Ant, Ron, Marsha and y'all: Ant McWatt asked dmb: >From your reading of the Republic and other research for your Plato/Pirsig >term paper, do you think Plato considered the Good as primarily static (as per >the other Forms) or essentially Dynamic (on the lines of DQ)? Moreover, did >you discover anything else particularly significant in this Good/Quality >comparison?
dmb says:Thanks for asking. Yes, the short and obvious answer is that Plato's Good is static while Pirsig's Quality is dynamic. I was surprised to find that the form of the Good is one of those things about which Socrates disavows knowledge. He can't provide an account of it, like the one he demands from Gorgias the Sophist when he claimed to be teaching excellence, like the one he demands from the Rhapsode in the Ion. He uses this demand for intelligibility against Homer and the rest of the poets, the dramatists, against his accusers at the trial and it's crucial to dialectic itself. Socrates says the Good is the most important thing to know, that without knowledge of the Good all other forms of knowledge are useless. He says anyone who is to act well in public or private, must see the Good. It's the ultimate goal of "real" philosophers and yet he can't provide an account. He can only say what it is LIKE. So Socrates expresses it by way of three analogies. (This is in book six of the Republic.) In the first, the form of the Good is like the sun of a higher realm, the realm of intelligibility. Like its counterpart in the visible realm, the Good shines its light of intelligibility and makes possible the connection between ideas and the mind's eye. In the same way that sunlight gives life to plants, the Good generates and sustains intelligible things. The second analogy is just a vertical line on which the realm of intelligibility is stacked on top of the visible realm, putting them in hierarchy of truth. The third one is the famous allegory of the cave, in which he shows how almost everybody is stuck in the lower realm, unaware of the sun of intelligibility outside the cave. The second one really shows his orientation. In his vertical hierarchy, Socrates equates the visible with change and flux and therefore untruth. The intelligible is equated with permanence and order and therefore truth. He even goes after what we'd call empirical science, saying they only partially work with intelligible objects. The fact that they make empirical observations means they're also partially stuck in the visible realm. The true philosopher, he says, leaves the visible realm behind entirely and engages in pure abstract thought. He perceives the forms themselves and works with nothing but the forms themselves. And here's the kicker, the form of the Good is what gives birth to all the other forms. It's the mother of all forms. And after you've left the cave and become a philosopher, the form of the Good is the last thing you see. So, in a sense, the form of the Good is the most static thing there is. It's at the top of the top of a hierarchy that runs from chaotic flux to ordered eternal forms. Naturally, I used this feature of the Good, that it's "last thing to be seen", as a pivot point. For Pirsig, Quality is the first thing you know. Other than finding that the Good is not defined, I was also surprised to learn that Plato was really concerned with the soul. One could make a case that the Republic isn't about politics at all. It's just one big elaborate analogy of the soul. His notion of justice isn't legal, it's moral. It's about preparing your soul for judgement day or choosing wisely your next life. Having a righteous soul seemed to be a matter of purification, as is consistent with his anti-empirical attitudes. His view seems to entail a double dose of idealism. On top of the view that ideas are what's most real, there is also a kind of perfectionism in it. There's more than just of whiff of Christianity in this other worldly stance. The Professor used the phrase, "slouching toward monotheism" at least twice during the semester. Ron said:...Plato, I believe, asked where the idea of excellence originates, how does one know what excellence is? He thought the concept of excellence preceded the act. Keeping in mind Plato was influenced by Parmenides, He considered the concept of excellence or the good as more real than the act which was subject to change and interpretation. dmb says:Yea, as Pirsig tells it Plato adopted the element of change from Heraclitus (the visible realm) and permanence from Parmedides (the intelligible realm). He says the Good was taken from the rhetoricians. For them it was ever-changing reality, dynamic reality, but Plato converted into a permanent and fixed form. I don't know it that's how it really went down, but this picture was not contradicted by another on our reading list. Ron continued:...Enter Aristotle who clarifies the sitituation by stating that why the idea of the good is more permanent is because the good is an idea understood universally but to under stand what was good was an arguent made from the particular expereince to a universal understanding. Aristotle disagreed with Plato in that he believed the material world is what gives rise to ideas about it. dmb says:Right, Aristotle is really the bad guy in ZAMM. The metaphysics of substance really gets started here. The "asshole" move he makes, I noticed, is the same one Socrates makes in the Gorgias. They both want to reduce quality speech and writing to a rationally ordered system and thereby render the heart of it, the art of it, to mere style. Rhetoric: the frilly ribbons and bows of communication science. Asshole. _________________________________________________________________ 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/
