[MD] Some historical perspective

[Matt Kundert]

The two parts you missed, Squonk, were partly because I was carrying on an argument in my head with DMB, and sort of Pirsig.  The contention has occasionally been, so I understand it, that the Sophists were philosophical mystics.  DMB knows a bit about Orphism, but there's been something like a binding together of the Sophists and Orphic mysticism in his presentation of the material, a presentation aided by Pirsig making something like that slide.  I've never encountered DMB on this terrain, specifically, so I'm not sure how he'd chew it.

The slide Pirsig makes is something like this: Pirsig makes three claims in ZMM--1) Plato stole his Good from the Sophists, 2) Plato made rhetoric bow down to dialectic, and 3) Aristotle made the Good bow down to the Truth.  The slide is essentially in associating too closely rhetoric and this notion of "Good".  That makes it easier to call the Sophists mystics, when I don't think they were--in their _philosophy_.  They may have participated in Orphic religion like many others, or in all kinds of the cults crawling all over Athens at the time (if I'm not mistaken on that point).  Orphism was a usurper from the East to the Greeks Homeric past.  The Sophists, in their capacity _as Sophists_, however, I don't think ever got to a point of sophistication (or at least uniformity) about religion or mysticism.

I don't know, maybe that's a dud explanation.  The main opaque claim missed was just the claim that Aristotle didn't see that if dialectic is for destroying, then the only thing that can build is rhetoric.  Aristotle thought, like Plato, that rhetoric was a _low_ thing, for the masses, not the enlightened few who practiced something else (Plato: dialectic, Aristotle: theoria).

> Bloody hell, I've actually understood a contribution of your Matt.

Yeah, well, DMB had a much easier time, too, after going back to school.

Take it easy,

Matt
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Windows 7: I wanted more reliable, now it's more reliable. Wow!
http://microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/default-ga.aspx?h=myidea?ocid=PID24727::T:WLMTAGL:ON:WL:en-US:WWL_WIN_myidea:102009