Posted by T. T. W. on August 10, 1999 at 03:28:53:
In Reply to: Help me with absolutism vs. relativism posted by Ashleigh on March 14, 1998 at 14:09:31:
: I need info on Socrates and Plato's belief in absolute truth and the sophists belief in relativism. If you could tell me where to look for info I would appreciate it.
I do not believe that characterization holds water.
The Ideal Forms of Socrates and the Rhetoricized wisdom of the sophists are secret lovers. They both love truth, and as such they both need the other to discover it. One world. The secret affair between them is revealed in this way. If you can see the forest you cannot be in it. If you see only the side of truth that is unchanging, eternal, absolute, then you are polarized, myopic. Truth is, without contradiction
except in the world of 'logic' (and even there Einstein's friend Godel proved mathematically that there are 'truths' that can not be proved to be so-Scientific American, June 1999, page76-81)
BOTH ABSOLUTE AND RELATIVE. I would suggest to you that Socrates WAS a Sophist. And That the sophists recognized the SEEMINGLY dual nature of truth, and as Pirsig so wonderfully demonstrated in ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE, their use of rhetoric to teach this Absolute-Relativity (my term) is because of the necessity
of having to somehow 'trick' our perceptions into
seeing the underlying unity of the apparent dualism. Plato/Socrates' Ideal forms is an rhetorical image that POINTS TO the Truth and must be understood in the light a truth that cannot be grasped dialectically without missing the other half of it. I find it useful to visualize this in the following way:pi, is the
relation between the center of a circle as expressed in it's radius, and it's cirference,
which corrollates to the approach to truth of dialectics, logic; phi, epitomised in the 'Golden Section" upon which the Parthenon was designed,
is expressed in an spiral that starts in the center and revolves outward to infinity- the truth as position somewhere on that infinite spiral,relative, rhetorical.This image then merges
the two symbols for these polarities into one with
the symbol for pi inside the symbol for phi, producing a new symbol for what I call Absolute-Relativity. Not really the answer you were looking for?
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