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Robert M. Pirsig's Description of
The Birth of SOM
from his
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

This text box only, and uniquely within our Quantonics Birth of SOM web page is
©Quantonics, Inc., 2005-2012 - Revised: 27Oct2009 - Created: 8Dec2005  PDR

Remainder of this web page and quotes below are ©Robert M. Pirsig 1974-2012.

A Frances A. Yates Hermetic Nexus to Robert M. Pirsig's Ancients in Pirsig's Birth of SOM

When Doug wrote this nearly a year ago, he failed to offer Doug's sui generis WJS heuristics and conjecture borne of WJS relevant research Doug has been doing.

We feel obliged to offer two key, but purely conjectural, points to our WJS readers:

1. WJS may have had aneuploidy. Our assumption is that aneuploidy may be implicit in neo Sapiens.

2. WJS may have, somehow, we d¤ n¤t yet grasp how, been part of Holy Grail's Merovingian Vine.

Doug - 8Oct2006.

Skip nexus and go directly to Pirsig's Birth of SOM

That: You may recall Jon's, Doug's, and others' concerns about Pirsig's referrals to aretê (i.e, quantum~qualitative excellence) and sophistry (i.e., quantum~qualitative~subjectivity) of The Ancients.

In particular, we worried about memes and notions harbored by ancients during times prior to Parmenides, Plato, and Aristotle as really being more like MoQ and more like what we today refer as "quantum reality."

Doug has wondered and wondered and wondered about this, and only recently "plungingly reoriented" himself far enough back —i.e., vicariously, in ancient history— to discover that about which Pirsig speaks and writes.

Doug's process of discovery happened only due Beth's insistence that he read these books:

  • Angels and Demons,
  • The Da Vinci Code, and
  • Holy Blood, Holy Grail (HBHG).

Of course, first two books are by Dan Brown, and third one is by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (BLL).

Here, we also reference:

  • Frances A. Yates' Giordano Bruno, CUP, paperback,1991, and
  • Griffiths, Gelbart, Lewontin, and Miller's Modern Genetic Analysis (MGA), Freeman, 2nd edition, hardbound, 1999, 2002.

Let's refer latter as GGLM's MGA.

Prior reading Beth's recommendations (to put it lightly ) we had already established an interest in Giordano Bruno as an MoQite. He is/was what we today would call an MoQite (and Catholics burned him at the stake in 1600 - Satanic bastards). And, our riveting interests in William James Sidis and issues surrounding his (perhaps only intuitive) uses of mnemonics and hermetic poetry and symbols as memory-enhancing 'devices' (a la Robert Fludd, Matteo Ricci, Hermeticists, etc.) led us on a Bruno~Sidis parallel path to Frances A. Yates. Our above three texts added a third parallel path to Yates via our recently established interests in Priori de Sion and its own prolific uses of Hermetic

  • art (stars, roses, hexagrams, circles, pointing, symbolic misorientation, etc.),
  • gestures (pointing, smiling, feigning, fawning, etc.),
  • masonry (corner stones, deviations from meridians, Hermetic shapes, cosmological alignments, etc.),
  • language (cryptography, explicit coversion, gematria, locus, prominence, mixing (Hebrew, Egyptian, Arabic, Greek, French, Latin, ..., ), etc.),
  • mathematics (Fibonacci series, golden ratio, incredibly elegant geometry, etc.),
  • architecture (arches, corner stones, round buildings, triangles, etc.),
  • anthropomorphic biology (Vitruvian Man: Leonardo (allegedly a Priori de Sion Grand Master), ratiocination: Leonardo, dissected anal musculature as puckered pentagonal five-petaled rose: Leonardo, vagina as cavernous arch: Leonardo, coitus as potentially hermaphroditic: Leonardo, aneuploidy: Hermetics, etc.),
  • cosmology (Ursa, Venus, etc.), and so on.

Almost full cycloidal orbit, we only appear to again superwalk Pirsig's own 'Birth of SOM' desnouements.

