Mary, DMB, All.
27 Apr.:
Mary originally said to dmb:
> I can't find anywhere in Bo's comments where he equates the Social
> Level with Dynamic Quality itself.
dmb answered:
> Huh? That's a confused version of what I said. Bo mistake is not
> EQUATING the social level with DQ. His mistake is CONFUSING the social
> level with Arete. Bo takes Arete to mean the social level but Pirsig
> equates it with DQ.
Mary has an epiphany.
> ... Now I figure you are zeroing in on Bo's use of the word "arête" in
> this phrase, " Socrates represents SOM's independence from the Arete
> past", and I say you really don't want to go there. ... But if your
> argument is that Bo is saying that arête = Dynamic Quality = The
> Social Level, then what am I to do with you, DMB? :) Do you really
> think Bo is saying that Socrates escaped from Dynamic Quality? This
> would be a straw man indeed.
Bo comments:
Thanks to you both, This is an important clarification: SOM replaced
Aretê according to ZAMM. Then the million Euro question is: What
does SOM and Aretê translate into in a MOQ context. IMO there are
just two options 1) To declare ZAMM as "having nothing to do with
LILA (like Anthony says in the his PhD thesis). 2) SOM is the 4th. level
emerging from the 3rd.
There is a third option, namely that all this is taking place on a pre-
existing "intellectual level", but that is to make intellect = mind. This is
what the lesser "minds" do, but kudos to DMB for not resorting to that,
and ditto to Mary for bringing this up. It's the "be or not to be" of the
MOQ.
dmb again:
> I'm saying that Bo mistakenly equates arete with the social level. I
> think Bo doesn't understand what is meant by DQ,
Ok, point taken.
> which is pretty much the whole point of Pirsig's work. See, I'm not
> disputing the idea that the intellectual level was being born out of
> the social level
Good!
> but I'm insisting that there is something else also going on. Pirsig
> traces our hollow forms of rationality back to the moment when Plato
> took the Arete (DQ) from the Sophists and turned it into a static form,
> an intellectual static form.
Yes, Plato helped Intellectual Aretê emerge from Social Aretê, as Mary
says below, Aretê was an ubiquitous term in Greece, used about
everything considered good.
> This is not a case of putting the intellectual over the social but
> rather of putting the static over the dynamic. Take a look at the last
> few pages of chapter 29 in ZAMM and you'll see what I mean. The
> emphasis is Pirsig's in the original...
Again, it's violating the MOQ to postulate any particular time in history
as more dynamic than other. Well admittedly there have been such
periods and that's when the level changes took place, so in that sense
the SOM-cum-intellect/Aretê-cum-social transition was dynamic, but in
that case dynamism was on intellect's side.
ZAMM: "QUALITY! VIRTUE! DHARMA! THAT is what the
Sophists were teaching! NOT ethical relativism. NOT pristine
'virtue.' But ARETE. Excellence. 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."
"But why? Phaedrus wondered. Why destroy ARETE? And no
sooner had he asked the question than the answer came to
him. 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 of forms, the highest Idea of
all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis of all
that had gone before. That was why the Quality that Phaedrus
had arrived at in the classroom had seemed so close to Plato's
Good. Plato's Good was TAKEN from the rhetoricians.
Phaedrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists
who had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists.
Yes, and this fits the SOL like hand and glove. Plato & Co did not
destroy DQ, they just encapsulated it in a new static form - the
intellectual, dialectical, subject/object, mind/matter form. You can't
expect ZAMM to contain the MOQ vocabulary, but it must fit and it
does, Plato & Co. were the cosmologists (=objectivists) of the new 4th.
level, but because S/O is an aggregate (you can't have one without the
other) the subjectivists immediately entered the scene in the form of
the Sophists.
As for this part:
The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal
and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an
idea at all. The Good was not a FORM of reality. It was reality
itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed
rigid way."
All levels regard their value as reality itself, intellect no exception it
regards the S/O divide to be reality's fundament .... and why the SOM
diagram in ZAMM is so misleading.
> You see? The Sophists were teaching Quality, as in "reality itself, ever
> changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way." I think
> it's obvious that he's talking about Arete as dynamic quality and he's
> explaining how it was converted by Plato into static quality, into a fixed
> and rigid thing.
This is only a repetition, but surely the Aretê manifested as the
Homeric Heroes "attitudes", so it was not all "dynamic".
Nuff for one sitting.
Bodvar
>
>
> Mary said:
> As I recall, Pirsig's point about arête was not that arete = DQ
> unequivocally as used by everyone in ancient Greece, but that it was a
> word with multiple layers of meaning with a very interesting past which
> may have evolved from the much older word rta which does seem to mean
> something similar in concept to DQ. - and, that the only reason all this
> fuss about this word is significant at all, is because Pirsig was looking
> for a precedent in history for the concept of Dynamic Quality.
