Ron said to dmb:
The love of wisdom is a passion for what is best. I dont think the passions
were rejected so much as directed. Remember the metaphor of the chariot driver
allowing the passions to drive and reason to guide. The passions were rejected
when the forms became the ideal and the True when the material was illusion and
false. Again the Platonic shadow is cast over the discussion, and it's Plato
who would divorce us from the passions not Aristotle or Socrates.
dmb says:
The chariot allegory is put into the mouth of Socrates by Plato - in the
dialogue titled "Phaedrus". It's pretty clear that only one of the two winged
horses is good. It's as plain as the difference between black and white, I
think. Plato makes Socrates say, "one of the horses is noble and of noble
breed, but the other quite the opposite in breed and character".
As Wikipedia puts it, "the Charioteer represents intellect, reason, or the part
of the soul that must guide the soul to truth; one horse represents rational or
moral impulse or the positive part of passionate nature while the other
represents the soul's irrational passions, appetites, or concupiscent nature".
This is certainly what Nietzsche was complaining about when he said the
“virtuous hero must henceforth be a dialectician” and “Socrates and his
successors,.. have considered all moral and sentimental accomplishments ...to
be ultimately derived from the dialectic of knowledge,..”
Even further, notice what this move (to put "Truth" above all) does to the
artists, poets, and sophists. If you believe Plato, the only thing worse that a
sophist is a tyrants. I think it's just like Pirsig says; vicious slander.
A little more from Wiki: "...the soul is incarnated into one of nine kinds of
person, according to how much TRUTH it beheld. In order of decreasing levels of
TRUTH SEEN, the categories are: (1) philosophers, lovers of beauty, men of
culture, or those dedicated to love; (2) law-abiding kings or civic leaders;
(3) politicians, estate-managers or businessmen; (4) ones who specialize in
bodily health; (5) prophets or mystery cult participants; (6) poets or
imitative artists; (7) craftsmen or farmers; (8) sophists or demagogues; and
(9) tyrants."
RON said:
James seems to be under the impression that ideas are some how unrelated to the
good, but in fact ideas exist by virtue of their goodness...
dmb says:
Whoa! Hold your horses there, mister. (Lame pun intended.) You think James is
under the impression that ideas are unrelated to the good? That is exactly what
he disputes, actually. Pirsig quotes James on that very point. To say that
truth is a species of the good, of course, is to say that truth is a particular
kind of good, the way Robins are a particular kind of bird. Robins ARE birds,
and not in a category distinct from birds.
"James said, 'Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a
category distinct from good, and coordinate with it.' He said, 'The true is the
name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief.' TRUTH IS A
SPECIES OF GOOD. That was EXACTLY what is meant by the MOQ. Truth is a static
intellectual pattern WITHIN a larger entity called Quality." (Lila -- Emphasis
is Pirsig's)
RON continued:
... and Pirsig seems to over generalize the importance the ancient Greeks
placed on avoiding the kinds prejudices the passions those ego-centric drives
are associated with. The only comparison is that they both miss the mark in
regard to the pragmatic benefits of reason over the unbridled passions and that
the best passion is the passion for what is best in life which is what Socrates
and Aristotle advocated and Plato rejected.
dmb says:
Well, basically we're talking about the long-term effects of the Platonic
legacy and he is, along with Socrates and Aristotle, the founder of Western
philosophy. Very roughly speaking, we're talking about what happened to the
Sophists back in ancient Greece and it's kinda like Socrates built them a
casket, Plato put them in it and Aristotle nailed it shut.
"Rhetoric is an art, Aristotle began, because it can be reduced to a rational
system of order. That just left Phaedrus aghast. Stopped. He’d been prepared to
decode messages of great subtlety, systems of great complexity in order to
understand the deeper inner meaning of Aristotle, claimed by many to be the
greatest philosopher of all time. And then to get hit, right off, straight in
the face, with an asshole statement like that! It really shook him."
"Between the lines Phædrus read no doubts, no sense of awe, only the eternal
smugness of the professional academician. Did Aristotle really think his
students would be better rhetoricians for having learned all these endless
names and relationships? And if not, did he really think he was teaching
rhetoric? Phædrus thought that he really did. There was nothing in his style to
indicate that Aristotle was ever one to doubt Aristotle. Phædrus saw Aristotle
astremendously satisfied with this neat little stunt of naming and classifying
everything. His world began and ended withthis stunt. The reason why, if he
were not more than two thousand years dead, he would have gladly rubbed him out
isthat he saw him as a PROTOTYPE for the many millions of self-satisfied and
truly ignorant teachers throughout history who have smugly and callously killed
the creative spirit of their students with this dumb ritual of analysis, this
blind, rote, eternal naming of things. Walk into any of a hundred thousand
classrooms today and hear the teachers divide and subdivide and interrelate and
establish "principles" and study "methods" and what you will hear is the ghost
of Aristotle speaking down through the centuries...the desiccating lifeless
voice of dualistic reason."
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
