DMB
On 6 Mar. you wrote:
> In ZAMM he says, "Plato HADN'T tried to destroy ARETE. He had
> ENCAPSULATED it; made a permanent , fixed Idea out of it; had
> CONVERTED it to a rigid , immobile Immortal Truth. He made ARETE 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.
Don't you agree that ZAMM can/must be seen in a MOQ context
and it's plain that the Aretê versus SOM conflict was intellect-out of
society and also that the lower level don't see any upper so
consequently, Intellect was seen as catastrophe?
> That was why the Quality Phaedrus had arrived at in the classroom had
> seemed so close to Plato's Good. Plato's Good was TAKEN from the
> rhetoricians. ...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.
ZAMM sees Quality as displayed by (Homer's) demi-gods of the
old mythological past long before the Sophists who were Plato's
contemporaries. It's plain that the Sophists represented the
budding subjectivism of the budding Intellect. Perhaps they saw
the Homeric past as "good old days" ...yet.
> The Good was not a FORM of reality. It was reality itself, ever
> changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way."
> (You'll find that near the end of ZAMM's chapter 29, the emphasis is
> Pirsig's.) dmb continues in the present:As the original quote states
> it, Plato's Good is a fixed and rigid idea but for the rhetoricians
> (the sophists) "it was not an idea at all". Instead, "it was reality
> itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed,
> rigid way."
As ZAMM tells it, SOM began as a search for eternal principles
that transcended the myths. This came to a head with Socrates
whose greatest principle was TRUTH - its opposite the superficial,
transient ..etc. Then Plato who saw Ideas as the True reality under
the shifting sense impressions. Then Aristotle, where the first
recognizable SOM emerged as Substance=eternal and
Form=transient. None of these thinkers saw themselves as
corrupting Aretê but as progress of Aretê.
> On the previous page (also in chapter 29) Pirsig writes:"Lightning
> Hits! QUALITY! VIRTUE! DHARMA! THAT is what the Sophists were teaching!
> NOT ethical relativism. NOT pristine 'virtue'. But ARETE. Excellence.
> DHARMA! ...Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching
> QUALITY, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric. He has
> been doing it right all along." Sigh. I fully expect you to misread
> this explanation too, but there it is.
Again, how do YOU translate all this into MOQ? Aretê was a
much used term in Greece, and I'm sure Plato claimed his Ideas
to be the highest Aretê ... just as I said. Look at this quote.
Now Plato's hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and
Socrates are defending the Immortal Principle of the
Cosmologists against what they consider to be the
decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which
is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal
that Socrates died for. The ideal that Greece alone
possesses for the first time in the history of the world. It is
still a very fragile thing. It can disappear completely.
This is clearly Intellect's OBJECTIVE part that fears the
SUBJECTIVE like the plague.
Plato abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint, not
because they are low and immoral people...there are
obviously much lower and more immoral people in Greece
he completely ignores. He damns them because they
threaten mankind's first beginning grasp of the idea of
truth. That's what it is all about.
I "damn" you, not because you are a low and immoral
person...there are obviously much lower and more immoral people
on the discussion, but because you threaten mankind's first
beginning grasp of the Quality Idea. That's what it is all about.
Platobo ;-)
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