[MD] Rorty, Pirsig and the Sophists

[skutvik at online.no]

All MOQ discuss.. 

Arlo had said:
> The intellectual patterns emerging from the Sophists were not SOM. They
> were clearly something better. And it is HERE that the SOM infestation of
> Western culture began. And it is HERE that Pirsig begins his treatise on
> correcting this.

dmb says:
> I agree with Arlo. There is always room for interpretation, of course, but
> it's really quite clear from the text. On page 377, it says that the
> Sophist were teaching excellence in general or Quality, not ethical
> relativism or pristine virtue.

It is also clear from the text that Plato & Co transformed the Quality 
(Arete) which he gives examples of in the Homeric heroes and 
heroines into some new kind of Quality

    "Plato hadn't tried to destroy aretê. He had encapsulated it; 
    made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a 
    rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made areté the Good, the 
    highest form, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to 
    Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before."  (ZAMM)

and how can you avoid "translating" this into MOQ - and see that this 
is the intellectual level starting to find its form and that a the Sophist's 
looked like what the "new age" wanted to escape, hence Plato's 
hatred. In a MOQ retrospect we see that they weren't "socialists", 
rather intellect's subjectivists. 

I know what ZAMM says about the Arete of the Sophists not being 
subjectivism or relativism ..etc. but this terms (S/O) was still a 
thousand years into the future. Plato conceived them to be a danger 
for the "new age" that he  sensed would change the world. 

    "Before substance. Before form.[Aristotle] Before mind and 
    matter.[Descartes] Before dialectic itself. [Plato] Quality had 
    been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were 
    teaching QUALITY, and the medium they had chosen was that 
    of rhetoric. He has been doing it right all along."  (ZAMM)

Think for yourself for a change, this must fit the MOQ and to say that 
before the Greeks Quality had been "absolute" is ridiculous. It made a 
dynamic leap to the intellectual level that's the only viable option. The 
social era's mythological "superstructure" had reached a point when it 
no longer had any appeal so in that sense DQ "intervened" to see the 
birth of a new level.  

DMB
> Not only does he identify with the Sophists because they were teaching
> Quality, he also identifies with medium they used to teach it. We see this
> instantiated not only in the classroom scenes where Phadreus experimented
> with composition students, we also see this in Pirsig's choice to teach it
> through a philosophical novel rather than some exclusively rational
> medium. He is taking sides AGAINST things like Plato's dialectic, after
> all.

"Teaching quality" how exactly was that carried out? "To-day well have 
a dynamic math lesson without static rules and fixed numbers ..." 
There is only one way to teach quality and that is to teach the MOQ 
where intellect-as-SOM is the final stage before realization of "X" and I 
only know Buddhism that transcended the Upanishads period (which 
was an Oriental intellect according to Pirsig) to a realization that truth 
is subordinated a greater context.    

I skip your academical "tour de force".

    "...Plato¢s hatred of the rhetoricians was part of a much larger 
    struggle in which the reality of the Good, represented by the 
    Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented by the 
    dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle for the future 
    mind of man. Truth won, the Good lost, and that is why today 
    we have so little difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so 
    much difficulty accepting the reality of Quality,.." (ZAMM)  

Right "the reality of the True" is Intellect's "objective" aspect and - 
again - the Sophists were perceived by Plato to represent the opposite, 
namely humankind's notorious whims, falsities and distortions that 
endangered TRUTH. How the Sophists looked upon themselves? 
Probably as pointing to what seems so obvious - that everything is 
man-made -  but the MOQ rejects subjectivism as much as 
objectivism and why Pirsig didn't mention the Sophist issue in LILA.  

Bodvar