As it turns out, Yates has written a fabulous text (among others relevant Hermetic beliefs) titled Giordano Bruno. In that text's first 10 chapters Yates gives an excellent overview of ancient Hermeticism including a strawhuman composite protagonist Hermes (He~rmes; he~rma; he~rm; he~r; her is 'sticky,; me is middle; etc.) Trismegistus (Tri~s'me~gist~us; 23 = 8 = 3+5; 1,2,3...; ; HT as hermaticity; etc.; ancient Egyptian god Thoth: quanton(female,male) alchemist, astrologist, magicist) and he~r~us teachers' teaching texts: Pimander and Asclepius. In Giordano Bruno's last 12 chapters she offers her perspectives of Bruno relevant Hermetic arts.

What we were looking for and found is evidence of our own gradually developed memetic that 'divine' sexuality is hermaphrotricity: a quantum~coherent~omnity of both~and quanton(female,male). Today, early in 2005, geneticists have shown that true human (and other animal) hermaphrodicity, quanton(XX,XY), 'exists.' That is, genuine genetic quantum~superposition and ~coherence of both female while~and male in a single human emerqancy. See, for example, GGLM's MGA definition of aneuploidy. It is extraordinarily enlightening, at least for Doug it is, that modern geneticists consider aneuploidy 'abnormal.' Yet ancients saw ideal hermaphrodicity as divine! Hmmm... In Quantonics we view aneuploidy as extraordinary quantum evidence of Nature's real quantum evolutionary progress. 'Abnormality' assessment otherwise is just another instance of dialectic distorting science's view of reality? SOM's wall? Probably! Here is a hint from Freeman's own text, "Aneuploid organisms result mainly from nondisjunction during parental meiosis." Page 358. Fathom how 'di' sjunction is classically bivalent, a SOM's knife objective 'di' alectical scission. However, when QELRed, "n¤n ¤mnihsjumcti¤n" issi a valihd way t¤ ¤mniscrihbæ quantum ræhlihty, and classical 'scientists' call it 'abnormal.' Classicists know1 what is 'normal,' and do not try to tell them otherwise! Dialectical 'Scientific' Inquisition... Dichon(abnormal, normal), EOOO(abnormal, normal), etc.

And from Yates' Giordano Bruno, "'Now,' says Pimander, 'I will reveal to you a mystery which has been hidden until now. Nature being united to Man in love produced an amazing prodigy. Man, as I said, had in him the nature of the assembly of the Seven, composed of fire and breath. Nature from her union with Man brought forth seven men corresponding to the natures of the Seven Governors, being both male and female and rising up towards the sky.'" Page 24 of 466 total including index, UChicP, 1991, paperback edition.

Mid-late 2005 Doug went to Beth and said, having read Brown's books, "The Grail Secret is that The Holy Blood is hermaphroditic." It was another of Doug's epiphanies from nowhere! BLL's HBHG made Doug even more certain. Now Yates' Giordano Bruno heightens Doug's self~assurances. Again, though, let's remind ourselves that what we want to accomplish here is showing how Pirsig was on a good track when he saw source and agency as more ancient than ancient Greece. Pirsig writes of Greeks as "ancients" and Yates' Hermetics as "mystical cosmologists." Indeed, Yates refers them that way too. Do you recall Pirsig's moment of breakthrough on what Quality is as he wrote it in ZMM? Allow us to quote it here. It starts with him quoting his own letter to Bozeman faculty:

" 'In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy, engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality. Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it.'

" 'Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. That is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it we are defining something less than Quality itself.' "

"I remember this fragment more vividly than any of the others, possibly because it is the most important of all. When he [Phaedrus, Pirsig's former self] wrote it he felt momentary fright and was about to strike out the words "All of it. Every last bit of it." Madness there. I think he saw it. But he couldn't see any logical reason to strike these words out and it was too late now for faintheartedness. He ignored his warning and let the words stand.

"He put his pencil down and then — felt something let go. As though something internal had been strained too hard and had given way. Then it was too late. [Compare this moment to John Forbes Nash's entry into schizophrenia having attempted to fathom and explain quantum uncertainty: close kin of Quality. In both cases, QTMs would have, in our view, mitigated these psychoses.]

