[MD] Rorty, Pirsig and the Sophists

[Gareth Evans]

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.


McLuhan in his thesis argues that the conflict is between dialectic and
grammar. Rhetoric,dialectic and grammar were the three liberal arts of of
the Greek *trivium. *And he states that the difference between an art and a
science is that science has a methodology. When the three were one,
knowledge of good(arete) was an art. With Aristotle dialectic morphed from a
discussion of the good to a system of methods of reasoning(dialectic became
logic which Aristotle claimed to invent) and became a static application of
rules. But grammar (the original non-prescriptive kind) lived on. McLuhan
traced the conflict down through the centuries to Nashe and his dispute
(from his side, the grammarian or *ars poetica*  side of Aquinas and the
scholastics) with the static rigidity of the Puritans (the dialecticians).
Of course Pirsig would enter the debate on the grammarian side with a novel.
The issues are too complex to put in a poem.