[MD] [Bulk] Re: Rorty's Relativism

[david buchanan]

Marsha said:
...And you are ignoring my evidence that 'Man is the measure of all things.', is a statement of relativism.  And Phædrus goes on to state "Yes, that's what he is saying about Quality."  This is my evidence the RMP embraces relativism.

dmb says:
The line you are citing as evidence of relativism comes from the same book that I'm citing for evidence against relativism. Do you think we ought to just pick our favorite line, just pick the one that supports our view and ignore the other one? No, of course not and neither do I. But I'll point out that the lines I'm quoting come later in the text and the apparent discrepancy is merely the result of not following the issue through. I mean, the structure of ZAMM does this sort of thing all the way through. He's not just contradicting himself when he says later, "Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! NOT ETHICAL RELATIVISM." He's developing these ideas step by step, not only to make it palatable but also for the sake of dramatic tension. He's trying to get across the struggles of trying to figure things out and the excitement of finally discovering what he is looking for. It's just like those waves of crystalization where he moves from the teaching of rhetoric, to metaphysics to mysticism. He gets closer and closer to those final discoveries and the text progresses. Between the lines you're quoting and the lines I'm quoting, he discovers that all important missing piece of the puzzle, which then allows him to say, "That is what the Sophists were teaching. Not ethical relativism."
If you would read the chapter as a whole, you'd easily see this. He's accusing Plato of slander for calling them relativist. You can quote Wiki to commit the same slander, but that was how this disagreement got started. I sited the same lines to show you that Pirsig disagrees with Wiki and Plato. Here's how the chapter ends....
"And rhetoric. Poor rhetoric, once "learning" itself, now becomes reduced to the teaching of mannerisms and forms, Aristotelian forms, for writing, as if these mattered. Five spelling errors, Phædrus remembered, or one error of sentence completeness, or three misplaced modifiers, or -- it went on and on. Any of these was sufficient to inform a student that he did not know rhetoric. After all, that's what rhetoric is, isn't it? Of course there's "empty rhetoric," that is, rhetoric that has emotional appeal without proper subservience to dialectical truth, but we don't want any of that, do we? That would make us like those liars and cheats and defilers of ancient Greece, the Sophists...remember them? We'll learn the Truth in our other academic courses, and then learn a little rhetoric so that we can write it nicely and impress our bosses who will advance us to higher positions.
Forms and mannerisms...hated by the best, loved by the worst. Year after year, decade after decade of little front-row "readers," mimics with pretty smiles and neat pens, out to get their Aristotelian A's while those who possess the real areté sit silently in back of them wondering what is wrong with themselves that they cannot like this subject.
And today in those few Universities that bother to teach classic ethics anymore, students, following the lead of Aristotle and Plato, endlessly play around with the question that in ancient Greece never needed to be asked: "What is the Good? And how do we define it? Since different people have defined it differently, how can we know there is any good? Some say the good is found in happiness, but how do we know what happiness is? And how can happiness be defined? Happiness and good are not objective terms. We cannot deal with them scientifically. And since they aren't objective they just exist in your mind. So if you want to be happy just change your mind. Ha-ha, ha-ha."
Aristotelian ethics, Aristotelian definitions, Aristotelian logic, Aristotelian forms, Aristotelian substances, Aristotelian rhetoric, Aristotelian laughter -- ha-ha, ha-ha.
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. --"




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