"He began to see that he had shifted away from his original stand. He was no longer talking about a metaphysical trinity but an absolute monism2. Quality was the source and substance of everything.

"A whole new flood of philosophic associations came to mind. Hegel had talked like this, with his Absolute Mind. Absolute Mind was independent too, both of objectivity and subjectivity.

"However, Hegel said the Absolute Mind was the source of everything, but then excluded romantic experience from the "everything" it was the source of. Hegel's Absolute was completely classical, completely rational and completely orderly.

"Quality was not like that.

"Phædrus remembered Hegel had been regarded as a bridge between Western and Oriental philosophy. The Vedanta of the Hindus, the Way of the Taoists, even the Buddha had been described as an absolute monism similar to Hegel's philosophy. Phædrus doubted at the time, however, whether mystical Ones and metaphysical monisms were introconvertable since mystical Ones follow no rules and metaphysical monisms do. His Quality was a metaphysical entity, not a mystic one. Or was it? What was the difference?

"He answered himself that the difference was one of definition. Metaphysical entities are defined. Mystical Ones are not. That made Quality mystical. No. It was really both. Although he'd thought of it purely in philosophical terms up to now as metaphysical, he had all along refused to define it. That made it mystic too. Its indefinability freed it from the rules of metaphysics." By Robert M. Pirsig, ©Robert M. Pirsig 1974-2006, from pp. 251-252, ZMM, Morrow, 1974, 1st ed., hardbound.

Doug's brackets, bold, and links.

Observe how Pirsig, apparently with great omnifficulty, noodles Quality as a genuine quantum~c¤hesihve (monisim) b¤th~ahll~while~amd~many (plurahlism). Also consider how Doug uses describe in place of define in quantum comtexts. What Doug intends is that SQ compenetrating DQ is descriptionings of DQ! To describe in Quantonics is to use our script, e.g., quanton(DQ,SQ). Doug should have made it clear that all descriptions of reality, using Pirsig's SQ and DQ as quantum~complementary quantons, are quantum~partial, are enthymemetic, are only, as Pirsig wrote in ZMM, "Phaedrus says, 'All this is just an analogy.' " See Chapter 30, page 351 of 380 total pages, Bantam paperback, 1981 ed. with 1984 Pirsig Introduction.

Example? Try this: SQ issi quanton(DQ,SQ). SQ as a stindyanic description is always partial, always enthymemetic, always only analogous, always quantum~hologramings, always EIMA quantum~entangling, and always evolving, changing... Doug - 16Aug2008. Red text updates 27Oct2009. Doug.

Now let's jump ahead to page 348 where Pirsig is writing about himself (his former self) as Phaedrus.

[We are working on this during balance of December, 2005. Lots of research coheres now and here and is nontrivial to explain. Doug - 12Dec2005.]

What jibes marvelously with Pirsig's emissions is that Hermeticism is sophist with a tinge of dialectic.. Hermeticism is remarkably quantum with a smidgeon of classical proemials. It hints of dialectic, but in a sense of God using dialectic as punishment. Rather, we view it as God setting dialectical preconditions to see if humans could find their way out of dialectic's terrible, war-intrinsic, SOM box.

As Yates writes, subsequent ancient chronology referred by that quote God turned those true, pure, divine hermaphrodites into ideal war-like dialectical either male or females "as punishment." Remarkable!

Based upon Yates' Giordano Bruno opus we agree with Pirsig: Egyptian Hermetics thousands of years before Christ were sophists, and by Quantonic extension were amazingly very quantum hermeneutic.

As further evidence of that last remark we shall offer additional relevant quotes here as we proceed through Yates' fine Bruno opus.

Instead, Doug has found evidence of pre Egyptian ancients via Carlo Suares' revived Qabala and his Trilogy of Song of Songs, Sepher Yetsira, and Cipher of Genesis. Suares' decoded some books of OT and other documents using his own reengineering of quantum~semantics of a Qabalic pre Egyptian, perhaps the ancients', Autiot. See also psyche[dot]com. Doug - 27Oct2009.

