Hi Matt,
> Matt:
> I was being sincere when I said I had thought about DQ, and its
> non-appearance, in first composing the post in question, and I was
> sincere in saying that I couldn't see how I was exposing myself to
> your critical point of view. We disagree, clearly, but I still have to
> confess that I don't understand what your criticism was/is. It's a
> form of "leaving out DQ," but I don't understand your criticisms of
> my attempts to include it. (I wish I could think that it was more
> than just not saying "DQ" enough, but sometimes that's all that it
> looks like.)
Steve replying in the dmb style:
Leaving out DQ is just not saying "DQ" enough times? Look, Matt, it's
simple. DQ is the leading edge of experience. It is the continuing
stimulus urging us to create the world in which we live! If you leave
out DQ, you aren't just leaving out the words, you are leaving out
half of the MOQ. You are gutting it worse than Clinton gutted the
military. You are destroying it worse than Obama is destroying the
economy. You are devouring it and spitting it out like Chris Matthews
tasting a bite of chili that was three alarms too hot for him. You
see? I mean, if it were just a matter of not saying "DQ" enough, I
wouldn't be this hysterical. The fact that I am flying off the handle
in itself is evidence of your error. But if that ain't enough, here
are a bunch of extended quotes presented with out any explanation of
what I they mean or how they relate to the point I must be making.
(And again, we can tell that I AM making a point because I am so
emotional and giving such a long quote.)
Pirsig:
"The next day he is at the library waiting for it to open and when it
does he begins to read furiously, back behind Plato for the first
time, into what little is known of those rhetoricians he so despised.
And what he discovers begins to confirm what he has already intuited
from his thoughts the evening before.
Plato’s condemnation of the Sophists is one which many scholars have
already taken with great misgivings. The Chairman of the committee
himself has suggested that critics who are not certain what Plato
meant should be equally uncertain of what Socrates’ antagonists in the
dialogues meant. When it is known that Plato put his own words in
Socrates’ mouth (Aristotle says this) there should be no reason to
doubt that he could have put his own words into other mouths too.
Fragments by other ancients seemed to lead to other evaluations of the
Sophists. Many of the older Sophists were selected as "ambassadors" of
their cities, certainly no office of disrespect. The name Sophist was
even applied without disparagement to Socrates and Plato themselves.
It has even been suggested by some later historians that the reason
Plato hated the Sophists so was that they could not compare with his
master, Socrates, who was in actuality the greatest Sophist of them
all. This last explanation is interesting, Phædrus thinks, but
unsatisfactory. You don't abhor a school of which your master is a
member. What was Plato’s real purpose in this? Phædrus reads further
and further into pre-Socratic Greek thought to find out, and
eventually comes to the view that Plato’s hatred of the rhetoricians
was part of a much larger struggle in which the reality of the Good,
represented by the Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented
by the dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle for the future
mind of man. Truth won, the Good lost, and that is why today we have
so little difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so much
difficulty accepting the reality of Quality, even though there is no
more agreement in one area than in the other.
To understand how Phædrus arrives at this requires some explanation:
One must first get over the idea that the time span between the last
caveman and the first Greek philosophers was short. The absence of any
history for this period sometimes gives this illusion. But before the
Greek philosophers arrived on the scene, for a period of at least five
times all our recorded history since the Greek philosophers, there
existed civilizations in an advanced state of development. They had
villages and cities, vehicles, houses, marketplaces, bounded fields,
agricultural implements and domestic animals, and led a life quite as
rich and varied as that in most rural areas of the world today. And
like people in those areas today they saw no reason to write it all
down, or if they did, they wrote it on materials that have never been
found. Thus we know nothing about them. The "Dark Ages" were merely
the resumption of a natural way of life that had been momentarily
interrupted by the Greeks.
Early Greek philosophy represented the first conscious search for what
was imperishable in the affairs of men. Up to then what was
imperishable was within the domain of the Gods, the myths. But now, as
a result of the growing impartiality of the Greeks to the world around
them, there was an increasing power of abstraction which permitted
them to regard the old Greek mythos not as revealed truth but as
imaginative creations of art. This consciousness, which had never
existed anywhere before in the world, spelled a whole new level of
transcendence for the Greek civilization.
But the mythos goes on, and that which destroys the old mythos becomes
the new mythos, and the new mythos under the first Ionian philosophers
became transmuted into philosophy, which enshrined permanence in a new
way. Permanence was no longer the exclusive domain of the Immortal
Gods. It was also to be found within Immortal Principles, of which our
current law of gravity has become one.
