Bo said to Matt: More agreement, the Sophists were part and parcel of the budding intellectual level - of SOM - namely its subjectivists. "Man the measure" was their credo that opposed Socrates' and Plato's objectivism, that truth was independent of man. ...What you write here and in your blog may be correct, but it clutters MOQ's level picture which is that before these last 500 years BC - before the intellectual LEVEL - the social LEVEL ruled.
dmb says: I think it's a mistake to regard the Sophists as subjectivists. It's true that they were present at the time that intellect was being born. They were Plato's enemies because he saw them as relativists, but they weren't that either. In the following quotes, which come from the last pages of chapter 29, the emphasis is Pirsig's, except I'm using capital letters where the book has italics... "The ideas of science and technology and other systematically organized efforts of man are dad-centered on it. [In this case 'it' is the idea of truth] It is the nucleus of it all. And yet, Phaedrus understands, what he is saying about Quality is somehow opposed to all this. It seems to agree much more closely with the Sophists. 'Man is the measure of all things'. Yes, that's what he is saying about Quality. Man is not the SOURCE of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world emerges as a RELATIONSHIP between man and his experience. He is a PARTICIPANT in the creation of all things. The MEASURE of all things - it fits. And they taught rhetoric - that fits." page 374 "QUALITY! VIRTUE! DHARMA! THAT is what the Sophists were teaching! NOT ethical relativism. NOT pristine 'virtue'. But ARETE. Excellence. DHARMA! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. 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." page 377 It's pretty clear that your assertion, that the Sophist's were the subjective half of SOM, is explicitly contradicted here. The contest between Plato and the Sophists is not a contest between subjective and objective truth. It's not a contest between social patterns and intellectual patterns either, even though Pirsig invokes Homer's heroes in making a case for arete as Dharma too. It's a contest between dynamic and static quality. Obviously, those terms haven't been adopted at this point in Pirsig's work but it's not hard to apply those terms retroactively because the descriptions make it pretty clear. At the end of chapter 28, Pirsig had said, "This preintellectual reality is what Phaedrus felt he had properly identified as Quality" and to a colleague who thought of things in terms of behaviorism, he said, "Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it." As you probably recall, "preintellectual reality" is explicitly identified with DQ in Lila. This is also identified with the "pure experience" of William James and Northrop's "undifferentiated aesthetic continuum". As I mentioned to Matt yesterday, by Pirsig's reckoning, Plato was trying to synthesize various elements of pre-Socratic thought into his own system, especially the cosmologists who had differing ideas about the eternal principle. To make a long story short, Heraclitus and Parmenides became Plato's appearance and reality, the realm inside the cave and the realm outside. The Good was taken from the Sophists and converted into the form of the Good, Goodness itself. He gave it the loftiest position, the mother of all forms, and the last thing a philosopher sees after leaving the cave and without it all other knowledge is useless, Socrates says in the Republic. But the problem was that he converted it into a fixed and rigid and eternal form. In other words, he adopted the Dynamic Quality of the Sophists and converted into static intellectual quality. That's why Plato's Good and Phaedrus's Quality seemed so close. It came from the Sophists. Plato's Good was freeze-dried dharma, frozen DQ. _________________________________________________________________ Hotmail® has ever-growing storage! Don’t worry about storage limits. http://windowslive.com/Tutorial/Hotmail/Storage?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_HM_Tutorial_Storage1_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/