Doug - 8Dec2005.

If you are new to quantonics here are some links for your edification:

coherence
define
describe
dialectic
dichon
duration
emerqancy
EOOO
Jon (browser search there for <sophist>)
MoQite
not (coined)
not (QELRed; also fathom subjectiv and subjective negation as quantum~positive)
omnifficult
quality
quanton
QELR
QTM
reality
SOM
SOM's Box
truth
uncertainty
war-intrinsic (browser search there for <dialectic is war>)
ZMM


Notes:

1 - know (see our QELR of 'judge')

2 - In Quantonics this is a Pirsigean Problematic. For an explanation see our Pirsig vis-à-vis Bergson on Pluralism vis-à-vis Monism. Quantum reality is a BAWAM quanton(heterogeneity,homogeneity) therefore absolute monism is a classical delusion. What Pirsig nor Bergson grasped but intended is quantum coherence of unlimited durational multiplicities where coherence corresponds 'monism' and Bergson's "multiplicities" correspond heterogeneity AKA pluralism.


This text box only, and uniquely within Quantonics Birth of SOM web page is
©Quantonics, Inc., 2005-2010 - Revised: 8-12Dec2005 - Created: 8Dec2005  PDR

Remainder of this web page and quotes above are ©Robert M. Pirsig 1974-2010.

 
Starting on page 334 of the
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
paperback (Bantam):

"The next day he is at the library waiting for it to open and when it does he begins to read furiously, back behind Plato for the first time, into what little is known of those rhetoricians he so despised. And what he discovers begins to confirm what he has already intuited from his thoughts the evening before.

"Plato’s condemnation of the Sophists is one which many scholars have already taken with great misgivings. The Chairman of the committee himself has suggested that critics who are not certain what Plato meant should be equally uncertain of what Socrates’ antagonists in the dialogues meant. When it is known that Plato put his own words in Socrates’ mouth (Aristotle says this) there should be no reason to doubt that he could have put his own words into other mouths too.

"Fragments by other ancients seemed to lead to other evaluations of the Sophists. Many of the older Sophists were selected as "ambassadors" of their cities, certainly no office of disrespect. The name Sophist was even applied without disparagement to Socrates and Plato themselves. It has even been suggested by some later historians that the reason Plato hated the Sophists so was that they could not compare with his master, Socrates, who was in actuality the greatest Sophist of them all. This last explanation is interesting, Phædrus thinks, but unsatisfactory. You don't abhor a school of which your master is a member. What was Plato’s real purpose in this? Phædrus reads further and further into pre-Socratic Greek thought to find out, and eventually comes to the view that Plato’s hatred of the rhetoricians was part of a much larger struggle in which the reality of the Good, represented by the Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented by the dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle for the future mind of man. Truth won, the Good lost, and that is why today we have so little difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so much difficulty accepting the reality of Quality, even though there is no more agreement in one area than in the other.

"To understand how Phædrus arrives at this requires some explanation:

"One must first get over the idea that the time span between the last caveman and the first Greek philosophers was short. The absence of any history for this period sometimes gives this illusion. But before the Greek philosophers arrived on the scene, for a period of at least five times all our recorded history since the Greek philosophers, there existed civilizations in an advanced state of development. They had villages and cities, vehicles, houses, marketplaces, bounded fields, agricultural implements and domestic animals, and led a life quite as rich and varied as that in most rural areas of the world today. And like people in those areas today they saw no reason to write it all down, or if they did, they wrote it on materials that have never been found. Thus we know nothing about them. The "Dark Ages" were merely the resumption of a natural way of life that had been momentarily interrupted by the Greeks.

