[MD] Concepts & Reality

[david buchanan]

Ron said to dmb:
...Bob paints dialectic as an evil usurper but that is after it became a tyranny. Dialectic was one of many devices used in the pursuit of wisdom one of many philosophic techniques employed to gain greater clarity and meaning. Because it is used to break down a persons static assumptions it makes it a devastating rhetorical tool in the wrong hands.    ...It is often read that Socrates valued truth while the Sophist valued excellence. But if we read Socrates he makes a claim that aiming for the true IS what it really means to value excellence. That THAT is what we mean when we say we strive towards excellence. Truth is a species of the good, the highest good. Which is why I seek to spare him the tag of the viciouse intellectual and place him more on the side of Will and Bob.  ...Socrates claimed Excellence has the greatest meaning when it concerns the true in experience and what Socrates was pushing was the idea that it was not enough to value excellence, that could mean anything one had to value the true in experience that is what holds the most power.


dmb says:

Plato and Socrates were his boyhood heros and Pirsig understands that they were trying to defend something quite worthy and precious "against what they consider to be the decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. ...The ideal that Socrates dies for. The ideal that Greece alone possesses for the first time in the history of the world. It is still a very fragile thing," Pirsig says. "And yet, Phaedrus understands, what he is saying about Quality is somehow opposed to all this. It seems to agree much more closely with the Sophists."

This contest between the True and the Good (ZAMM, chapter 29) ties in pretty neatly with the distinction between concepts and reality (LILA, chapter 29). To say that "truth" is a species of the Good is to subordinate the truth under the Good, as a relatively narrow and specific kind of good. In this case, truth is what's good intellectually. This is very much part of reversing the one really crucial mistake made by Plato and Plato's Socrates. "Truth won, the Good lost," Pirsig says, "and that is why today we have so little difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so much difficulty accepting the reality of Quality, even though there is no more agreement in one area than in the other."

"But why? Phædrus wondered. Why destroy areté? And no sooner had he asked the question than the answer came to him. Plato hadn't tried to destroy areté. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made areté the Good, the highest form, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before.
That was why the Quality that Phædrus had arrived at in the classroom had seemed so close to Plato's Good. Plato's Good was taken from the rhetoricians. Phædrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists who had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists. 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 kind of fixed, rigid way."

That was the Platonic mistake, encapsulating the Good making it subordinate to Truth itself. Pirsig (and James) reverse that priority. Truth obtains between concepts and concepts are always derived from Quality, which is pre-conceptual experience or reality itself. Quality cannot be defined because it is an "ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any fixed or rigid way. It is neither true nor untrue but the source and substance of all intellectual quality.