[MD] the sophists

[skutvik at online.no]

DMB, ALL-

22 May:

Bodvar before:
> 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. 

OK, the students learned  how to free their greater or lesser writing 
abilities, just as the mechanical finesse displayed by the author in 
ZAMM resulted in better motorcycles performance, yet this is writing 
and motorcycles. John Sutherland would never become a good 
mechanic and Pirsig no good musician regardless of lecturing.  To 
teach quality generally can only be done by teaching the MOQ.  

> 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. 

But do you think Socrates and/or Plato taught low quality and sloppy 
ways to their students? Course not, their teachings were every bit as 
quality-filled as the Sophists,  Pirsig's grievance was  - as he saw it in 
ZAMM - their making Objective Truth the central reality instead of 
Aretê. That this was the emergence of the intellectual level out of the 
social is more than obvious.  

> 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  

What this "sophism" proves or disproves I'm not sure of, I think Pirsig 
later saw that it pulls the rug from under the Quality as well and did not 
follow up on it in LILA  .... nor the Sophist issue at all FYI.
 
    "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)  

Yes, the Greeks changed the social Good of old into the new 
intellectual Good, here it says into an Idea - and that was Plato's true 
part of the True/False dichotomy that Socrates arrived at. Now, if the 
rhetoricians said these things above about Aretê ...who knows? The 
"Man the Measure" sentence more indicates subjectivism as we know 
it.       

> 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. 

Objections your honor. Plato's IDEAS had nothing to do with our 
present day mind patterns, or concepts that we - when we were 
somists - regarded subjective and the exact opposite of Plato's ideas.  
It was only with Aristotle that the TRUE became "substance" (and the 
illusory "form", why ZAMM says that we in Aristotle see the shape of 
our modern scientific understanding.    


Bodvar