"Early Greek philosophy represented the first conscious search for what was imperishable in the affairs of men. Up to then what was imperishable was within the domain of the Gods, the myths. But now, as a result of the growing impartiality of the Greeks to the world around them, there was an increasing power of abstraction which permitted them to regard the old Greek mythos not as revealed truth but as imaginative creations of art. This consciousness, which had never existed anywhere before in the world, spelled a whole new level of transcendence for the Greek civilization.

"But the mythos goes on, and that which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos, and the new mythos under the first Ionian philosophers became transmuted into philosophy, which enshrined permanence in a new way. Permanence was no longer the exclusive domain of the Immortal Gods. It was also to be found within Immortal Principles, of which our current law of gravity has become one.

"The Immortal Principle was first called water by Thales. Anaximenes called it air. The Pythagoreans called it number and were thus the first to see the Immortal Principle as something nonmaterial. Heraclitus called the Immortal Principle fire and introduced change as part of the Principle. He said the world exists as a conflict and tension of opposites. He said there is a One and there is a Many and the One is the universal law which is immanent in all things. Anaxagoras was the first to identify the One as nous, meaning "mind."

"Parmenides made it clear for the first time that the Immortal Principle, the One, Truth, God, is separate from appearance and from opinion, and the importance of this separation and its effect upon subsequent history cannot be overstated. It's here that the classic mind, for the first time, took leave of its romantic origins and said, "The Good and the True are not necessarily the same," and goes its separate way. Anaxagoras and Parmenides had a listener named Socrates who carried their ideas into full fruition.

"What is essential to understand at this point is that until now there was no such thing as mind and matter, subject and object, form and substance. Those divisions are just dialectical inventions that came later. The modern mind sometimes tends to balk at the thought of these dichotomies being inventions and says, "Well, the divisions were there for the Greeks to discover," and you have to say, "Where were they? Point to them!" And the modern mind gets a little confused and wonders what this is all about anyway, and still believes the divisions were there.

"But they weren't, as Phædrus said. They are just ghosts, immortal gods of the modern mythos which appear to us to be real because we are in that mythos. But in reality they are just as much an artistic creation as the anthropomorphic Gods they replaced.

"The pre-Socratic philosophers mentioned so far all sought to establish a universal Immortal Principle in the external world they found around them. Their common effort united them into a group that may be called Cosmologists. They all agreed that such a principle existed but their disagreements as to what it was seemed irresolvable. The followers of Heraclitus insisted the Immortal Principle was change and motion. But Parmenides’ disciple, Zeno, proved through a series of paradoxes that any perception of motion and change is illusory. [Be very careful here: I.e., if we believe what Parmenides said,] Reality had to be motionless. Doug's brackets added - 20Dec2004.

"The resolution of the arguments of the Cosmologists came from a new direction entirely, from a group Phædrus seemed to feel were early humanists. They were teachers, but what they sought to teach was not principles, but beliefs of men. Their object was not any single absolute truth, but the improvement of men. All principles, all truths, are relative, they said. "Man is the measure of all things." These were the famous teachers of "wisdom," the Sophists of ancient Greece.

"To Phædrus, this backlight from the conflict between the Sophists and the Cosmologists adds an entirely new dimension to the Dialogues of Plato. Socrates is not just expounding noble ideas in a vacuum. He is in the middle of a war between those who think truth is absolute and those who think truth is relative. He is fighting that war with everything he has. The Sophists are the enemy.

"Now Plato’s hatred of the Sophists makes sense. He and Socrates are defending the Immortal Principle of the Cosmologists against what they consider to be the decadence of the Sophists. Truth. Knowledge. That which is independent of what anyone thinks about it. The ideal that Socrates died for. The ideal that Greece alone possesses for the first time in the history of the world. It is still a very fragile thing. It can disappear completely. Plato abhors and damns the Sophists without restraint, not because they are low and immoral people...there are obviously much lower and more immoral people in Greece he completely ignores. He damns them because they threaten mankind’s first beginning grasp of the idea of truth. That’s what it is all about.

"The results of Socrates’ martyrdom and Plato’s unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it. If the idea of truth had been allowed to perish unrediscovered by the Renaissance it's unlikely that we would be much beyond the level of prehistoric man today. The ideas of science and technology and other systematically organized efforts of man are dead-centered on it. It is the nucleus of it all.

