[MD] MD Plato's Good vs. Pirsig's Quality

[MarshaV]

"Sophists so was that they could not compare with 
his master, Socrates, who was in actuality the 
greatest Sophist of them all. This last 
explanation is interesting, Phædrus thinks, but 
unsatisfactory. You don't abhor a school of which 
your master is a member.  What was Plato's real 
purpose in this? Phædrus reads further and 
further into pre-Socratic Greek thought to find 
out, and eventually comes to the view that 
Plato's hatred of the rhetoricians was part of a 
much larger struggle in which the reality of the 
Good, represented by the Sophists, and the 
reality of the True, represented by the 
dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle 
for the future mind of man. Truth won, the Good 
lost, and that is why today we have so little 
difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so 
much difficulty accepting the reality of Quality, 
even though there is no more agreement in one area than in the other.
...

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.
"
        (ZAMM, Chapter 29)

Seems to me Plato was championing the Truth.





At 07:28 AM 5/21/2009, you wrote:
>Ant,
>If I may jump in for a second, In my reading, 
>the sophists thought of excellence
>as a practice, an activity. Like dance or 
>athletics. Something that really could
>not be taught but developed through practice and guidance, an action of being.
>
>Plato, I believe, asked where the idea of excellence originates, how does one
>know what excellence is? He thought the concept of excellence preceded the
>act. Keeping in mind Plato was influenced by Parmenides, He considered the
>concept of excellence or the good as more real 
>than the act which was subject to
>change and interpretation.
>Enter Aristotle who clarifies the sitituation by 
>stating that why the idea of the good
>is more permanent is because the good is an idea 
>understood universally but to under
>stand what was good was an arguent made from the 
>particular expereince to a universal
>understanding. Aristotle disagreed with Plato in 
>that he believed the material world is what gives
>rise to ideas about it.
>Aristotle was the one who equated the good with what is "true" and truth
>is a sort of sameness with being like what "is".
>
>-Ron
>
>________________________________ From: Ant 
>McWatt <antmcwatt at hotmail.co.uk> To: moq discuss 
><moq_discuss at moqtalk.org> Sent: Wednesday, May 
>20, 2009 4:45:29 PM Subject: [MD] MD Plato's 
>Good vs. Pirsig's Quality DMB said May 20th 
>2009: Funny thing is, I'd just finished a 15 
>page term paper comparing Plato's Good and 
>Pirsig's Quality. (Among other things, we read 
>the Republic, where the allegory of the cave 
>serves as one of three analogies for the Good.) 
>So I was just covering the same ground for my 
>Plato class. It was no trick at all to see that 
>both terms are central in their own context. It 
>could just be a reflection of the reading list 
>for this particular course and there is a ton of 
>Plato I haven't read but it's my impression that 
>you can [not] tell a story about Plato without 
>including the Good. Same with Pirsig and his 
>Quality. They'd both tell you their central term 
>refers to the source and substance of 
>everything. If they were excluded, I wouldn't 
>know how to say anything of any substance about 
>either of them... Ant McWatt just had to ask: 
>Dave, >From your reading of the Republic and 
>other research for your Plato/Pirsig term paper, 
>do you think Plato considered the Good as 
>primarily static (as per the other Forms) or 
>essentially Dynamic (on the lines of DQ)? 
>Moreover, did you discover anything else 
>particularly significant in this Good/Quality 
>comparison?  Best wishes, Anthony . 
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The self is a thought-flow of ever-changing, 
interrelated and interconnected, inorganic, 
biological, social and intellectual, static 
patterns of value responding to Dynamic Quality.

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