The Immortal Principle was first called water by Thales. Anaximenes
called it air. The Pythagoreans called it number and were thus the
first to see the Immortal Principle as something nonmaterial.
Heraclitus called the Immortal Principle fire and introduced change as
part of the Principle. He said the world exists as a conflict and
tension of opposites. He said there is a One and there is a Many and
the One is the universal law which is immanent in all things.
Anaxagoras was the first to identify the One as nous, meaning "mind."
Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the Immortal
Principle, the One, Truth, God, is separate from appearance and from
opinion, and the importance of this separation and its effect upon
subsequent history cannot be overstated. It's here that the classic
mind, for the first time, took leave of its romantic origins and said,
"The Good and the True are not necessarily the same," and goes its
separate way. Anaxagoras and Parmenides had a listener named Socrates
who carried their ideas into full fruition.
What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there
was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and
substance. Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came
later. The modern mind sometimes tends to balk at the thought of these
dichotomies being inventions and says, "Well, the divisions were there
for the Greeks to discover," and you have to say, "Where were they?
Point to them!" And the modern mind gets a little confused and wonders
what this is all about anyway, and still believes the divisions were
there.
But they weren't, as Phædrus said. They are just ghosts, immortal gods
of the modern mythos which appear to us to be real because we are in
that mythos. But in reality they are just as much an artistic creation
as the anthropomorphic Gods they replaced.
The pre-Socratic philosophers mentioned so far all sought to establish
a universal Immortal Principle in the external world they found around
them. Their common effort united them into a group that may be called
Cosmologists. They all agreed that such a principle existed but their
disagreements as to what it was seemed irresolvable. The followers of
Heraclitus insisted the Immortal Principle was change and motion. But
Parmenides’ disciple, Zeno, proved through a series of paradoxes that
any perception of motion and change is illusory.
The resolution of the arguments of the Cosmologists came from a new
direction entirely, from a group Phædrus seemed to feel were early
humanists. They were teachers, but what they sought to teach was not
principles, but beliefs of men. Their object was not any single
absolute truth, but the improvement of men. All principles, all
truths, are relative, they said. "Man is the measure of all things."
These were the famous teachers of "wisdom," the Sophists of ancient
Greece.
To Phædrus, this backlight from the conflict between the Sophists and
the Cosmologists adds an entirely new dimension to the Dialogues of
Plato. Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is
in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and
those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with
everything he has. The Sophists are the enemy.
Now Plato’s hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and Socrates are
defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they
consider to be the decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That
which is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal that
Socrates died for. The ideal that Greece alone possesses for the first
time in the history of the world. It is still a very fragile thing. It
can disappear completely. Plato abhors and damns the Sophists without
restraint, not because they are low and immoral people...there are
obviously much lower and more immoral people in Greece he completely
ignores. He damns them because they threaten mankind’s first beginning
grasp of the idea of truth. That’s what it is all about.
The results of Socrates’ martyrdom and Plato’s unexcelled prose that
followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we
know it. If the idea of truth had been allowed to perish
unrediscovered by the Renaissance it's unlikely that we would be much
beyond the level of prehistoric man today. The ideas of science and
technology and other systematically organized efforts of man are
dead-centered on it. It is the nucleus of it all.
And yet, Phædrus 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.
The one thing that doesn't fit what he says and what Plato said about
the Sophists is their profession of teaching virtue. All accounts
indicate this was absolutely central to their teaching, but how are
you going to teach virtue if you teach the relativity of all ethical
ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an ethical
absolute. A person whose idea of what is proper varies from day to day
can be admired for his broadmindedness, but not for his virtue. Not,
at least, as Phædrus understands the word. And how could they get
virtue out of rhetoric? This is never explained anywhere. Something is
missing.
His search for it takes him through a number of histories of ancient
Greece, which as usual he reads detective style, looking only for
facts that may help him and discarding all those that don't fit. And
he is reading H. D. F. Kitto’s The Greeks, a blue and white paperback
which he has bought for fifty cents, and he has reached a passage that
describes "the very soul of the Homeric hero," the legendary figure of
predecadent, pre-Socratic Greece. The flash of illumination that
follows these pages is so intense the heroes are never erased and I
can see them with little effort of recall.
The Iliad is the story of the siege of Troy, which will fall in the
dust, and of its defenders who will be killed in battle. The wife of
Hector, the leader, says to him: "Your strength will be your
destruction; and you have no pity either for your infant son or for
your unhappy wife who will soon be your widow. For soon the Acheans
will set upon you and kill you; and if I lose you it would be better
for me to die."
