From: Paul Turner (paulj.turner@ntlworld.com)
Date: Wed Jan 28 2004 - 17:20:19 GMT
Mati
Mati said:
I am guessing this is where your "Rhetoric" might come into play, as
"independently manipulable signs". Then Pirsig notes, "But if one
studies the early books of the Bible or if one studies the sayings of
primitive tribes today, the intellectual level is conspicuously absent.
The world is ruled by Gods who follow social and biological patterns and
nothing else." Perhaps an example of this is the Iliad of Homer.
Reading a brief passage if the Iliad one see it is an example of
"Rhetoric".
Paul:
No, Iliad is an example of myth and poetry - rhetoric came after, see
below.
Mati said:
The Greek mythos was part of the natural progression of defining or
reflecting who we are and what is real in the social context. Why does
the thunder come from the heavens etc. They provided socially
anthropomorphized answers. Then there are the early Greeks philosophers,
Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, and others that tried something
different. They tried to define reality as a rational thought beyond the
social reality. Not until Aristotle Subject/Object split was the
intellectual latch provided...
Paul:
Allow me to offer an alternative piece of speculation. I argue that the
emergence of rhetoric produced the first intellectual patterns and that
rhetoric was the point of transition from social to intellectual
patterns. When Protagoras states a general principle such as "Man is the
measure of all things," it is clearly a far cry from social use of
language e.g. "Pour that wine, I'm thirsty from fleecing those rams."
Intellectual patterns in the form of rhetoric came first, then
dialectic, then logic, then SOM. Rhetoric was the original art of using
words to form intellectual patterns - the *art* of definition, of
identifying likeness, difference, the clear statement of belief - and
all in a creative process. When it sounds good, dialectic takes those
patterns as representative of an actual order of things and, through its
question-and-answer technique, builds its hierarchy. Logic formalises
the rules one should use to move through and extend this hierarchy.
"Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric.
Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece.
That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common
sense. The poetry and the myths are the response of a prehistoric people
to the universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality,
not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know." [ZMM
p.391]
That is what I meant when I said that rhetoric produced the intellectual
patterns that enabled SOM.
Regards
Paul
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