[MD] Some historical perspective

[mark_maxwell at talktalk.net]

Hi Bo,



Bo quotes: ‘Now Plato's hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and Socrates are defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they consider to be the decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. THAT WHICH IS INDEPENDENT OF WHAT ANYONE THINKS ABOUT IT. The ideal that Socrates died for. The ideal that Greece alone possesses for the first time in the history of the world. It is still a very fragile thing. It can disappear completely. Plato abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint, not because they are low and immoral people...there are obviously much lower and more immoral people in Greece he completely ignores. He damns them because they threaten mankind's first beginning grasp of the ide
 a of truth.’ (ZAMM page 368)



Squonk: Truth is not a subject or an object.

It is not an object because truth is not material, and it is not a subject because it is asserted to be independent. In other words, Truth is a rhetorical device.



Bo: This [Truth] is what the INTELLECT in a MOQ context is all about.



Squonk: Agreed - truth is used to establish that which it insists to be true.

Nietzsche suggests that the sophists and the philosophers were playing a game to try and out-do each other in order to establish who could produce the best rhetoric. The philosophers hammered their opponents with a new rhetorical move: Truth.

Nietzsche’s view re-wrote previous views of the sophists and th
 e philosophers and established the current academic norm.



Bo: ‘Now, the point is that S/O distinction (as reality's base - as SOM) is WRONG…’



Squonk: Actually, the point is that Truth has been used to enforce the S/O distinction. There is no right or wrong, because Truth is a rhetorical device.



Bo: I feel that you people are completely off-track regarding the big picture.

DMB, Ron, Ian .. the resurrected Squonk ... all who have tried to disprove the SOL up through the ages may be great thinkers, but to re-write ZAMM: Bodvar abhors and damns them without restraint, not because they are low and immoral people, he damns them because they threaten mankind's first beginning grasp of the MOQ.=0
 A


Squonk: The moq is presented in Lila. Lila is written by RMP. Therefore, I should have thought it is primarily with RMP that you have a problem, and anyone else who advocates his views by proxy in a secondary sense.



Bo: ‘Their [RMP and proxies] "intellect" is what the intellectual level has hypnotized us into believing, namely something "conceptual" going on inside our subjective minds, totally and principally different from what it "conceptualizes"…‘



Squonk: The moq does statically differentiate, and by differentiating it could be asserted that the differentiation closes off one aspect of reality from another.

Well it does, in a static sense. But not in a SOM sense - it is non-SOM differentiation
 .

This is what I intend when I use the term ‘reify’: one static realm describing another.



Bo:.. ‘while MOQ's 4th.level is the VALUE of this distinction.’



Squonk: The rhetorical device Truth is used to establish the value of that which it distinguishes. Without Truth a S/O distinction would be difficult if not impossible to enforce.



All the best,

squonk