[MD] Rhetoric

Thu Nov 24 07:04:32 PST 2016

Hi Folks
My take on any discussion is that as long as it pertains to the MoQ and 
is at least vaguely civil then go for it.
If it gets out of hand or abusive I'll intervene.

Cheers

Horse

On 24/11/2016 12:29, David Harding wrote:
> Dmb, Horse and all,
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> Regarding the below - whilst we can see his ideas forming here - I think his 1998 thoughts on the matter are superior. Having not received the book yet Wikipedia suggests it distinguishes between two camps on the left - the 'pragmatic progressive left' and the 'critical left'. His narrative of the critical left moving towards apathy is very apt in my view. The rise of Trump is, if anything, a failure of intellectual circles on the left to defend the right things and the ‘post’ cultural left could only be at least partly to blame.  I also love the following quote from “Competition for political leadership is in part a competition between differing stories about a nation’s self-identity, and between differing symbols of its greatness”.  Mythos over logos indeed! An MOQ supported statement if I ever heard one.
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> Interestingly Rorty’s Vietnam war fracture time period lines up nicely with a political fissure described independently by both Matt Stoller in his excellent article http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710/
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> and by Thomas Frank in his book ‘Listen, Liberal - what ever happened to the party of the people?’.   Both of these describe a takeover within the Democratic party amongst the despondency of the Vietnam war by those in favor of corporations over the trust-busting Democrats who were pushed out.  Stoller writes:
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> “To young, liberal politicians, many of whom read (Charlie) Peters, there was simply no difference between what the government was doing in one part of the world and what corporate America was doing at home. This cynicism allowed the traditional Republican notion of overregulation to be introduced into a liberal-leaning group. Whether it was overregulated or mismanaged by Wall Street, Penn Central had collapsed—so what was the difference anyway? The idea of Wall Street posing some kind of specialized problem was dated. After all, it hadn’t been banks sending young people to die in the jungle. Remember also, this is the generation that included people like Pete Stark, the congressman who jump-started his campaign by putting a peace sign on his bank.”
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> He goes on to write about how this cynicism naturally produced libertarian style arguments on both the right and left and helped to create what we now know as Neoliberalism.
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> But to speak to your point at the larger conflict level -  that’s right regarding this conflict between social and intellectual values. What the MOQ provides us is a language where we can condemn one side -not just as someone’s subjective opinion - but a fact backed by millions of years of evolution…  It would be great use it on MD!
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> Horse - I’m walking wide eyed into politics territory here.  Here’s hoping that you’ll reconsider this rule so we can confidently start discussing these things with the strength of the MOQ..
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>> 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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