Steve said:
The problem is not a matter of being our of touch with reality but of needing
better concepts.
dmb says:
I think we need better concepts precisely because SOM creates a problem of
being out of touch.
Steve said:
...My point is that SOM itself is also built right into the glasses metaphor.
That metaphor implies what Pirsig wants to reject, i.e. that reality is what it
is regardless of what we think about it. ...Pirsig pushed the metaphor too far
in mentioning being able to take off the glasses altogether.
dmb says:
Pirsig's metaphor implies what he want to reject? I think that accusation is
both outrageous and ridiculous. The glasses metaphor is situated in a context
where Pirsig denies all those implications quite explicitly. In order for your
accusation to be true, Pirsig would have to be pretty oblivious to the meaning
of his own words. It would be insulting if it weren't so implausible.
As a matter of fact, the analogy adds a layer to the "ocular metaphors" that
concern Rorty fans like you and Matt. Pirsig's metaphor says that we don't
simply peer out at reality as it's given, that we see only what the culture
pre-disposes us to see, as in Pirsig's correction of Descartes. ""If Descartes
had said, "The seventeenth century French culture exists, therefore I think,
therefore I am," he would have been correct." Unlike SOM's claims about
objective reality and the corresponding objective truth, Pirsig's analogy says
that we are suspended in language.
You are reading Pirsig's anti-SOM metaphor as a SOM metaphor. This is sort of
thing I was talking about when I said you and Matt have a habit of using
Rorty's anti-Platonism against Pirsig's anti-Platonism. The glasses metaphor
says that the so-called subjective self and the so-called objective reality is
actually within the glasses, is an interpretation of reality rather than the
starting point of reality. This was one of my main points in answering Matt
earlier today.
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