[MD] Rorty, Pirsig and the Sophists

[skutvik at online.no]

Gareth Evans 

May 21

Bodvar before (to DMB I believe)

> > 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.

 
Gareth says 
> 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.

Bodvar now:
Please no more interpretations of "The Greeks" I don't know how 
many I've heard since we started this discussion, one more outlandish 
than the other. Most however goes more or less along the lines of 
Pirsigs in the sense of it being the emergence of rationality from a 
mythological past. A past that rationality in turn deemed irrational. 

In a Q context the past must have been the social level and not 
"irrational" at all because it was from before the "irrational/rational" 
distinction, ergo - as what follows the 3rd. is the 4th. - it was intellect 
that introduced this dualism and the countless variations over the 
subject/object theme. 

The most interesting "Greek interpretation"  is Owen Barfield's 
"Participation" scheme that our long lasting MD participant Scott 
Roberts promoted. This because it so closely matches the Q-levels, 
but without MOQ's initial inside-out turn it is lost. As lost as the MOQ 
will be without the SOL interpretation. 

Bodvar