"And yet, Phædrus understands, what he is saying about Quality is somehow opposed to all this. It seems to agree much more closely with the Sophists.

""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. He is a participant in the creation of all things. The measure of all things—it fits. And they taught rhetoric—that fits.

"The one thing that doesn't fit what he says and what Plato said about the Sophists is their profession of teaching virtue. All accounts indicate this was absolutely central to their teaching, but how are you going to teach virtue if you teach the relativity of all ethical ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute. A person whose idea of what is proper varies from day to day can be admired for his broadmindedness, but not for his virtue. Not, at least, as Phædrus understands the word. And how could they get virtue out of rhetoric? This is never explained anywhere. Something is missing.

"His search for it takes him through a number of histories of ancient Greece, which as usual he reads detective style, looking only for facts that may help him and discarding all those that don't fit. And he is reading H. D. F. Kitto’s The Greeks, a blue and white paperback which he has bought for fifty cents, and he has reached a passage that describes "the very soul of the Homeric hero," the legendary figure of predecadent, pre-Socratic Greece. The flash of illumination that follows these pages is so intense the heroes are never erased and I can see them with little effort of recall.

"The Iliad is the story of the siege of Troy, which will fall in the dust, and of its defenders who will be killed in battle. The wife of Hector, the leader, says to him: "Your strength will be your destruction; and you have no pity either for your infant son or for your unhappy wife who will soon be your widow. For soon the Acheans will set upon you and kill you; and if I lose you it would be better for me to die."

Her husband replies:

"Well do I know this, and I am sure of it: that day is coming when the holy city of Troy will perish, and Priam and the people of wealthy Priam. But my grief is not so much for the Trojans, nor for Hecuba herself, nor for Priam the King, nor for my many noble brothers, who will be slain by the foe and will lie in the dust, as for you, when one of the bronze-clad Acheans will carry you away in tears and end your days of freedom. Then you may live in Argos, and work at the loom in another woman’s house, or perhaps carry water for a woman of Messene or Hyperia, sore against your will: but hard compulsion will lie upon you. And then a man will say as he sees you weeping, `This was the wife of Hector, who was the noblest in battle of the horse-taming Trojans, when they were fighting around Ilion.’ This is what they will say: and it will be fresh grief for you, to fight against slavery bereft of a husband like that. But may I be dead, may the earth be heaped over my grave before I hear your cries, and of the violence done to you."

So spake shining Hector and held out his arms to his son. But the child screamed and shrank back into the bosom of the well-girdled nurse, for he took fright at the sight of his dear father...at the bronze and the crest of the horsehair which he saw swaying terribly from the top of the helmet. His father laughed aloud, and his lady mother too. At once shining Hector took the helmet off his head and laid it on the ground, and when he had kissed his dear son and dandled him in his arms, he prayed to Zeus and to the other Gods: Zeus and ye other Gods, grant that this my son may be, as I am, most glorious among the Trojans and a man of might, and greatly rule in Ilion. And may they say, as he returns from war, `He is far better than his father.’

""What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism," Kitto comments, "is not a sense of duty as we understand it...duty towards others: it is rather duty towards himself. He strives after that which we translate `virtue’ but is in Greek aretê, `excellence’ we shall have much to say about aretê. It runs through Greek life."

"There, Phædrus thinks, is a definition of Quality that had existed a thousand years before the dialecticians ever thought to put it to word-traps. Anyone who cannot understand this meaning without logical definiens and definendum and differentia is either lying or so out of touch with the common lot of humanity as to be unworthy of receiving any reply whatsoever. Phædrus is fascinated too by the description of the motive of "duty toward self " which is an almost exact translation of the Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes described as the "one" of the Hindus. Can the dharma of the Hindus and the "virtue" of the ancient Greeks be identical?

"Then Phædrus feels a tugging to read the passage again, and he does so and then what’s this?! "That which we translate `virtue' but is in Greek `excellence.'"