Her husband replies:
Well do I know this, and I am sure of it: that day is coming when
the holy city of Troy will perish, and Priam and the people of wealthy
Priam. But my grief is not so much for the Trojans, nor for Hecuba
herself, nor for Priam the King, nor for my many noble brothers, who
will be slain by the foe and will lie in the dust, as for you, when
one of the bronze-clad Acheans will carry you away in tears and end
your days of freedom. Then you may live in Argos, and work at the loom
in another woman’s house, or perhaps carry water for a woman of
Messene or Hyperia, sore against your will: but hard compulsion will
lie upon you. And then a man will say as he sees you weeping, "This
was the wife of Hector, who was the noblest in battle of the
horse-taming Trojans, when they were fighting around Ilion." This is
what they will say: and it will be fresh grief for you, to fight
against slavery bereft of a husband like that. But may I be dead, may
the earth be heaped over my grave before I hear your cries, and of the
violence done to you."
So spake shining Hector and held out his arms to his son. But the
child screamed and shrank back into the bosom of the well-girdled
nurse, for he took fright at the sight of his dear father...at the
bronze and the crest of the horsehair which he saw swaying terribly
from the top of the helmet. His father laughed aloud, and his lady
mother too. At once shining Hector took the helmet off his head and
laid it on the ground, and when he had kissed his dear son and dandled
him in his arms, he prayed to Zeus and to the other Gods: Zeus and ye
other Gods, grant that this my son may be, as I am, most glorious
among the Trojans and a man of might, and greatly rule in Ilion. And
may they say, as he returns from war, "He is far better than his
father."
"What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism," Kitto comments,
"is not a sense of duty as we understand it...duty towards others: it
is rather duty towards himself. He strives after that which we
translate 'virtue' but is in Greek aretê, 'excellence' — we shall have
much to say about aretê. It runs through Greek life."
There, Phædrus thinks, is a definition of Quality that had existed a
thousand years before the dialecticians ever thought to put it to
word-traps. Anyone who cannot understand this meaning without logical
definiens and definendum and differentia is either lying or so out of
touch with the common lot of humanity as to be unworthy of receiving
any reply whatsoever. Phædrus is fascinated too by the description of
the motive of "duty toward self " which is an almost exact translation
of the Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes described as the "one" of the
Hindus. Can the dharma of the Hindus and the "virtue" of the ancient
Greeks be identical?
Then Phædrus feels a tugging to read the passage again, and he does so
and then — what’s this?! — "That which we translate 'virtue' but is in
Greek 'excellence.'"
Lightning hits!
Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not
ethical relativism. Not pristine "virtue." But aretê. 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.
The rain has lifted enough so that we can see the horizon now, a sharp
line demarking the light grey of the sky and the darker grey of the
water.
Kitto had more to say about this aretê of the ancient Greeks. "When we
meet aretê in Plato," he said, "we translate it 'virtue' and
consequently miss all the flavour of it. 'Virtue,' at least in modern
English, is almost entirely a moral word; aretê, on the other hand, is
used indifferently in all the categories, and simply means
excellence."
Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a
ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he
must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he
can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone,
beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian
youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an
ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent
all-rounder; he has surpassing aretê.
Aretê implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and
a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for
efficiency—or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency
which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.
Phædrus remembered a line from Thoreau: "You never gain something but
that you lose something." And now he began to see for the first time
the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained 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 manifestations of his own dreams of
power and wealth...but for this he had exchanged an empire of
understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be
a part of the world, and not an enemy of it.
One can acquire some peace of mind from just watching that horizon.
It's a geometer’s line...completely flat, steady and known. Perhaps
it's the original line that gave rise to Euclid’s understanding of
lineness; a reference line from which was derived the original
calculations of the first astronomers that charted the stars.
Phædrus knew, with the same mathematical assurance Poincaré had felt
when he resolved the Fuchsian equations, that this Greek aretê was the
missing piece that completed the pattern, but he read on now for
completion.
The halo around the heads of Plato and Socrates is now gone. He sees
that they consistently are doing exactly that which they accuse the
Sophists of doing—using emotionally persuasive language for the
ulterior purpose of making the weaker argument, the case for
dialectic, appear the stronger. We always condemn most in others, he
thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.
But why? Phædrus wondered. Why destroy aretê? And no sooner had he
asked the question than the answer came to him. Plato hadn't tried to
destroy aretê. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea
out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He
made aretê the Good, the highest form, 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 Phædrus had arrived at in the classroom
had seemed so close to Plato’s Good. Plato’s Good was taken from the
rhetoricians. Phædrus 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 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.
Why had Plato done this? Phædrus saw Plato’s philosophy as a result of
two syntheses.
