Abstract

Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine “virtue.” But aretê. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dialectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric. It’s been slightly less than a half century since Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance exploded on an unsuspecting American public. Ostensibly the story about a father and son’s motorcycle trip across the American Northwest, as their journey unfolds, that story becomes only the narrative...