From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Dec 22 2002 - 19:10:26 GMT
Matt, Sam and all:
Matt said:
I agree with Sam, ... when he says Platonism leads to modernism, I can
agree, insofar as Aristotellianism (usually contrasted to Platonism) is
engulfed by Platonism, subsumed under its heading.
DMB:
Aristotle was Plato's student and was a Platonist, so Aristoteleanism is
really Platonism, and is subsumed under it, as is all Western Philosophy?
Careful with that knife, mister. You're gonna hurt yourself. Just kidding. I
know. Its true. All philosophy is a footnote to Plato, or something like
that. The so-called neo-Platonists were actually quite Aristotelian.
Mixtures and confusions abound in intellectual history. But this is not what
its all about. Plato and Aristotle represent two broad strains of thought
that run through history. Plato, the eternal-Buddha seeker and Aristotle the
mechanic. Plato's emphasis is on the 'one' and Aristotle's emphasis is on
the many. At least, this is what I see Pirsig saying.
Matt said:
Aristotle was making room for science. The distinction between form and
substance is a distinction that Aristotle took from Plato: the Realm of the
Forms and the Realm of Shadows, respectively. The distinction that informs
both Plato's emphasis on the Forms and the Enlightenment's emphasis on
Science is that between appearance and reality. Plato claimed that the
Forms were reality and that Shadows were mere appearance. The
Enlightenment project of science inverted this schematic, making the
Shadows (now, material existence) reality and the Forms (now, concepts)
mere appearance. This reading of the history of ideas, I think, shows us
the real culprit: the search for Truth, started by our friends Socrates and
Plato. This is why we can refer to a Platonic tradition that includes
everybody from Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas and Descartes to Habermas and
Searle.
DMB says:
I think it is unhelpful to say the Platonic traditon includes everybody. And
I definately think you misidentified the "culprit". Wouldn't the culprit be
SOM or whatever brought us to it? (I assume we're talking about the "culprit
" as PIrsig sees it.) But other than that I think your brief history of
ideas is about right.
Matt said:
Now, quite plainly, you, DMB, are going to want to deny this reading of
philosophy. You want to save the search for Truth while damning the
Aristotellian tradition for creating "amoral scientific objectivity" and a
"metaphysics of substance."
DMB says:
Yes. Or rather, I think this is whay Pirsig has done. His MOQ preserves the
intellect and says that it is completely moral that it go off in its own
direction, but he wants to replace the metaphysics of substance with one of
Quality. And its not a matter of damning the Aristotelians and subsequent
materialists, but of re-integrating mysticism into secular scientific world.
Matt said:
I don't think SOM (be it a "metaphysics of substance" in DMB's
interpretation or
the appearance/reality distinction in my interpretation) is what has caused
societies ills. I think there are many more factors involved, one being
the lack of money. If everybody had enough money and had time enough to be
lazy and reflective and loving, then I think a lot of the world's problems
would dissolve.
DMB says:
Society's ills? If only we had more money and love? Don't think SOM is the
problem? What I'm trying to get at by going back to the Sophists is to show
what was lost so long ago. SOM represents the culmination of a long trend, a
trend that was increasingly "godless and materialistic" as the
fundamenatlists might put it. Yes, we're talking about a defect in the way
intellect searches for "Truth", but more than that we're talking about the
mystical reality that SOM denies almost entirely. We're talking about the
death of God, the de-sanctification of nature, that terrible secret
loneliness of the twentieth century, we're talking about a spirtual vacuum
that has left Western man trapped alone in his own subjective reality in a
meaningless and hostile universe. We're talking about the human soul and its
alienation from God. The examination of this issue certainly benifits from
doing some intellectual history, but the heart of the issue of a spiritual
crisis. The further back we go, the more apparent this becomes. Socrates is
a champion of the intellect, but let us not project our SOM onto him. For
him the intellect was not just the brain power and an ability to do
philosophy, it was an aspect of the soul, the immortal aspect of the soul.
As I keep promising, I hope to show that the original Platonists were far
more spiritual than is usually supposed.
Matt:
p.s. DMB, I was hoping that when you quote Pirsig you could put the chapter
number. There are many different editions of his books out, all being
numbered differently, and it makes it hard to find the sections you're
quoting with only page numbers.
DMB:
Most of the Zen quotes are from chapters 29 and 30.
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