Frank
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Rhetoric, 2; Dialectic, 0.
"And from the dialectic come the forms," Phasdrus continues, "and from. — " But the Chairman cuts it off. He sees it cannot go his way and dismisses it. He shouldn't have cut it off, Phasdrus thinks to himself. Were he a real Truth-seeker and not a propagandist for a particular point of view he would not. He might learn something. Once it's stated that "the dialectic comes before anything else," this statement itself becomes a dialectical entity, subject to dialectical question.
Phasdrus would have asked. What evidence do we have that the dialectical question-and-answer method of arriving at truth comes before anything else? We have none whatsoever. And when the statement is isolated and itself subject to scrutiny it becomes patently ridiculous. Here is this dialectic, like Newton’s law of gravity, just sitting by itself in the middle of nowhere, giving birth to the universe, hey? It’s asinine.
Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and the myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.
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