[MD] Rhetoric

Tue Nov 22 10:05:30 PST 2016

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David Harding said to dmb:

I do wonder if you agree with the words you write when you’re continually referring to what ‘Pirsig says'.  Do you agree with Pirsig?  What’s your opinion?

dmb says:

Yes, I agree with Pirsig in particular and with Classical Pragmatism in general. I like to quote Pirsig in order to present and explain the ideas rather than defend them. It seems to me that nearly every "critic" of the MOQ ends up attacking ideas that are NOT actually features of the MOQ but rather products of the critic's misunderstanding. Since there's no point in defending a distorted idea that Pirsig never endorsed, it's better to answer the critic by offering an undistorted version of that idea. In this case, for example, Tuukka was operating with conspicuously incorrect conceptions of "dialectic" and "rhetoric". Pirsig's own comments on the topic serve as the perfect antidote to poison, I think.

David Harding said:

On this point I’m not so sure but in your first paragraph you write that a traditional understanding of rhetoric and sophistry is fine as there are so many hucksters out there.  But on this I disagree.  I would argue that it’s precisely because of our traditional understanding of these terms that there are so many hucksters and deceivers out there. ...

dmb says:

Think of it this way: People use the term "vandalism" to describe pointless destruction and that's find because there are people who destroy thing for no particular reason but we can also speak historically about the Germanic tribe called "Vandals" and make a case that the conventional term is slanderous toward actual Vandals. In the same way, we can use "sophistry" to describe Trump or talk radio hosts but still make a case that this is slanderous toward the actual Sophists of ancient Greece. I mean, if you're talking to Pirsig and he says you're a great rhetorician then you should know that you have not been insulted. Quite the opposite. In that context, you would have been very flattered. But it you're down at the local bar and some dude accuses you of sophistry, then you have been insulted (and I would not mind meeting the kind people who hang out there because that's my kind of insult).

David Harding said:

What’s missed by Socrates is that he, and not the Sophists, is being the deceptive one by claiming he doesn’t know what is good.   That’s why I think it’s our current day Metaphysics, built upon Socrates assumption, that creates this deceptive attitude. One in which the words we speak can be meaningless so who really cares about them anyway? And Quality forget that - what’s that?  Furthermore, how can you be honest and speak to the wholeness of experience without perceiving and speaking directly of its Quality?  And how better to continually do this than with a Metaphysics which points out that all things are built upon it, and so are it? But you were probably just giving a throwaway line and I’m reading too much into this but figure it’s worth a chat anyway :)

dmb says:

It's not clear what you mean, David, but I'll give an indirect answer and just hope that some of it addresses your concern.

Socrates actually ends up looking pretty good. That short epigraph from the front of ZAMM - Do we need anyone to tell us what's Good and what's not Good? - that line is put into the mouth of Socrates (in Plato's Phaedrus). It's really Plato himself - or rather Platonism in general - that is so much at odds with the MOQ. This isn't just because of the vicious slander against the Sophists but also against the view that Truth is eternal and separate from the world as it appears to us finite mortals. By contrast, Pirsig says that Man is the measure of all things, a participant in the creation of all things, and that means that there is no eternal Truth beyond appearances but only humanly constructed truths within a human context. As William James put it, 'The trail of the human serpent is over all.' This anti-Platonism is a common feature of Pragmatism, the meaning of which has been enriched by reading people like William James, John Dewey, and even Richard Rorty.

"At the same time as I was worrying about this tension within Platonism – and within any form of what Dewey had called 'the quest for certainty' – I was also worrying about the familiar problem of how one could possibly get a noncircular justification of any debatable stand on any important issue. The more philosophers I read, the clearer it seemed that each of them could carry their views back to first principles which were incompatible with the first principles of their opponents, and that none of them ever got to that fabled place 'beyond hypotheses'. There seemed to be nothing like a neutral standpoint from which these alternative first principles could be evaluated. But if there were no such standpoint, then the whole idea of 'rational certainty', and the whole Socratic-Platonic idea of replacing passion by reason, seemed not to make much sense." -- Richard Rorty, 1992

> On Nov 21, 2016, at 9:47 AM, david <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
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> Hello, MOQers:
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> 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.
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> “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
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> 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.
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> “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
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> 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.
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> “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."
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> 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.
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> "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."
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> 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.
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> 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

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David Harding said to