Greetings Matt,
I enjoyed your paper. But as always you seem to
overlook that the MOQ is suppose to synchronize
the philosophies of the West and the East. The
only mention of the East is your suggestion that
the Orphic tradition might be an Eastern
import. You are missing something important by ignoring the East. imho.
Marsha
At 08:43 PM 5/13/2009, you wrote:
This is a new bit I wrote, fully housed at my blog, here:
http://pirsigaffliction.blogspot.com/2009/05/philosophy-metaphysics-and-common-sense.html
It's another attempt to circle Socrates, Plato,
Pirsig and Rorty, done mainly through narrative.
So if one is looking for metaphysical
principles, or the like, one would be
disappointed. I'll tease it with the first 500
words to help decide whether it's worth reading the rest:
Socrates essentially defined philosophy as a common, basic
human activity when he said that the
unexamined life is not worth living. Plato said
that philosophy was for the very
few people who were able
to do it. Pirsig said philosophy isnt worth doing if it
doesnt help with life. Rorty said
philosophy is pretty
remote from life.
Is there a way of coordinating all of these
thoughts? Do they all fit together? I think they can, in their
way, fit together
coherently, but there have been better and worse ways of construing them.
Socrates came upon the Greek scene at a very important point
in its cultural evolution. For some
years,
leisured aristocrats had begun popping up around the Aegean Sea and
composing themselves in a manner
that had previously been unheard ofour first
intellectuals. They for the most part
had begun speculating
about the way reality as a whole functioned, though they
did occasionally drift into the way humanity,
specifically, functioned (humans
being a natural enough subject within the purview of reality). These
drifts didnt pick up speed until
democracy had taken hold in Greece. The
hold of democracy on Athens
produced a shift in the educational institutions of
Greece. The existence of a citizen class
in Athens
created a need for a means of educating them, one that surpassed the
means that existed for the needs of
fickle aristocracies. For the first time in history, an opportunity
was created in which people could live on
their wits.
These were the Sophists, the first professional
intellectuals, and, like most people I know, they soon
began talking about
themselves and what they do. The trouble
for them was that nobody had really done
what they did before. Their only real models were the poets, the
previous educators of Greece, but the
poets profession had itself begun to
change, too, at about the same time. It
was a common enough
feature for Greek rhapsodes,
oral poets, to brood about what they were doing (captured well by Hesiod
in his
musings on the Muses) and the earlier physiologoi,
Thales, Heraclitus and the rest, had themselves
produced occasional remarks,
but we can imagine it wasnt until the pressure of professional
differentiation
set in for the Sophists (produced by the high concentration of them in Athens)
that real
self-consciousness kicked in.
The Sophists had to attract customers, which meant not only displaying
their wares in public, but arguing for why they
knew what they were doing, over
and against their
competitors.
What they did, in fact, was increase the ability of
public speakers to convince their audience that they
were right. In Athens, in contrast to today, every man
was their own politician and
lawyer. This meant
that arguing your
view (say, of innocence) became dramatically more important than in previous,
aristocratic generations, where oratory was more
for the battlefield (the first
great place you had to
convince people of doing something, like
bleeding). So the Sophists, our first rhetoricians, began
to
reflect . . . .
Matt
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