[MD] the sophists

[skutvik at online.no]

Hi DMB 

24 May.:

Bo had said:
> ...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. 

You skipped my points that "teaching quality itself" is plain impossible 
(for Heaven's sake DQ is indefinable and hence unteachable) except 
learning about it as the DQ/SQ dualism form, but THAT could only be 
realized after the static hierarchy was completed. 

> That's the whole point of Pirsig's identifying with them. 

Sure he identified with them in ZAMM where Plato was the bad guy. I 
myself identified with the author when I first started reading ZAMM, I 
had a motorcycle and felt that he was "my man", but it was only when I 
understood his budding philosophical revolution that lightning hit. The 
Sophists just were Plato's antagonists, the intellectual level were  in 
the offing and they were part and parcel of its internal inconsistency.   

> 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! 

A little more specific, please! 

You cite from LILA:
    "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)  

Right, but another place in LILA it says:

    Phaedrus remembered now that it had bothered him a little 
    that in the Odyssey, Homer seemed at times to be equating 
    Quality and celebrity. Perhaps in Homer's time, when evolution 
    had not yet transcended the social level into the intellectual, 
    the two were the same. 

In Homer's time the Social level was "leading edge" and celebrity an 
immense value, but this was not the Sophist's issue they were 
modernists and their "Man the Measure" filled the necessary "S" role 
of the budding intellect after Plato had provided the "O" and ever since 
this see-saw has been going ... supposedly until the MOQ, but some 
thinks the objective is the sole antagonist and that the subjective has 
some affiliation with it.  

> >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.

Sure, the term Quality may be as old as language, but I guess so is 
Beauty, I have no issue with this.

Bodvar