RE: MD The intellectual mess still not cleared up.

From: Paul Turner (paul@turnerbc.co.uk)
Date: Tue Aug 02 2005 - 09:28:57 BST

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    Bo, Matt,

    I read Matt's exasperated reply to this post with sympathy.

    I have just one brief interjection.

    >> Something interesting did come out of this. You say that intellect
    >> arose in Greece during Socrates' time. Right? So, you're saying that
    >> when Pirsig talked about rhetoric in ZMM he was talking about social
    >> patterns and when he talked about dialectic he was talking about
    >> intellectual patterns.
    >
    >Agree about dialectics. Earlier I have claimed that because the
    >Sophists were Plato's hate objects and he (Plato) was intellect's
    >midwife then the Sophists had to be (the last) defenders of social
    >value. But I've found that they rather were intellect's "idealists"
    >(subjective over objective) before the modern idealist/materialist
    >form. Protagoras' "man the measure ..." points in that direction.

    Paul: No, at least, that's not how Pirsig saw it:

    "Man is the measure of all things." Yes, that's what he is saying about
    Quality. Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists
    would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective
    idealists and materialists would say. The Quality which creates the world
    emerges as a relationship between man and his experience." [ZMM, p383]

    As you keep reminding us, S/O was a distinction that didn't exist when the
    Sophists were teaching - so it seems an odd move to pin idealism on them.
    These Sophists could turn out to be a real spanner in the works for the SOL.
    Interesting.

    Regards

    Paul

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