[MD] Rhetoric

[david]

Hello, MOQers:

I suppose everyone knows that people are suspicious of the emotional language in "rhetoric" and consider "sophistry" to be a form of manipulative deception. The conventional meaning isn't likely to change anytime soon and that's fine because there is empty speech and there are plenty of manipulative deceivers that deserve the name. In telling the story of philosophy Pirsig turns those meanings upside down.


“Plato’s hatred of the rhetoricians was part of a much larger struggle in which the reality of the Good, represented by the Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented by the dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle for the future mind of man.” -- Robert Pirsig


As the story is usually told, rhetoric is too emotional to be considered serious about the truth. Our feelings have no bearing on the truth, this story goes, and clear thinking is about cool logic and putting one's passions aside. But, Pirsig says, this story doesn't make as much sense as it used to.


“It’s been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions, the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of nature’s order which was as yet unknown. Now it’s time to further an understanding of nature’s order by reassimilating those passions which were originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man’s consciousness, are a part of nature’s order too. The central part.” — Robert Pirsig


At certain points in the re-telling and inversion of this old slanderous story Pirsig is downright angry about it. He finally realizes that the Platonic demand for passionless dialectic has the effect of excluding Quality, which is the whole thing for Pirsig.



“Phædrus’ mind races on and on and then on further, seeing now at last a kind of evil thing, an evil deeply entrenched in himself, which pretends to try and understand love and beauty and truth and wisdom but whose real purpose is never to understand them, whose real purpose is always to usurp them and enthrone itself. Dialectic - the usurper. That is what he sees. The parvenu, muscling in on all that is Good and seeking to contain it and control it."


And he's feeling triumphant about this discovery because it turns out that the Sophists weren't demagogues, hucksters, or confidence men. They were teaching Quality and they were teaching it the same way he had been teaching it to his student in Montana.


"Lightning hits! Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine 'virtue.' But areté. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric."


And this re-telling of ancient history is part of the book's central project, which is a root expansion of rationality. The criticisms of rationality that he offers almost always involve the problem of objective truth. Value-free science has got to go, he says. Attitudes of objectivity make our thinking stiff and narrow and entail a denigration of subjectivity so that Quality is JUST what you like, is JUST your opinion or assessment of some thing or other. But this is part of that same old slander against the Sophists and rhetoricians, Pirsig says, and our form of rationality would actually be vastly improved by putting Quality at the cutting edge of all experience and all thought. Quality is right there at the very roots of our thinking and by including Quality our thinking is broadened and deepened and enriched by the inclusion of the emotional and aesthetic quality that pervades our thought regardless of whether we acknowledge it or not. You gotta have a feel for the work, he says, and that's not just about fixing motorcycles. It's about everything. All the time.


For Pirsig, "rhetoric" simply means excellence in thought and speech. Rhetoric is truer than objective truth because it includes the heart as well the head, so to speak. To talk truthfully will mean that the claim is supported by evidence and its expression logically sound, just as before, but that's no longer good enough. Speaking truthfully also means that you care about the truth, have feelings about that truth and maybe your expression shows the power or the beauty of that truth. To move or persuade another is not a sinister manipulation or a deception. It's a good thing and we should love it somebody does it right.





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Robert M. Pirsig's MoQ deals with the fundamentals of existence and provides a more coherent system for understanding reality than our current paradigms allow