"Lightning hits!

"Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine "virtue." But aretê. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric. He has been doing it right all along.

"The rain has lifted enough so that we can see the horizon now, a sharp line demarking the light grey of the sky and the darker grey of the water.

"Kitto had more to say about this aretê of the ancient Greeks. "When we meet aretê in Plato," he said, "we translate it `virtue’ and consequently miss all the flavour of it. `Virtue,’ at least in modern English, is almost entirely a moral word; aretê, on the other hand, is used indifferently in all the categories, and simply means excellence."

Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing aretê.

Aretê implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency—or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.

"Phædrus remembered a line from Thoreau: "You never gain something but that you lose something." And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth...but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it.

"One can acquire some peace of mind from just watching that horizon. It's a geometer’s line...completely flat, steady and known. Perhaps it's the original line that gave rise to Euclid’s understanding of lineness; a reference line from which was derived the original calculations of the first astronomers that charted the stars.

"Phædrus knew, with the same mathematical assurance Poincaré had felt when he resolved the Fuchsian equations, that this Greek aretê was the missing piece that completed the pattern, but he read on now for completion.

"The halo around the heads of Plato and Socrates is now gone. He sees that they consistently are doing exactly that which they accuse the Sophists of doing—using emotionally persuasive language for the ulterior purpose of making the weaker argument, the case for dialectic, appear the stronger. We always condemn most in others, he thought, that which we most fear in ourselves.

"But why? Phædrus wondered. Why destroy aretê? And no sooner had he asked the question than the answer came to him. Plato hadn't tried to destroy aretê. He had encapsulated it; made a permanent, fixed Idea out of it; had converted it to a rigid, immobile Immortal Truth. He made aretê the Good, the highest form, the highest Idea of all. It was subordinate only to Truth itself, in a synthesis of all that had gone before.

"That was why the Quality that Phædrus had arrived at in the classroom had seemed so close to Plato’s Good. Plato’s Good was taken from the rhetoricians. Phædrus searched, but could find no previous cosmologists who had talked about the Good. That was from the Sophists. The difference was that Plato’s Good was a fixed and eternal and unmoving Idea, whereas for the rhetoricians it was not an Idea at all. The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.

"Why had Plato done this? Phædrus saw Plato’s philosophy as a result of two syntheses.

"The first synthesis tried to resolve differences between the Heraclitans and the followers of Parmenides. Both Cosmological schools upheld Immortal Truth. In order to win the battle for Truth in which aretê is subordinate, against his enemies who would teach aretê in which truth is subordinate, Plato must first resolve the internal conflict among the Truth-believers. To do this he says that Immortal Truth is not just change, as the followers of Heraclitus said. It is not just changeless being, as the followers of Parmenides said. Both these Immortal Truths coexist as Ideas, which are changeless, and Appearance, which changes. This is why Plato finds it necessary to separate, for example, "horseness" from "horse" and say that horseness is real and fixed and true and unmoving, while the horse is a mere, unimportant, transitory phenomenon. Horseness is pure Idea. The horse that one sees is a collection of changing Appearances, a horse that can flux and move around all it wants to and even die on the spot without disturbing horseness, which is the Immortal Principle and can go on forever in the path of the Gods of old.

"Plato’s second synthesis is the incorporation of the Sophists’ aretê into this dichotomy of Ideas and Appearance. He gives it the position of highest honor, subordinate only to Truth itself and the method by which Truth is arrived at, the dialectic. But in his attempt to unite the Good and the True by making the Good the highest Idea of all, Plato is nevertheless usurping aretê’s place with dialectically determined truth. Once the Good has been contained as a dialectical idea it is no trouble for another philosopher to come along and show by dialectical methods that aretê, the Good, can be more advantageously demoted to a lower position within a "true" order of things, more compatible with the inner workings of dialectic. Such a philosopher was not long in coming. His name was Aristotle.

