Hi, Rick
Thanks for your comments, including the following :
>One question though:
>you wrote....
>
>"...And so SOM, that DID defend the right of an individual to spin his own
>story
>in spite of everybody else (provided it bowed to that new God, Truth), won
>the fight against those who thought Arête meant social status.
>
>Huh? Is this to imply that the Sophists are the ones who though Arête
meant
>social status? If so, this would seem to directly contradict Pirsig's
>evaluation of the Sophists in ZAMM in and around p.338-340.
Oooops ! Sorry, I seem to have deduced some of that from a line in Lila, and
then I forgot *I* had thought it up and gave the paternity of it to Pirsig !
Not the best way to get your point across... ;)
The line I'm referring to is in 'Lila' Chp. 20 p294 : "Phaedrus remembered
now that it had bothered him a little that in _The Odyssey_ Homer seemed at
times to be equating Quality and celebrity. Perhaps in Homer's time, when
evolution had not yet transcended the social level into the intellectual,
the two were the same."
This line, which shows how subservient was Intellect is Homer's time,
reminded me of ZAMM, especially Chapter 29 where RMP describes the battle
between Sophists and Dialecticians, between the proponents of relative and
absolute Truth.
For Pirsig, the Sophists were teaching Arete which, we learn from H.D.F.
Kitto in ZAMM (Chp. 29), meant how to become an "excellent all-rounder" with
a "consequent dislike of specialization" and a "much higher idea of
efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in
life itself."
This, I believed, was the romantic view of the Sophists which the former
line puts into question.
>
>Because despite the romantic view of the Sophists that ZAMM offers, 'Lila'
>makes it
>clear that they were morally *inferior* to Socrates and Plato, then."
>
>I was wondering where you get this from? I don't remember ever reading
such
>an assertion (either explicit or implicit) in LILA. It also seems to clash
>strongly with Pirsig's take on the Sophists in ZAMM. How could the
Sophists
>(the proponents of Arête/Excellence/Quality) be less moral than the
>Socratics/Platonics (proponents of Truth)?
After all, if Intellect came to proeminence only under the Greek
philosophers, it means that the Arete, the excellence, could only be
understood then as social quality. To be of surpassing Arete probably meant
something like the Victorian "gentleman" ideal. The ideal is not one of
intellectual proeffiency, but of proefficiency in all domains of the social
life. Remember that Athens was a republic, but NOT a democracy, and that the
ideals of "human rights" were nowhere in sight. For that, we had to wait for
Christianity, which extolled the universality of Man despite his ethnic
roots, and then for the free-thinkers of the Age of Enlightenment, who took
the moral claim one step further and dissociated this universality from the
social pattern of religion. Then, and only then was Intellect really
recognized as the Greatest Good (even though it was in a warped SOM way).
I thus hold the Sophists to have upheld a social ideal, and not an
Intellectual one. Therefore, by the standards of the MOQ, they were morally
inferior to Dialecticians because they couldn't set Arete above the ideals
of their age. Which is why Socrates was made to drink the cigue. He was too
disruptive to the social order.
I think Pirsig somewhere said (although I cannot find the exact quote at
this moment), that Socrates (and later Plato) was trying to save Truth from
the dictates of society by making it an Absolute Principle, and that it was
a moral move on his part. If this is true (and I think it is whether or not
Pirsig actually said it), then he DID hold the high moral ground in this
battle.
Seeya
Denis
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