Exactly--which is still my point: I've never found maya a useful concept once 
one takes on, say, Pirsig's less paradoxical point that it's analogies upon 
analogies.  "Illusion" and "fiction," it seems to me, obscures the point 
philosophers of our stripe want to make to regular folk who do think "illusion" 
means "fake" and "fiction" "made up."

As a matter of presentational strategy, which is to say rhetoric (and since 
we're Pirsigians, this is to say quite a bit), I've found it useful to avoid 
putting my point against realists like Derrida did: il n'y pas d'hors-texte.  
Because "there's nothing outside the text" sounds weird and silly.  Derrida's 
real point is better described from the better translation of that line: 
"there's no outside-text."  The oddity of the term, "outside-text," with it's 
hyphen makes it look more like the insider's jargon in should be taken for: 
Derrida was talking about a specific kind of philosophical conception of 
reality.

In fact, I even avoid putting the point like Sellars did these days: "all 
awareness is a linguistic affair."  Because that slogan confuses 
retro-pragmatists who don't see it as making the same tactical move in an 
adjacent philosophical game as the slogan "experience is reality."  But really, 
I think, maya-lovers, Pirsig, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Sellars, and James 
are all saying pretty much the same thing on this score.

Matt

> Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2010 15:08:02 -0800
> From: [email protected]
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [MD] continental and analytic philosophy
> 
> hey matt,
> reminds me of the old hindu or buddhist quote about maya - similar lines - a 
> student asking about whether a stampeding elephant is essentially illusory - 
> the reply being yes but you had still better get out of the way because you 
> are part of the same illusion.
> 
> you don't make up the fiction of the world. to think you make it up is SOM. 
> the subject and object are both abstracted fictions. 
> 
> yes the world is a fiction but that is not to say unreal - quite the opposite.
                                          
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