Hey Ron, Ron said: I see a great difficulty in escaping Platonism when speaking philosophically. It would mean re-defining philosophic terms entirely. which is what you might be advocating. but I see this task as daunting and isolating itself in esoteria . I think the prudent method is to embrace Platonism for what it is which I think Pirsig does when he reveals how the whole thing evolved and originated. He saw that sophistry was encased in the platonic system and could not hope to win in an open argument it could only hope to stalemate. Then the breakdown, the psychosis.
Matt: I am, in a sense, advocating a series of redefinitions, but I'm not sure it as daunting, though I think it may be tremendously isolating (which I think is basically the sense that philosophical discourse is remote from common sense). As I see it, the fight against Platonism was there from the beginning and has never stopped. This gives us a tradition of wisdom that can be mined. What would be daunting is if one thought one had to scrap it all and start from the "beginning." I'm not sure a lot of good sense can be given to that notion of a "beginning," the historicist sense that Pirsig gives it being one of the few. Where we disagree, and what I'll pick up further below, is that you think we should "embrace Platonism," whereas I have no idea why one would want to. The reason I balk is because I don't think "Platonism" is coextensive with "thinking," which is often a spin that is given to it when somebody is trying to convince us that it is daunting and unmovable (Pirsig occasionally slips into this identification). I think you are right, Platonism cannot be defeated on its own terms, but that's because the issue between Platonism and various anti-Platonisms are "the terms." In a loose sense of argument, anti-Platonism can certainly win, and I think have been slowly over time. What we need to do, and have been, are changing the terms of debate, the terms of discussion. This looser sense is what Pirsig was aiming at with "rhetoric," whereas "dialectic" was strict, logical "if P, then Q" stuff. What Pirsig saw is that logic requires assumptions to do anything, to make an argument. (I expand on this a bit here: http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2006/04/begging-question-moral-intuitions-and.html) Pirsig's attempt to evade Platonism is to question the assumptions guiding its arguments. In this sense, Pirsig was equating Platonism with, not logical argumentation or thinking, but with a set of assumptions that lead--through logical entailment--to a series of undesirable cultural malformations. "Back to rhetoric!" was Pirsig's call to cease thinking we had to think through Plato's categories (one of which pit logic against values) and see that there are other ways, that logic is a tool that we use for whatever purposes we set. Plato wished us to think that logic had its own desires, but Pirsig wanted to expose those purposes as Plato's, not logic's. Ron said: When he saw he could step out of the arena entirely. calling it SOM. creating a meta arena. Now he can come at it with it's own tools plus the original tool he created, the dynamic/static distinction. which in itself redefines the conceptual understanding of terms of subject/ object distinction. Matt: With the first part in the background, this is where I slap you on the wrist for Platonism. And, I think, this is largely what divided me from Bo--stop thinking Platonism/SOM is a _tool_. The tool metaphor itself should help us see what is wrong with this line of thinking: a tool is what it is because it is defined as being separate from the user of the tool. It is an aid for purposes of another (think of the expression, "You're a tool!"--meaning, you are letting yourself be used). A tool doesn't come attached with purposes (though it can be better or worse for some as opposed to others). Only a person using them has purposes and goals with which to wield them. I'd like to suggest that Pirsig's goal in ZMM was to expose Plato's sin as making us think his philosophy (encapsulated in the concept of "dialectic") was simply how things were done--you have to think with Platonic assumptions to be said to use Reason, be rational. As Pirsig sums up, in what we could call the thesis statement of ZMM, of what Pirsig is upset by in our current culture, "Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he would find the cause of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency _to do what is 'reasonable' even when it isn't any good_." So, in my view, saying "Platonism is a tool" is a Platonic sin, is a step backwards from the position Pirsig was hoping to leave us in at the end of ZMM. _Plato_ left us a lot of amazing tools in his writings, writings that can be mined almost indefinitely, and profitably even by anti-Platonists--but _Platonism_ is a different beast, not a tool but a philosophy, a set of assumptions with which we use tools to carry out. Matt p.s. DMB said: But I really don't think Pirsig sought to rescue rhetoric because he loved long speeches more than dialogue. Matt: I'm really sorry you thought I was saying something like that. I was using conceptual resources that Pirsig helped craft for my own purposes. I apologize that you missed the point, because you came at me in an adversarial manner, but from what I can tell, not really disagreeing with what I was saying. _________________________________________________________________ The i’m Talkathon starts 6/24/08. 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