[MD] The Art of Philosophy

[david buchanan]

Ron said to dmb:

The love of wisdom is a passion for what is best. I dont think the passions were rejected so much as directed. Remember the metaphor of the chariot driver allowing the passions to drive and reason to guide. The passions were rejected when the forms became the ideal and the True when the material was illusion and false. Again the Platonic shadow is cast over the discussion, and it's Plato who would divorce us from the passions not Aristotle or Socrates.

dmb says:
The chariot allegory is put into the mouth of Socrates by Plato - in the dialogue titled "Phaedrus". It's pretty clear that only one of the two winged horses is good. It's as plain as the difference between black and white, I think. Plato makes Socrates say, "one of the horses is noble and of noble breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character".

As Wikipedia puts it, "the Charioteer represents intellect, reason, or the part of the soul that must guide the soul to truth; one horse represents rational or moral impulse or the positive part of passionate nature while the other represents the soul's irrational passions, appetites, or concupiscent nature".

This is certainly what Nietzsche was complaining about when he said the “virtuous hero must henceforth be a dialectician” and “Socrates and his successors,.. have considered all moral and sentimental accomplishments ...to be ultimately derived from the dialectic of knowledge,..”

Even further, notice what this move (to put "Truth" above all) does to the artists, poets, and sophists. If you believe Plato, the only thing worse that a sophist is a tyrants. I think it's just like Pirsig says; vicious slander.

A little more from Wiki:  "...the soul is incarnated into one of nine kinds of person, according to how much TRUTH it beheld. In order of decreasing levels of TRUTH SEEN, the categories are: (1) philosophers, lovers of beauty, men of culture, or those dedicated to love; (2) law-abiding kings or civic leaders; (3) politicians, estate-managers or businessmen; (4) ones who specialize in bodily health; (5) prophets or mystery cult participants; (6) poets or imitative artists; (7) craftsmen or farmers; (8) sophists or demagogues; and (9) tyrants."
 RON said:
James seems to be under the impression that ideas are some how unrelated to the good, but in fact ideas exist by virtue of their goodness...

dmb says:
Whoa! Hold your horses there, mister. (Lame pun intended.) You think James is under the impression that ideas are unrelated to the good? That is exactly what he disputes, actually. Pirsig quotes James on that very point. To say that truth is a species of the good, of course, is to say that truth is a particular kind of good, the way Robins are a particular kind of bird. Robins ARE birds, and not in a category distinct from birds. 

"James said, 'Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and coordinate with it.' He said, 'The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.' TRUTH IS A SPECIES OF GOOD. That was EXACTLY what is meant by the MOQ. Truth is a static intellectual pattern WITHIN a larger entity called Quality." (Lila -- Emphasis is Pirsig's)



RON continued:
... and Pirsig seems to over generalize the importance the ancient Greeks placed on avoiding the kinds prejudices the passions those ego-centric drives are associated with. The only comparison is that they both miss the mark in regard to the pragmatic benefits of reason over the unbridled passions and that the best passion is the passion for what is best in life which is what Socrates and Aristotle advocated and Plato rejected.

dmb says:
Well, basically we're talking about the long-term effects of the Platonic legacy and he is, along with Socrates and Aristotle, the founder of Western philosophy. Very roughly speaking, we're talking about what happened to the Sophists back in ancient Greece and it's kinda like Socrates built them a casket, Plato put them in it and Aristotle nailed it shut.

"Rhetoric is an art, Aristotle began, because it can be reduced to a rational system of order. That just left Phaedrus aghast. Stopped. He’d been prepared to decode messages of great subtlety, systems of great complexity in order to understand the deeper inner meaning of Aristotle, claimed by many to be the greatest philosopher of all time. And then to get hit, right off, straight in the face, with an asshole statement like that! It really shook him."

"Between the lines Phædrus read no doubts, no sense of awe, only the eternal smugness of the professional academician. Did Aristotle really think his students would be better rhetoricians for having learned all these endless names and relationships? And if not, did he really think he was teaching rhetoric? Phædrus thought that he really did. There was nothing in his style to indicate that Aristotle was ever one to doubt Aristotle. Phædrus saw Aristotle astremendously satisfied with this neat little stunt of naming and classifying everything. His world began and ended withthis stunt. The reason why, if he were not more than two thousand years dead, he would have gladly rubbed him out isthat he saw him as a PROTOTYPE for the many millions of self-satisfied and truly ignorant teachers throughout history who have smugly and callously killed the creative spirit of their students with this dumb ritual of analysis, this blind, rote, eternal naming of things. Walk into any of a hundred thousand classrooms today and hear the teachers divide and subdivide and interrelate and establish "principles" and study "methods" and what you will hear is the ghost of Aristotle speaking down through the centuries...the desiccating lifeless voice of dualistic reason."