20220202-02

… the Sophists, who taught the art of rhetoric, played a significant role in the demise of the Polis, argues Kitto in The Greeks… for Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mainteancne, the Sophists are the vanquished heroes… they are the ones teaching Quality (Virtue, Excellence)… Kitto tells us they were instrumental in the demise of the polis, through which the Greek concept of aretê (admired by Pirsig) was inculcated into the people as a whole… there could not be two more different ideas of the impact of the Sophists on subsequent Greek culture and Western civilization… and Pirsig read The Greeks…

From The Greeks, Kitto, H

… i have been reading this book to follow up on thoughts developed in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance… the principal idea of ZAMM is that there was a time when the Greeks were centered on “Quality,” as Pirsig would put it, or “Virtue,” as we might phrase it, or “Excellence,” as the Greeks put it through their word Aretê… Pirsig argues that there was a place in time when the Greeks stopped striving for Aretê… this was when the Sophists came on the scene… Pirsig, i think, believes the Sophists were the last to honor and teach Quality, Virtue, Excellence… reading ahead, i currently believe that Kitto thinks the Sophists were the ones who robbed the Greeks of their commonly understood and expressed sense of Aretê… they did this because they were itinerant teachers for hire, and the wealthy hired them to give themselves and their children an advantage in the world, which began to separate the Polis into those who could afford ‘higher’ education and those who could not and the commonly held concept of Aretê was lost… in this passage, Kitto speculates what might be if our Polis had something akin to Homer, The Iliad, and The Odyssey to base their common understanding of Virtue, Excellence and Quality on…

It is an interesting, though idle, speculation, what would be the effect on us if all our reformers, revolutionaries, planners, politicians and life-arrangers in general were soaked in Homer from their youth up, like the Greeks. They might realize that on the happy day when there is a refrigerator in every home, and two in none, when we all have the opportunity of working for the common good (whatever that is), when Common Man (whoever he is) is triumphant, though not improved – that men will still come and go like the generations of leaves in the forest; that he will still be weak, and the gods strong and incalculable; that the quality of a man matters more than his achievement; that violence and recklessness will still lead to disaster, and that this will fall on the innocent as well as on the guilty. The Greeks were fortunate in possessing Homer, and wise in using him as they did.¹

… on this point, i think Pirsig is in agreement…