>
>
> dmb says:
>
> Who said anything was unequivocal for everyone? I'm just saying that
> Pirisg identifies his own notion of Quality (DQ) with the Arete taught by
> the Sophists of ancient Greece. The textual evidence (above) is very clear
> about this point, don't you think?
>
> Again, the assertion that the intellectual level grew out of the social
> level is NOT in dispute. But there is something else going on too. The
> dynamic is being converted into the static. It's the price paid for
> intellect. Pirsig is saying we want intellect, but not at that price. The
> problem is that Bo (and you too, apparently) is misconstruing this other,
> more important aspect. Bo construes the Sophists as teaching static social
> quality instead of Dynamic Quality. That misses the central point of the
> book. It undermines the central point of the book and misconstrues the
> book's philosophical and dramatic climax. For my fifth example....
>
>
> Bo said:
>
> Socrates represents SOM's independence from the Arete past, here he is
> said to represents the intellectual level's independence of its social
> origin (all levels have their origin in the former level).
>
>
> dmb says:
>
> In this sentence, Bo is equating SOM with intellect and equating Arete
> with the social level. I think each of those equations are incorrect and
> together these two notions create one helluva conceptual mess.
>
>
> Again, here is Bo misconstruing arete as social static quality:
> "About Aretê being the social level in a MOQ retrospect is so obvious that
> you have to be hell-bent on NOT admitting it. It was the Homer's time in
> Greece "...when the social level weren't yet transcended" as it says in
> LILA.
>
> Here's what Pirsig actually says about arete:
> "QUALITY! VIRTUE! DHARMA! THAT is what the Sophists were teaching!
> ...Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching QUALITY, ...
> 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. ...The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and
> eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an idea
> at all. The Good was not a FORM of reality. It was reality itself, ever
> changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed rigid way."
>
> I don't see how it could make sense to describe static social quality as
> "reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed
> rigid way".
>
> Bo said:
> ... but it's plain silly to believe that DQ was more prominent at some
> particular time in history. And its just as plain that the Aretê
> represents social values, the duty, honour, valor, contempt for death
> that Hector displays is the same as the islamists suicide "pilots" showed.
> This is the "paradise lost" longing.
>
> dmb says:
> Bo says it's plain silly, but I think that is exactly what Pirsig is
> saying. "And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable
> magnitude of what man, when he gained the power to understand and rule the
> world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of
> scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous
> manifestation of his own dreams of power and wealth - but for this he had
> exchanged an empire of understanding of what it is to be a part of the
> world and not an enemy of it." "And the bones of the Sophists long ago
> turned to dust ...buried so deep and with such ceremoniousness and such
> unction and such evil that only a madman centuries later could discover
> the clues needed to uncover them, and see with horror what had been done."
>
>
> dmb had said to Bo:
>
> ...You repeatedly take this [pre-intellectual] as a reference to social
> static patterns. Because they evolved prior to intellect, you figure,
> social patterns are "pre-intellectual". What it actually refers to is the
> cutting edge of experience, the front edge of each moment, the eternal
> present. In other words, the pre-intellectual reality is Dynamic Quality,
> not social static quality.
>
>
>
> Bo responded by simply repeating the mistake again:
>
>
> .., in the MOQ context "intellect" is the last or highest level, thus what
> precedes intellect must necessarily have been the social, but mark you,
> all level have once been the "cutting edge" and the formation of a new
> level was in all cases as dynamic as dynamic comes. No problems there.
>
>
> dmb says:
>
> No problem there? There is a very, very big problem. Can you imagine
> static social quality getting you off that hot stove? Can you imagine that
> the front end of that moving freight train is Victorian virtue? Do you
> suppose Northrop's term (the undifferentiated aesthetic continuum) is a
> reference to honor and duty? Do you think James's "immediate flux of life"
> or "pure experience" is a reference to courage and loyalty? No, of course
> not. If you read "preintellectual" to mean static social quality, the most
> important ideas and examples no longer make any sense at all. This goes
> for ZAMM as well as Lila. I think anyone's understanding of what what
> Pirsig means by "pre-intellectual" is going to be improved when you
> compare it to the way this idea is expressed by other thinkers. Northrop
> and James are the most obvious choices because Pirsig was heavily
> influenced by the former and identifies his MOQ with the latter. Dewey
> talks about this too, in terms of experience that is HAD and experience as
> it is KNOWN, or simply as primary and secondary experience.I can assure
> you that none of these guys, including Pirsig, are talking about the
> difference between social and intellectual levels. They're talking about
> dynamic and static, about pre-intellectual and intellectual, undivided and
> divided, undifferentiated and differentiated, preconceptual and
> conceptual, immediate and reflective. This is about the DQ/sq distinction,
> not the social/intellectual distinction.
>
> But hey, I've explained this more than a few times already but it just
> doesn't register. Bo sticks to his ridiculous nonsense no matter what
> anyone says.
>
> His english is way better than my norwegian but still, I can't help but
> wonder if Bo is losing something in translation. How a native english
> speaker can follow him in this wacky thinking, however, is hard for me to
> fathom.
>
>
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