicitly, in the next paragraph. There he says, "The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. ..It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way". 

I'm not denying that there was a shift from the social to the intellectual in Plato's time, just that you have misidentified Plato's crime. The problem is not that he asserted intellectual values over social level values. That's a good thing according to the MOQ. But in the process, Plato also converted the dynamic quality of the sophists into a static intellectual form. That's the move that Pirsig resents and his MOQ undoes it. 

  

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