From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Apr 15 2005 - 22:49:38 BST
Hey Robin,
Robin said:
We don't really need to change the word I guess, although I think that since
Pirsig was not a big fan of "intellectual historians" he might have chosen
to give them a new pet name. If the discussion was about just the word we
would not need to examine it very deep i think.
Matt:
True enough, but I think the matter is a bit deeper for Pirsig, though
perhaps not for the two of us. But its also deeper for other people,
following Pirsig, and I can tell you I'm tired of being called a
philosophologist when I think the way people are using it, following Pirsig,
is incoherent.
Robin said:
However the distinction Pirsig makes between philosophers and
philosophologers and might be the same distinction many see between the
Sophists and Socrates.
The Sophist believed that truth could only be found wthin oneself and that
each person had his or her own truth. There was thus no use for listening to
others to find any truth, it was only usefull because it was interesting and
fun, but truth was still to be found wthin oneself and not within someone
else.
Socrates believed in a universal truth only known by gods in total, but
those truths sometimes showed their faces in discussion and within the
similarities of ideas and opinions of the many speakers.
Matt:
This, and what followed, I think, is wrong in a certain respect. I think
you have it exactly backwards. First, remember that it is Socrates that
Pirsig is quoting in the inscription at the beginning of ZMM. It's
Socrates, as brought to us by Plato, that thought that we each individually
had the truth in our breasts because our immortal souls had seen it before
they descended to earth and that conversation was simply a method of
anamnesis, or "remembering." I think your characterization of the Sophists
moreorless comes from a distorted reading (a reading passed on for years up
to this very day in philosophy classes) of Protagoras' famous dictum "Man is
the measure of all things." The way Protagoras meant it and the way Pirsig
reads it is _not_ that each person is hopelessly and relativistically caught
in their individual perspectives, but that truth is generated by the
confluence of people. People generate truth by discussion.
What's interesting about the dialectic in Socrates is that Socrates clearly
thought conversation and the exchange of views a good thing, but the way it
is presented in, for instance, the Republic seems to make it something more
like algebra, which is something you can do by yourself. I think Plato
distorted Socrates' method of dialectical conversation and pushed it towards
something more resembling a mathematical equation because, after all, we
already did know the answers. We just needed to remember them.
For the Sophists, conversation is much more important because, as you say
correctly, they did not believe in a hidden universal truth behind our
debased, common truths. The Sophists were the first reaction against
Parmenidean philosophy, where common sense and experience were rejected in
favor of something (possibly radically different) going on behind the
scenes. The Sophists parodied Parmendies for making philosophy something
detached and remote from the concerns of actual life. Socrates, who was
considered a Sophist at the time, also had a strong ethical concern, he just
differed from them on the matter of education (i.e. the teaching of virtue).
Socrates and Plato, I think, should be seen as the counter-reaction to the
Sophists whereby they took along the Sophists concern for virture, but kept
Parmenides concern for what was really going on in the unseen background.
Much is the story that Pirsig tells at the end of ZMM (though it is slightly
different in important respects), and Pirsig aligns himself with the
Sophists against Socrates and Plato, with common sense and experience and
against something going on behind the scenes.
I think conversation is very important for Pirsig, as it was for the
Sophists and Socrates (though perhaps not for Plato), and that part of
enlarging our scope of conversation would be experiencing more and more
things, stuff, views, etc. A great way of facilitating that, I would think,
would be through reading.
Matt
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