"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." Bo said to dmb: 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?
dmb says:You're asking questions about these quotes but these quotes were meant to answer them in the first place. Look again, Pirsig says that the rhetoricians were teaching Quality. This is what Plato had taken from them and then encapsulated it into a static form, an idea. The Quality they were teaching was not a social level static pattern nor was it a fixed idea. He said, in the very quote you're responding to, "for the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all". So it makes no sense to say, "the Sophists represented the budding subjectivism of the budding Intellect". On the contrary, that quote goes on to say "The Good was not a FORM of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way." I even repeated that part of the quote so you wouldn't miss it, but you did. Let me repeat the repetition again :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." That is a description of Dynamic Quality, not social patterns. The Homeric world knew what this Quality was. It was in their myths and culture and their bones. Those are the social patterns, the mythos that was generated by DQ, but that's not what the sophists were teaching. They were teaching excellence in general THROUGH rhetoric, not just pretty talking itself as their enemies maintained. 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. Bo replied: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. dmb says:Well, yes. Plato sees it as a battle against relativism for for immortal principles. And its reasonable to say this is a fight against what's "just" subjective and for thee objective truth. He's not thinking of his objective reality in terms of material substance, obviously, but otherwise the analogy is okay. But the sophists are not relativists, Pirsig says. They only looked that way to plato because their Quality was not fixed. It was "reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way". They were teaching Dynamic Quality, not relativism. I'm sure this idealizes them to some extent, but I've reading Plato lately and it does look like an encapsulated form of DQ that he's talking about. I can really why he said it was pretty close to what Phaedrus was saying. There is even some interesting writings about how the written word destroys memory. I'm not sure, but I have a hunch its about the dangers of this kind of encapsulating. In any case, Pirsig says that Phaedrus identifies his version with the rhetoricians and the descriptions (reality itself, everchanging) make it clear that they were talking about DQ. Was quality a part of Greek culture, he'd asked. Quality was every part of Greek culture, she said. So the idea that Odysseus knew Quality, Homer knew Quality, the Sophists knew Quality and Plato knew it too, well enough that he'd rank it near the top of his own absolutist philosophy, is really not that surprising. They were just a few steps along the new path at this point. Or rather the fork was still ahead and the direction was still undecided when Plato wrote. So rather than being "mankind's first beginning grasp of the Quality Idea", the MOQ is "the oldest idea known to man". What happened back there in ancient Greece was not all bad. The scientific and technological world we live in is a result of taking that path. But something got buried and lost, for Western cultures anyway. So getting at his own ideas of Quality was more like an excavation project. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™: Life without walls. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_allup_1a_explore_032009 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