"Aristotle felt that the mortal horse of Appearance which ate grass and took people places and gave birth to little horses deserved far more attention than Plato was giving it. He said that the horse is not mere Appearance. The Appearances cling to something which is independent of them and which, like Ideas, is unchanging. The "something" that Appearances cling to he named "substance." And at that moment, and not until that moment, our modern scientific understanding of reality was born.

"Under Aristotle the "Reader," whose knowledge of Trojan aretê seems conspicuously absent, forms and substances dominate all. The Good is a relatively minor branch of knowledge called ethics; reason, logic, knowledge are his primary concerns. Aretê is dead and science, logic and the University as we know it today have been given their founding charter: to find and invent an endless proliferation of forms about the substantive elements of the world and call these forms knowledge, and transmit these forms to future generations. As "the system."

"And rhetoric. Poor rhetoric, once "learning" itself, now becomes reduced to the teaching of mannerisms and forms, Aristotelian forms, for writing, as if these mattered. Five spelling errors, Phædrus remembered, or one error of sentence completeness, or three misplaced modifiers, or...it went on and on. Any of these was sufficient to inform a student that he did not know rhetoric. After all, that’s what rhetoric is, isn't it? Of course there's "empty rhetoric," that is, rhetoric that has emotional appeal without proper subservience to dialectical truth, but we don't want any of that, do we? That would make us like those liars and cheats and defilers of ancient Greece, the Sophists—remember them? We'll learn the Truth in our other academic courses, and then learn a little rhetoric so that we can write it nicely and impress our bosses who will advance us to higher positions.

"Forms and mannerisms—hated by the best, loved by the worst. Year after year, decade after decade of little front-row "readers," mimics with pretty smiles and neat pens, out to get their Aristotelian A’s while those who possess the real aretê sit silently in back of them wondering what is wrong with themselves that they cannot like this subject.

"And today in those few Universities that bother to teach classic ethics anymore, students, following the lead of Aristotle and Plato, endlessly play around with the question that in ancient Greece never needed to be asked: "What is the Good? And how do we define it? Since different people have defined it differently, how can we know there is any good? Some say the good is found in happiness, but how do we know what happiness is? And how can happiness be defined? Happiness and good are not objective terms. We cannot deal with them scientifically. And since they aren't objective they just exist in your mind. So if you want to be happy just change your mind. Ha-ha, ha-ha."

"Aristotelian ethics, Aristotelian definitions, Aristotelian logic, Aristotelian forms, Aristotelian substances, Aristotelian rhetoric, Aristotelian laughter...ha-ha, ha-ha.

"And the bones of the Sophists long ago turned to dust and what they said turned to dust with them and the dust was buried under the rubble of declining Athens through its fall and Macedonia through its decline and fall. Through the decline and death of ancient Rome and Byzantium and the Ottoman Empire and the modern states—buried so deep and with such ceremoniousness and such unction and such evil that only a madman centuries later could discover the clues needed to uncover them, and see with horror what had been done....

"The road has become so dark I have to turn on my headlight now to follow it through these mists and rain."

 

Ending on page 345 (at the start of Chapter 30) of the
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
paperback (Bantam).
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Doug Renselle
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Rev. 16Aug2008  PDR
(2Nov2001 rev - Add anchor to 'Kitto' reference.)
(26May2002 rev - Add anchor to first uses of "aretê.")
(9Jan2003 rev - Add Zenos_Paradice link.)
(20Dec2004 rev - Add Doug's bracketed Parmenides be careful qualifier.)
(8-10,12Dec2005 rev - Add ancients' nexi at page top.)
(7,25Mar2006 and 15-16May2006 rev - Typos. Repair 'Aretê' anchor. And do it again! Adjust colors.)
(8Oct2006 rev - Add page top WJS conjecture and heuristics text box.)
(12May2008 rev - Repair 'Arete' anchor to remove special 'e' with carat character.)
(16Aug2008 rev - Add 'quantum~partiality' comment near end of pink background text near page top.)
(27Oct2009 rev - Add 'motionless' link to blue update of our A Quantum Pendulum. Add gif smiley. Reset legacy markups.)