[MD] Some historical perspective

[John Carl]

Squonk,

Good stuff!



> These insights lead Nietzsche to the later realisation that Plato and the
> Sophists were trying to ‘out-best’ each other.
>
>
An emotional aspect to dialectical wrangling?  Heaven and Ham forbid.




>
> Squonk: This is the way it logically stacks up to me…
>
> Truth is an aesthetically pleasing relationship between symbols - symbolic
> manipulation.
>
> Symbolic manipulation is what the Intellect is and does.
>
> Therefore, Intellect must exist in order for the Truth to exist, in order
> for it (the Truth) to subordinate the Good.
>
>

Well and truly analyzed and sir.  I agree.  In fact, I've said before that
Truth is the highest value of any intellectual pattern.   If we make IT the
highest overall value of existence in a  subordination of Quality to
intellect; it becomes something bad called by many names, "SOM",
Objectivism, Intellectualism, a values-free metaphysic.

You nailed it on the head.




> If this is so, then it allows us to contemplate the source of Truth, and
> that source is evident in Geometry. Geometry existed hundreds of years
> before Plato’s rhetorical battle with the sophists, (Thales, 635
>  -543 BC) and in a period of Human consciousness which produced literature
> that does not convey SOM.
>




> This destroys Bo’s argument that Intellect = SOM.
>
> Shatters it completely.



Yes and it joins a long crowded list.  Leonard Shlain's, Art and
Physics<http://www.artandphysics.com/>  offers
the most thorough and compelling evidence I've ever seen that intellectual
insights evolve in response to aesthetic/spatial (non-linguistic)
appreciation far in advance of intellectual formulation.  He goes into the
Greeks too.


> Squonk: I think you are bang on the money when you recognise that truth
> pre-existed SOM. I think it is so clear that one would have to go to quite
> extraordinary, if not pathologically arrogant lengths NOT to see it.
>

Well you yourself need not go to "pathetical arrogant lengths" in search of
a motivation, especially as you posit the Occamic solution intuitively at
the beginning of your excellent post...


"These insights lead Nietzsche to the later realisation that Plato and the
Sophists were trying to ‘out-best’ each other."


See?  They're all good enough guys in their own rights.  Plato was cool!  So
were the Sophists.  But in the struggle to out-best the other guy, they lost
sight of the process of dynamic evolution of intellect which occurs
 emptying out all the old static baggage and re-organizing.


I would argue that primary Truth belongs in the realm of pure abstraction.
> (In this realm, Truth is actually an aesthetic appreciation of quality).
>
>
Yes, although that last statement can be as confusing as Keats formulation
of Truth and Beauty, if you want to really slice and dice you lose the good,
so I won't.

My thinking on Truth evolved out of Pirsig combined with Ellul.  Jacques
Ellul posits that human consciousness has two disparate paradigms as value -
Truth (of the word) and Reality (of the image)

What I see plainly in front of my face, in a gestaltish whoosh at once and
all the time is what I think of as Reality.  What I deduce or induce or
imagine intellectually is the realm of Truth.  Seeing a cat cross my path is
part of my reality.   Saying that a cat crosses my path is part of my truth.


Hmmm... if we start philosophizing about where and how the two realms
intersect, wouldn't we be in the intellectual pattern known as "Pragmatism"?


Rather than state that rhetorical truth can be abstracted to 'Essence -
> Truth', i would say that the notion of an 'Essential Truth' is a Human myth
> - its a story.
>

Yes.  It's not so much that Truth is relative, but more like truth is
relational.  It is always "about" something else and is built upon context,
narrative and rules.