Afsoon asked:

I am an English Literature student in Iran. I am doing a research on Beckett's novels. In doing the
research I have ended up somewhere in the philosophic ideas. My question concerns the nature of
relativism in Pre-Socratic times and in Zen Buddhism:

In Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Phaedrus came out with the conclusion
that the Sophists believed in relativism of truth, and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle believed in
absolutism and tried to systematize the Truth. Therefore they came out with ideas such as
subject-object. Yet they were like Sophists in using rhetoric, but according to 'conventional
knowledge' (according to the definition given by Alan Watts).

On the other hand we know that relativism in the Pre-Socratic era had the worst consequences —
there are some who call it a crisis. They had some saying like, 'The wise man is the perfectly unjust
man'. Now how is it that the Sophists, went astray (if it is going astray and, if not, why?) yet Zen has
been known as the way of liberation for a long time? What is the difference between them? Do they
both believe in Dharma and relativism in the same way, and if they do why did such things happen in
Sophism?

============

You know, I've seen your question, off and on, for a while, and it never made any sense to me. But I
think I may understand what's going on. It seems to me that you're assuming that because Pirsig
used "Zen" in his title, that he is implying that there is a direct relationship to the philosophies he's
talking about and Zen. But that isn't true. There is, I believe, an indirectrelationship, which I'll briefly
discuss below, but there are no such direct interrelations as you speak of.

Now, however, and otherwise, you couldsay that what the title is referring to is a kind of non-rational,
wholistic approach to life and tasks (like motorcycle repair) that are usually considered and described
in rational, reductionistic terms; in terms of explicit directions and lists. What Pirsig is saying is that
Socrates, Plato, and that gang startedthe trend towards that kind of rationality, and the Sophists were
trying to counter that trend (or actually, Plato was trying to counter the holism of the Sophists). Pirsig
wanted to bring aesthetics, emotion, a wholistic approach into a rationality that he saw as the usual
stereotype of that: cold, bloodless, list-making and rule-following. So forget the Dharma stuff, except
very indirectly... the relation to Zen is not that specific.

So the Sophists went astray in the same way that all the wholistic approaches have gone astray: they
have not found a way to usethe techniques of rational thought, which work very effectivelyin
chopping up the world, analyzing the little bits, and reassembling them (with, usually, some pieces
missing), and still remaining holistically oriented. It's those missing pieces that the holists object to,
and sure, they've got a point. But they haven't come up with a viable alternative, which allows, say,
medicine to develop vaccines without using rational thought. I like vaccines, myself... and my car, and
warm synthetic clothes. All products of cold, analytic rationality, I'm afraid.

Of course I could now go into my anti-anti-science rant, but I won't. I'll just say that given that we don't
want to live like primitive hunter-gatherers (which I, for one, don't — not to mention that the world
doesn't have the resources to support everyone living that way, without majorpopulation reduction),
we're going to use the methods and products of rationality... and the holists have yet to figure out how
to do boththat and holism.

Steven Ravett Brown