Jon Wrote:
Struan's post from Sep 8th 1999 is worth looking at again, and I'd like to
ask all members to do so, and give your feedback. Nobody at all replied to
that post when it was posted, but I found it very interesting.
Anon:
Is this the one you mean:
---------------------
Sep 8th 1999 Struan Wrote:
Greetings,
JONATHAN:
"I feel that the solution to this lies in our understanding of rationality
itself. SOM equates rationality with the dialectic. I have consistently
pointed out in this forum how one can follow religiously follow the
dialectic to absurdity.
IMHO, the MoQ solution is to widen the scope of rationality beyond the
dialectic."
Aristotle (along with most Ancient Greeks) understood 'dialectic' to mean the
'ART of debate.' (The
word comes from the Greek). The biggest 'asshole' in that chapter of ZAMM is
Phaedrus, simply
because he thought he could properly criticise Aristotle without paying the
slightest attention to
the problems of translation and transliteration. It is one of the great
failings of Pirsig that the
professor was characterised as being philosophically retarded, otherwise he
could have put Phaedrus
straight very easily and this mythical, if rather quaint, 'SOM' would never
have seen the light of
day.
Equally; 'reason' as a term has had a more involved passage to modern English
(and American), but
2000 years ago was widely regarded as being descriptive of products of, 'the
faculty of intuition,'
and even now is, in popular parlance, linked to motive (same root as
emotion).
So a 'rational dialectic,' for Aristotle could well have meant, 'using the
faculty of intuition to
further (the art of) debate.'
For all its drama, that chapter is pure bluster and we should give it a wide
berth.
Struan
------------------------------------------
Anon:
At first reading, Struan appears to be arguing that Aristotle was really some
kind of Pirsigian (that Aristotle was really into intuition of quality in
argument). This is interesting, though not a line I've heard from many
Aristotle scholars. Struan then doubles back on himself at the last moment
to conclude that this means Pirsig is talking Bluster while Aristotle is OK.
This series of switchbacks has me dizzy: if Struan, in defence of Aristotle,
wants to substantially reinterpret Aristotle so as to agree with Pirsig, that
doesn't seem to me to be the way to go about establishing that Pirsig is an
'asshole'. It rather suggests that Pirsig is your guiding star.
There is one recognisable intersection with reality, so far as I can make
out. The idea that dialectic means 'art of debate' is spot on: just look it
up in Liddell & Scott. The problem is where Struan then goes with this juicy
bit of information. Struan appears to argue that this means Aristotle has an
intuitionist theory of correctness in argument. That's so absurd it just
makes me laugh. Has this guy read any Aristotle? Ever wondered who invented
the syllogism? Much more plausibly, we can say that Aristotle would regard
argument as an art in just the same sense that he would also, as he does,
regard Geometry as an art: the art of conforming to the proper fixed
standard. Aristotle thinks of himself as discovering, for the first time
(the conceit of the man) the proper *rules* of argument. Phaedrus is very
far from 'Bluster' in his charaterisation of Aristotle. I'll say.
Oh, and the bit about Reason:
Struan wrote:
Equally; 'reason' as a term has had a more involved passage to modern English
(and American), but
2000 years ago was widely regarded as being descriptive of products of, 'the
faculty of intuition,'
and even now is, in popular parlance, linked to motive (same root as emotion).
Anon:
Well this is just pure fantasy. Bluster, if you like. I have absolutely no
idea where he gets it from, particularly because the roots of the word
'reason' are Latin, not Greek, as any fool knows, and the latin 'ratio' from
which reason is derived relates to words for proportion, not emotion. This
bit of etymology has no part in the history of ideas before the Romans, and
they were hardly the worlds greatest philosophers. In fact at the earliest
Descartes is the one you could etymologise 'reason' for, not Aristotle. So
this philological bluster has no relevance whatsoever, and is also wholly
false.
When Plato talks about reason ruling the soul the word he uses is
'logistikos', which has etymological relations to the seat of language:
'logos' being 'word' or 'account'. Nothing to support Struan's etymological
fantasy about emotion. And in fact it is just this word 'logistokos' that
Aristotle uses when he talks about man as the rational animal. Unlike
Struan, I can supply you with sound references to back this account up.
Check out:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/lexindex?lookup=logistiko/s&lang=Greek
You will find that that page tells you just exactly what I have just said.
Perseus is the leading online resource for classical scholars, having access
to all texts in original and translation, well interlinked with the leading
dictionaries: a good place to go the next time anyone tries to pull the
classical wool over your eyes - which, hopefully, Struan will not try to do
again.
Bluster indeed. Pah!
Anon
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