[MD] Some historical perspective

[mark_maxwell at talktalk.net]

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







Hello Matt,

It may be because it is late my time, but that remark regarding dmb has lost me again. Sorry.



Bo has long held the position that Intellect is equivalent Subject/Object differentiation.

This is the subject of this thread: any thoughts regarding that in light of your current thinking?



All the best,

squonk