[MD] the sophists

[david buchanan]

Bo said to dmb:
...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. ... 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. ... 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.



dmb says:

No, Bo, the Sophists were not teaching social level values and they were not the subjective half of SOM either. They were teaching Quality. That's the whole point of Pirsig's identifying with them. You're also quite mistaken to say he did not follow up on this in Lila. Lila culminates in this supposed non-existent follow up!

"Digging back into ancient Greek history, to the time when this mythos-to-logos transition was taking place, Phaedrus noted that the ancient rhetoricians of Greece, the Sophists, had taught what they called ARETE, which was a synonym for Quality. Victorians had translated ARETE as 'virtue' but Victorian 'virtue' connoted sexual abstinence, prissiness and a holier-that-thou snobbery. This was a long way from what the ancient Greeks meant. The early Greek literature, particularly the poetry of Homer, showed that ARETE had been a central and vital term." (Lila, page 378)

>From here, Pirsig traces this central and vital term back into the proto-Indo-European language and discovers that this synonym for Quality goes all the way back and is the oldest idea known to man. It's not a social level concept except in the mistranslations of snobby Victorians and thou.

And it is no accident that we read this in chapter 30, after Pirsig hitches his wagon to James's pragmatic theory of truth and radical empiricism. As a matter of fact, Buddhist scholars recognized James as an ally over a hundred years ago.





 		 	   		  
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