[MD] Logos is not ergon

[Matt Kundert]

Ron said:
with regards to Andre and his post, I feel you greatly 
misunderstand his meaning. it is exactly the virtue of 
logos as ergon he laments as lost to the ego and the 
selfishness of the "I" at the expense of the community. 
To lawyers and wordsmiths worshiping at the alter of 
materialist desires. Greed has replaced honor as the 
virtue of the culture as it distorts logos and twists ergon.

Andre said:
Excellent Ron, I could not have said it better. If I 
understand Kitto in 'The Greeks' properly, the 
relationship between word and deed was much closer (if 
not the same) than it is now. We are talking about the 
time of arete, the time before any systematic philosophy 
(intellect) had 'evolved' out of the social level (this, Pirsig 
of course argues, happened with Aristotle). A social PoV 
not yet kidnapped by intellect to serve its own purposes.

Matt:
That's interesting, and a bit as at cross-purposes, I think, 
with what I said as what I said was with either of you.  
But I'm not sure.

1) I'm not going to defend lawyers.

2) I'm not going to defend consumerism or neoclassical, 
Chicago school economics.

3) I wasn't exactly talking about the ego of "egotistical," 
though I will grant they relate.

4) In contradistinction to Ron, I absolutely think words 
are actions.  Everything we do is an action in a pragmatist 
view, though that doesn't itself begin the distinctions to be 
made between different kinds of actions.  To not think 
words are actions is to greatly underestimate the notion of 
psychological damage. (I don't care if you _talk about_ 
pragmatism, Ron, I'm simply commenting on the 
occasional things you say that are at odds with what I 
take to be its insights.  The only reason I find it interesting 
is because of our similar take on what happened in 
Greece, and your use of Barry Allen's book on truth--he's 
basically a pragmatist.)

5) I do, in contradistinction to both of you, think it's 
actually a pretty good thing that the "relationship 
between word and deed" are not as close as they used to 
be.  This is something I began to realize a couple years 
ago in pursuing Greek studies around rhetoric and 
historical change.  As I see it, rhetoric composes the 
routes of thought our minds engage in--the shorter the 
route between an event that kicks you up into a reflective 
thought-loop and the action-consequence dump-out at 
the end of the thought-loop, the _less thought_ goes into 
the reflection over which action-consequence should be 
taken.  In other words, spazzes and fundamentalists have 
short thought-loops.

As I see it, the whole movement of secularization, the 
movement that helped end the bloody Religious Wars in 
Europe--where people would react upon hearing a single 
word, "Catholic" or "Lutheran"--was a movement for the 
elongation of thought-loops, of the rhetorical routes 
between one action and another action.

I think more thought is good.  I think a little elongation in 
the thought of some practitioners of Islam and Christianity 
would be good.  Yet, on the other hand, impotence to act 
is bad, so it's not as if I want thought-loops to be infinitely 
long.

Matt
 		 	   		  
_________________________________________________________________
Bing™  brings you maps, menus, and reviews organized in one place.   Try it now.
http://www.bing.com/search?q=restaurants&form=MLOGEN&publ=WLHMTAG&crea=TEXT_MLOGEN_Core_tagline_local_1x1