Marsha said to 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.
dmb says: Ditto what Marsha said. I especially liked the connection you made between the Republic's soul/city parallel and ZAMM's soul/culture pairing. I wish I'd seen that BEFORE my term paper was handed in. I woulda stolen it for sure. "The mythos is insane." I recently revisited that section of ZAMM wherein lightening strikes for Phaedrus. This has to do with the re-translation of arete from "moral righteousness" to "excellence", as was discussed in your essay. The word was being used in many ways and could be applied to just about anything. One of the meanings of arete in the Illiad was "a duty toward self". That's what ignited the bolt for him. He saw it as an exact translation of the Sanskrit word "dharma". And so, by Pirsig's reckoning, the Sophists were teaching dharma. By the time he was discovering this in Chicago, he had already earned a B.A. in philosophy, read Northrop's book and studied in India. Not to mention the things he learned from his American Indian friends. When Phaedrus finally identifies the Sophists with his central term, a mystic term, he was quite ripe and so it was quite electric for him. Usually I hate the kind of criticism that knocks a piece for the things it didn't say or should have said but it really does seem wrong to leave this out of an essay about Pirsig and Plato. It's the reason Plato's Good, at first, seemed identical to his Quality. Plato had taken dharma from the Sophists and converted into an Idea, which is exactly what it's not. Or at least that's Pirsig's thesis, I think. Most of this is in chapter 29, with a little extending into the chapters before and after, if anyone's interested. dmb _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® goes with you. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/Mobile?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_Mobile1_052009 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/
