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." [Ron replies:] Those who are to communicate with one another by way of arguement, that is, in order to persuade one another, must have some common understanding. Every word must therefore be intelligible. Art to Aristotle is a discipline, "Art is born when out of the many bits of information derived from experience there emerges a grasp of those similarities in view of which they are unified whole." Rhetoric is an art, but as any art, a discipline must be mastered first, as the skillfull mechanic. Then when those basic rules of meaning have become second nature, one may create with freedom and skill, which is where Pirsig ultimately ends up within his own metaphysics. I think if one looks closly at Aristotle, it becomes increasingly difficult to discern exactly where he actually crushes or kills creativity, but he does call for a development of skill and craftsmanship as a proper foundation for the creative spirit. The ritual was passed on and lost it's original meaning. What the crime REALLY is, is the blind following of ritual without understanding of the principles involved. It's easy to point to one particular person and blame all the stupidity of blind conformity of western civilization on them but it's much more difficult to inquire as to how and why it happened. It does make for good reading and Pirsig used it skillfully but in the end he makes the same call for precision consistancy and clarity in meaning and when we look back at the beginning of his journey where he makes those comments quoted above we really see the intensity and the drive to get to the bottom of the problem. One mans journey into the understanding of the origins of western rationality to which he then expands apon, "to untangle a knot one must first see it". Thnx Dave .. 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
