[MD] the sophists

[david buchanan]

Bodvar said:
If Pirsig's presentation of the MOQ is "from a static perspective" because it is conveyed by language, how would a dynamic presentation be carried out? 


Andre replied:
... About the 'dynamic presentation' dmb has already referred you to the relevant (classroom) passages in an earlier post.


dmb says:

Thanks, Andre. In the classroom scenes the students learned that they didn't need a bunch of rules to recognize quality when they saw it. They weren't given a definition of quality and yet almost everyone agreed about which papers were best. Once they learned to trust their own ability to see it, they wanted to know how to get it. Only then did the rules have a meaning and a purpose they could appreciate. They learned to recognize it even if there was no rule or technique attached to it. 

That's why Phaedrus feels that he's finally found his allies when his realizes what the Sophists were up to the same thing. "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." Like I said, 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 again in Pirsig's choice to present Quality in a philosophical novel, in which he tells John Sutherland...

"Laws of nature are human INVENTIONS, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It's all a ghost, AND IN ANTIQUITY WAS SO RECOGNIZED AS A GHOST, the whole blessed world that we live in. It's run by ghosts." (ZAMM:42)

"The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a FORM of reality. It was reality itself, ever-changing, ultimately unknowable in any sort of fixed, rigid way." (ZAMM:379)

James was opposed to this Platonic rigidity too. As he saw it, Burkhardt says, "we are on the very brink of misunderstanding if we think that our only access to reality is through conceptual understanding. In addition to conceptual understanding there is also direct acquaintance and experience. ...Conceptual thought, despite its practical or theoretical efficacy, stays only on the surface of things. It is knowledge ABOUT things; it does not penetrate the inner life of things and reality's continuously changing character." (Editor's intro to PU, p.xxiii)

"...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,.." 



 		 	   		  
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