Wednesday, June 14, 2006
relativity, zen, sophists and Plato as the culprit
days ago, when i was organizing all the "mess" in my room, i came across my philosophical essays and stumbled on one of my essays for my epistemology class. the essay* is an inquiry on the distinction between relativity and subjectivity. in that essay, i made an account on Protagoras' doctrine of the relativistic truth, which states that "Man is the measure of all things". it was explained there that the doctrine could be paraphrased as "The truth is significant only because of the man that makes it"; implying that it is the man who creates, and is (thus) the source of truth - the truth that is made significant by virtue of being created by the man who created it. i thought that my account was right because anyone would most likely believe that the doctrine of relativity implies that truth, rather than discovered, is created (which actually makes it relative). but i realized that this account is somewhat mistaken. my previous understanding of the doctrine was flawed though my grade in the essay could make anyone think that i know Protagoras' theory very well. i got a grade of one, which actually made me feel guilty. i murdered Protagoras' philosophy and i still got an excellent grade. i have read Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. it actually took me about a year or maybe two to finish the novel. i found the introduction boring, though thought-provoking. actually, it is its being thought-provoking that made me finish reading it. anyhow, while i was reading my essay on relativity, i remembered Pirsig's account on Protagoras' doctrine. it was then that i realized that i know very little about his doctrine.
Man is the measure of all things. who taught us that it means that man is the creator of things (i.e. truth)? what makes this statement imply that Truth is relative? what makes the account on truth's relativity imply that truth is created? who taught us all these things? who taught us to kill Protagoras? if we are to examine the statement clearly, "measure" is not actually tantamount to "source". so according to this doctrine, man is not the source of all things. Nor (as Pirsig said) he is a passive observer of things, as materialists would tend to argue. Man is a participant in the creation of things; not the creator of things. Participation, yes, that is what man does in his act of measuring things.
but what is the reason for my wrong interpretation of the doctrine? it was hard to admit that i was mistaken but it was even harder to accept that my wrong interpretation was caused by my way of looking at things. i embraced analytic tradition so much because i grew up with it. that's what happens to you when you grew up with "science" and "mathematics" persons. you would also want to excel, to the point of wanting to discover new things, in those fields so that you would be considered great. and that's where the problem starts. the sciences & math that we have started with philosophy, i mean "western philosophy". the philosophy subjects that are taught in schools are based on western philosophy. (remember Whitehead's claim that all of philosophy is a footnote to Plato?) there seems to be something wrong with the history of western philosophy. i do not assent to all of Pirsig's arguments, but his claims make a lot of sense. it encourages us to re-examine our perspective as tainted by the ancient greek philosophers.
again, let me ask, who taught us to murder the philosophies of Sophists like Protagoras, and say that what they have written are just of rhetoric and not of philosophy? who taught us not to call Sophists as "philosophers"? i mean, we do not know them, nor read all of their works. what would people think if i say the culprit is Plato (whom all philosophies are footnotes to)? i am not saying that he is, but what if Pirsig was right in saying that he is?
"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 may sound interesting but as Pirsig said, it was insufficient. well, the battle between the Sophists and what we call "ancient greek philosophers" (Plato and Socrates) may be a battle between ideologies, not because (as what we are taught) Sophists are pseudo-philosophers. why call them pseudo-philosophers if we don't even bother to read their works? is it because they are being paid and because we are taught that "sophists are not philosophers"?
maybe Pirsig was right, it was just a battle between ideologies. Plato and Socrates fought for Truth and Knowledge, which they thought are independent of us. and that's when the dualistic perspective (subject-object distinction) started. we are just subjects who are mere discoverers of Truth. Sophists, on the other hand, were not after the discovery of any single truth. they are after the improvement of men, so they teach the Good. Plato may be just so threatened that the mankind may not strive to discover the Truth; a reason why he hated the so-called Sophists so much. and since the history of philosophy started with Plato and his colleagues and since all are just footnotes to him, we are much affected by this dualistic perspective. we tend to think that Truth is discovered, which actually is the reason why we inquire on things and discover their is-ness. but we find it hard to accept the idea that we are a only a participant (not the subject nor the object) in the creation of things as Protagoras have argued. i do not wish to argue that Plato's philopsophy was wrong and Protagoras' was right; i just want to re-examine our way of looking at things, which might be dogmatic. we tend to look at things as how we are taught by our old western teachers; we tend to inquire on things while looking at ourselves as a subject, and the world as the object. we find it hard to accept that both the world and us (man) are just participants (where there is no subject and no object) in the creation of things, i.e. of truth and etc. if we want to examine or inquire on certain philosophical problems, it would be good if we first examine our way of looking at things so that at least, we could know our biases and know how to deal with them.
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*the essay can be found at http://diorythoughts.blogspot.com
8:22 PM
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