Robert Pirsig - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Plato’s second synthesis is the incorporation of the Sophists’ arete 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 arete’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 arete, 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 arete 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. Arete 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 arete 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.

At Arcata we enter a small diner, cold and wet, and eat chili and beans and drink coffee.

Then we are back on the road again, freeway now, fast and wet. We’ll go to within an easy day’s distance from San Francisco and then stop.

The freeway picks up strange reflections in the rain from oncoming lights across the median. The rain hits like pellets against the bubble, which refracts the lights in strange circular and then semicircular waves as they go by. Twentieth century. It’s all around us now, this twentieth century. Time to finish this twentieth-century odyssey of Phædrus and be done with it.

The next time the class in Ideas and Methods 251, Rhetoric, met at the large round table in South Chicago, a department secretary announced that the Professor of Philosophy was ill. The following week he was still ill. The somewhat bewildered remnants of the class, which had dwindled to a third of its size, went on their own across the street for coffee.

At the coffee table a student whom Phædrus had marked as bright but intellectually snobbish said, “I consider this one of the most unpleasant classes I have ever been in.” He seemed to look down on Phædrus with womanish peevishness as a spoiler of what should have been a nice experience.

“I thoroughly agree”, Phædrus said. He waited for some sort of attack, but it didn’t come.

The other students seemed to sense that Phædrus was the cause of all this but they had nothing to go on. Then an older woman at the other end of the coffee table asked why he was attending the class.

“I’m in the process of trying to discover that”, Phædrus said.

“Do you attend full-time?” she asked.

“No, I teach full-time at Navy Pier.”

“What do you teach?”

“Rhetoric.”

She stopped talking and everyone at the table looked at him and became silent.

November wore on. The leaves, which had turned a beautiful sunlit orange in October, fell from the trees, leaving barren branches to meet the cold winds from the north. A first snow fell, then melted, and a drab city waited for winter to come.

In the Professor of Philosophy’s absence, another Platonic dialogue had been assigned. Its title was Phædrus, which meant nothing to our Phædrus since he didn’t call himself by that name. The Greek Phædrus is not a Sophist but a young orator who is a foil for Socrates in this dialogue, which is about the nature of love and the possibility of philosophic rhetoric. Phædrus doesn’t appear to be very bright, and has an awful sense of rhetorical quality, since he quotes from memory a really bad speech by the orator Lysias. But one soon learns that this bad speech is simply a setup, an easy act for Socrates to follow with a much better speech of his own, and following that with a still better speech, one of the finest in all the Dialogues of Plato.

Beyond that, the only remarkable thing about Phædrus is his personality. Plato often names Socrates’ foils for characteristics of their personality. A young, overtalkative, innocent and good-natured foil in the Gorgias is named Polus, which is Greek for “colt.” Phædrus’ personality is different from this. He is unallied to any particular group. He prefers the solitude of the country to the city. He is aggressive to the point of being dangerous. At one point he threatens Socrates with violence. Phædrus, in Greek, means “wolf.” In this dialogue he is carried away by Socrates’ discourse on love and is tamed.