Ron said to dmb:
Speaking of this Dave [the MOQ's levels], I was kicking around the notion that
the Sophists were promoting social good. Wondering what you may make of that in
terms of conflict with Socrates intellectual good.
dmb says:
As I read it, Plato would like us to see the Sophists that way, as something
appealing to common opinions, feelings, emotions and otherwise less than
intellectual. And this is an argument that Plato won a long time ago. But this
is exactly what Pirsig is resisting. He wants to tell a different story wherein
the Sophists were teaching Quality, just like himself.
"Lightning hits!
Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not
ethical relativism. Not pristine "virtue." But areté. 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."
I think he means that the Sophists put Quality above not only physical and
social goods but also intellectual good. Quality is absolute in a ubiquitous
way, permeating everything including excellence in thought and speech.
Ron continued:
Ant and I were recently discussing the encapsulation of the Good off list and
coincidentally I found it in Philebus where the discussion revolves around
pleasure and reason. I found it in Philebus specifically 65a-e. You have to
read the entire thing to get the gist of how it involves the forms. [...]
Scholars agree that this was one of Plato's last works. Timeaus is where I can
put my finger on using that encapsulation as a vehicle for the demiurge. As far
as I know, this was one of the few texts available to early Christian thinkers.
dmb says:
It's certainly possible to make a scholarly case that the most common and
persistent interpretations of Plato are mistaken in some way but I think that's
almost beside the point because those common and persistent interpretations
constitute the history of philosophy and that's what Pirsig is taking on. I
mean, even if it's not exactly true that Plato intended to turn the Good into a
fixed and eternal Form, that's what it became in countless different ways, most
of which are Idealistic or Theological or both. And, yes, one of the many
permutations of this fixed and eternal absolute is the God of monotheism, the
paper God of the philosophers, Hegel's Absolute, and lots of similar notions.
It's no accident that all such notions leave a very bad taste in my mouth. I'm
increasingly convince that all such metaphysical fictions are a very misleading
waste of time. I suppose entire lives have been wasted thinking about things
that never existed in the first place. It's all so tragically otherworldly and
even life-denying.
"The Absolute, also represented through other concepts as the Source, Fountain
or Well, the Centre, the Monad or One, the All or Whole, the Origin (Arche) or
Principle or Primordial Cause, the Sacred or Holy or Utterly Other (Otto), the
Form of the Good (Plato), the Mystery, the Ultimate, the Ground or Urground
("Original Ground"), is the concept of an unconditional reality which
transcends limited, conditional, everyday existence. The manifestation of the
Absolute has been described as the Logos, Word, the Ṛta or Ratio (Latin for
"reason")."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_%28philosophy%29
I hope that gives you something worth pondering.
dmb
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