The first synthesis tried to resolve differences between the
Heraclitans and the followers of Parmenides. Both Cosmological schools
upheld Immortal Truth. In order to win the battle for Truth in which
aretê is subordinate, against his enemies who would teach aretê in
which truth is subordinate, Plato must first resolve the internal
conflict among the Truth-believers. To do this he says that Immortal
Truth is not just change, as the followers of Heraclitus said. It is
not just changeless being, as the followers of Parmenides said. Both
these Immortal Truths coexist as Ideas, which are changeless, and
Appearance, which changes. This is why Plato finds it necessary to
separate, for example, "horseness" from "horse" and say that horseness
is real and fixed and true and unmoving, while the horse is a mere,
unimportant, transitory phenomenon. Horseness is pure Idea. The horse
that one sees is a collection of changing Appearances, a horse that
can flux and move around all it wants to and even die on the spot
without disturbing horseness, which is the Immortal Principle and can
go on forever in the path of the Gods of old.
Plato’s second synthesis is the incorporation of the Sophists’ aretê
into this dichotomy of Ideas and Appearance. He gives it the position
of highest honor, subordinate only to Truth itself and the method by
which Truth is arrived at, the dialectic. But in his attempt to unite
the Good and the True by making the Good the highest Idea of all,
Plato is nevertheless usurping aretê’s place with dialectically
determined truth. Once the Good has been contained as a dialectical
idea it is no trouble for another philosopher to come along and show
by dialectical methods that aretê, the Good, can be more
advantageously demoted to a lower position within a "true" order of
things, more compatible with the inner workings of dialectic. Such a
philosopher was not long in coming. His name was Aristotle.
Aristotle felt that the mortal horse of Appearance which ate grass and
took people places and gave birth to little horses deserved far more
attention than Plato was giving it. He said that the horse is not mere
Appearance. The Appearances cling to something which is independent of
them and which, like Ideas, is unchanging. The "something" that
Appearances cling to he named "substance." And at that moment, and not
until that moment, our modern scientific understanding of reality was
born.
Under Aristotle the "Reader," whose knowledge of Trojan aretê seems
conspicuously absent, forms and substances dominate all. The Good is a
relatively minor branch of knowledge called ethics; reason, logic,
knowledge are his primary concerns. Aretê is dead and science, logic
and the University as we know it today have been given their founding
charter: to find and invent an endless proliferation of forms about
the substantive elements of the world and call these forms knowledge,
and transmit these forms to future generations. As "the system."
And rhetoric. Poor rhetoric, once "learning" itself, now becomes
reduced to the teaching of mannerisms and forms, Aristotelian forms,
for writing, as if these mattered. Five spelling errors, Phædrus
remembered, or one error of sentence completeness, or three misplaced
modifiers, or...it went on and on. Any of these was sufficient to
inform a student that he did not know rhetoric. After all, that’s what
rhetoric is, isn't it? Of course there's "empty rhetoric," that is,
rhetoric that has emotional appeal without proper subservience to
dialectical truth, but we don't want any of that, do we? That would
make us like those liars and cheats and defilers of ancient Greece,
the Sophists—remember them? We'll learn the Truth in our other
academic courses, and then learn a little rhetoric so that we can
write it nicely and impress our bosses who will advance us to higher
positions.
Forms and mannerisms—hated by the best, loved by the worst. Year after
year, decade after decade of little front-row "readers," mimics with
pretty smiles and neat pens, out to get their Aristotelian A’s while
those who possess the real aretê sit silently in back of them
wondering what is wrong with themselves that they cannot like this
subject.
And today in those few Universities that bother to teach classic
ethics anymore, students, following the lead of Aristotle and Plato,
endlessly play around with the question that in ancient Greece never
needed to be asked: "What is the Good? And how do we define it? Since
different people have defined it differently, how can we know there is
any good? Some say the good is found in happiness, but how do we know
what happiness is? And how can happiness be defined? Happiness and
good are not objective terms. We cannot deal with them scientifically.
And since they aren't objective they just exist in your mind. So if
you want to be happy just change your mind. Ha-ha, ha-ha."
Aristotelian ethics, Aristotelian definitions, Aristotelian logic,
Aristotelian forms, Aristotelian substances, Aristotelian rhetoric,
Aristotelian laughter...ha-ha, ha-ha.
And the bones of the Sophists long ago turned to dust and what they
said turned to dust with them and the dust was buried under the rubble
of declining Athens through its fall and Macedonia through its decline
and fall. Through the decline and death of ancient Rome and Byzantium
and the Ottoman Empire and the modern states—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 ...
The road has become so dark I have to turn on my headlight now to
follow it through these mists and rain."
Tanx,
Steve
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