Dmb quotes Granger: "Literary criticism in the West begins with the wish that literature disappear. Plato's chief objection to Homer is that he exists. For to Plato poetry is a deception: it proffers imitations of imitations when life's purpose is to seek eternal truth; poetry stirs up refractory emotions, challenges reason's rule, making men womanish; it induces us to manipulate language for effect rather than strives for accuracy. The poets deliver many fine speeches, but when you question them about what they've said, their answer are puerile; they don't know what they're talking about. Though Plato can be eloquent about the appeal of literary art, to him poetry has no real place in creating the well-balanced soul or just state. When he conceives his Utopia, Plato banishes the poets outside its walls."
Ron: Plato, or more particularly Socrates, states that the best rhetoric, the best literature bases the art of persuasion in the love of wisdom, his utopia the "Republic" is the study of a single man which may be best understood as a complex ecology of systems, like that of a city. Dmb: Pirsig not only attacks Plato on this very point, criticizing his pursuit of fixed and eternal truths, he does so in the form of literature. In this case, the literary medium is the philosophical message. "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. The difference was that Plato's Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas fro 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." (ZAMM 379) Ron: True, the good is an idea, the idea all ideas spring from. It was thought that perception was the good in the way of limit. To experience or to "be" was to exercise limit, preference, thus consciousness is measure. No The Good was not A form of reality, to be certain, it was THE form of reality. And in this way it was considered eternal and unmovable, without limit. No distinctions. Dmb: There must always be a discrepancy between concepts (sq) and reality (DQ). All concepts are secondary and static and are derived from reality. If they are subordinated to reality in this way, they're awesome and we love them. The problem is that abstractionism had already become vicious by Plato's time. Vicious abstractionism is the cause and target of James and Pirsig's complaints. Vicious abstractionism denigrates and de-realizes the empirical reality from which our concepts were abstracted in the first place. It subordinates life to the intellect, whereas James and Pirsig are saying that intellect is the servant of life. Ron: True in very short order vicious abstractionism became the problem and yes it subordinated life to intellect but let us also remember Aristotles point that the divine aspect of intellect is life at it's eternal best. .. 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/md/archives.html
