[MD] Consciousness a la Ham

[skutvik at online.no]

DMB (maybe Ron will have some interest in it)

On 24 Aug. 

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 then said:

> 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.

Bo now:

In my opinion the Plato-Sophist controversy  was not a dynamic/static  
process, but more on that later.   

> We see this more clearly, even explicitly, in the next paragraph. There
> he says, "The differenc 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". 

A qualification: I speak about reading ZAMM in light of the MOQ, but 
we must also understand that it was an early stage of the MOQ. He 
simply began by seeing a decline from a Golden Age when it (Aretê) 
dominated existence to Plato when Aretê became a fixed part of 
reality.   

> 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.

Yes, intellect is the better than "society" in the static hierarchy of the 
final MOQ, but ZAMM had not arrived there. P. only longed  for the 
heroic past that looked so attractive compared to SOM's bloodless 
nihilism and saw it as a "fall" from grace. 

> 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. 

On with the MOQ glasses: No age, nor group represent DQ, it's only 
the static Aretê evolution, thus ZAMM tells about intellectual Aretê 
emergence out of social Aretê. However, the latter as described by 
Homer is a thousand years before the Sophists so they hardly 
represented social Aretê (not to speak of Dynamic Aretê) rather were 
the newfangled subjectivists who confronted the newfangled 
objectivists of the newfangled intellectual level.

Pirsig of ZAMM bought Kitto's interpretation of Aretê as displayed by 
the mythological heroes of "The Iliad" and then drew the conclusion 
that because the Sophists taught Aretê  this was the same article, but 
Protagoras' "man the measure" had little to do with the mythological 
social past, it said that (what was to become) the subject was reality's 
source. I know well that there is a quote in ZAMM that denies that 
"man" means subjectivism, but then neither object nor subject were 
part of the Greek vocabulary.

Bo .