If all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato, then the artists have been
subordinated to the philosophers for about 25 centuries. According to Plato’s
Republic, especially the last section, the artists present a danger to society
and to your soul. Two of my favorite thinkers disagree with Plato and Socrates
on this point. Friedrich Nietzsche and Robert Pirsig both make a case that
there is something terribly wrong with this Platonic legacy. In one of
Nietzsche’s earliest works, The Birth of Tragedy, he asks us to consider the
consequences of the Socratic idea that virtue is knowledge, that all sins arise
from ignorance, and only the virtuous are happy. As a consequence, Nietzsche
says, the “virtuous hero must henceforth be a dialectician” because virtue and
knowledge are necessarily connected such that “Truth” is the highest good.
“[E]ver since Socrates the mechanism of concepts, judgements and syllogisms has
come to regarded as the highest exercise of man’s powers, nature’s most
admirable gift. Socrates and his successors, down to our own day, have
considered all moral and sentimental accomplishments — noble deeds, compassion,
self-sacrifice, heroism, even that spiritual calm which the Apollonian Greek
called sophrosune — to be ultimately derived from the dialectic of knowledge,
and therefore teachable.” — Nietzsche
We can see this attitude throughout Plato’s dialogues wherein the Sophists, the
rhetoricians, the rhapsodes are pressed by Socrates to give an account of their
know-how. Socrates’ demand for intelligibility works its magic and each kind of
artist is chopped up into little pieces. Gorgias the Sophist is compared to a
pastry chef who panders to our child-like appetites, for example, and poor Ion
the rhapsode is more or less reduced to a blithering idiot. What was Plato’s
motive for this condemnation?
As Pirsig sees it, “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.”
The fact-value distinction is, I think, one of the more recent consequences of
this Platonic legacy. As difficult as it might seem to achieve agreement as to
the facts, it’s still pretty easy compared to gaining a consensus on values.
These days, common sense and the dictionary both tell us that “sophistry” is a
dirty word and anyone who engages in it is just some kind of manipulative
bullshitter. This is what we might unkindly say about advertisers, politicians,
talk radio hosts and other types of crass button-pushers. Mere “spin” doesn’t
count as art by anyone’s standard and nobody would be crazy enough to defend
anything like that, right?
“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…” — Robert Pirsig
As Nietzsche paints it, the new Socratic hero of the dialectic “opposes
Dionysiac wisdom and art; tries to dissolve the power of myth” and instead
“believes that the whole world can be corrected through knowledge and that life
should be guided by science”. In the process of establishing the supremacy of
Truth, these dialecticians and logicians inadvertently killed something
precious and wild. A clean, well lighted order was imposed on everything,
taming the passions and training the affective domain of consciousness as if it
were a dangerous animal, the dark side of the soul. Dionysus, the god of mystic
union becomes the god of drunks and Apollo, the god light and order, becomes an
obedient prude. For Nietzsche, this is “the vortex and turning point of Western
civilization.”
“It was Socrates who expressed most clearly this radically new prestige of
knowledge and conscious intelligence when he claimed to be the only one who
acknowledged that he knew nothing. . . . From this point of view, Socrates was
forced to condemn both the prevailing art and the prevailing ethics. Wherever
his penetrating gaze fell he saw nothing but lack of understanding, fictions
rampant, and so was led to deduce a state of affairs wholly discreditable and
perverse. Socrates believed that it was his mission to correct the situation.”
— Nietzsche
It’s not just a coincidence that Nietzsche and Pirsig both present their work
in an unusual style. In both cases, their artsy form is consistent with their
rebellious content. There is no pretense of logical rigor or objectivity and
instead enjoy a sense of power and intimacy in their work. Nietzsche talks like
a poet and a prophet and Pirsig’s philosophy is quite deliberately tangled up
with his own biography and presented in the form of novel. In both cases, they
are practicing what they preach.
Maybe it goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway; their criticism of the
dialecticians does not mean that we ought to abandon intellectual standards or
that we ought to live by gut-feelings alone. As I read them, they are denying
that philosophy is better than art. But they’re not exactly saying that art is
better than philosophy either. The idea, I think, is that philosophy is a form
of art – if you’re doing it rightly.
“It’s been necessary since before the time of Socrates to reject the passions,
the emotions, in order to free the rational mind for an understanding of
nature’s order which was as yet unknown. Now it’s time to further an
understanding of nature’s order by reassimilating those passions which were
originally fled from. The passions, the emotions, the affective domain of man’s
consciousness, are a part of nature’s order too. The central part.” — Robert
Pirsig
> From: [email protected]
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:30:50 -0400
> Subject: Re: [MD] Definitions
>
> [Ron]
> This is one of those difficult quotes from Nietzche in which the moniker of
> "nilhist" became attached to him.
>
> [Krimel]
> It's been awhile. Good hearing from you. I hope all is well in your part of
> the world.
> Nietzsche had no problem with the nihilist moniker. He discusses three
> different kind of nihilism and I believe endorsed what he call an active
> nihilism which would embrace the death of Absolutes as a healthy liberation
> and the rise of the ubermensch.
>
> [Ron]
> I think on these terms Pirsig diverges with the idea of Dynamic quality being
> the undefined good (that downside being levels of good in competition as a
> secondary distinction) that lends greater explanitory power than Nietzches's
> Chaos. That is not to lessen the caution of anthropomorphism in any way but
> these ideas fit into an overall explanation based on the concept of evolution
> and Nietzches chaos fails to perform in that aim.
>
> [Krimel]
> I am no expert on Nietzsche but I suspect that he would regard the MoQ, at
> least as some here interpret it, as another futile attempt to establish a new
> absolute. Nietzsche's perspectivism would be more or less like Pirsig's
> pictures in a gallery so I think he would like that. But would not care much
> for those who hold up this picture or that as "better" or as a replacement
> for all the other pictures in the gallery.
> Nietzsche was heavily influenced by Darwin and provides a very Darwinian
> explanation of how the things we take to be Absolutes evolve into becoming
> regarded as Absolute. There is some suggestion that he was also influenced by
> Helmholz one of the founders of thermodynamics and the seriously depressing
> idea of entropy.
>
> [Ron]
> Hesiod said "First of things was chaos made, then broadbreasted earth...and
> love supreme among mortals".
> When confronted with the difficulty of explaining why a thing is of necessity
> he drags the mind in sideways; in other explanations he uses everything
> rather than mind to account for the facts.
> Failing to use the explanation consistantly it lacks persuasive power.
>
> [Krimel]
> The mythology of most advanced cultures like the Greeks, as you point out,
> begins with an account of the triumph of Order over Chaos. The Egyptians, the
> Aztecs and the Jews are obvious examples.
>
> [Ron]
> However I think it was hit apon rather well with this statement:
>
> [Krimel]
> Necessity just means thing have to happen in a certain way and not some
> other.
>
> [Ron]
> Which is to say, wether we like it or not. Shooting a hole in the pure
> anthropomorism status given to the good in the terms of what we like to call
> truth.
>
> [Krimel]
> I believe Nietzsche would reject any notion of truth or good applied as a
> universal. The one perspective he really had no patience with was the "view
> from nowhere" or the "God's eye view" which is just fantasy.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
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