Ron said:
When someone makes the blanket statement "it's all an analogy" with all the
finality of a question well answered, inquiring minds aren't as easily
satisfied. Because those who are concerned with value need more of an
explanation of just what one means by "analogy" for it posesses several
meanings. ..But then again, smug quips of finality are all some here seek.
dmb says:
Marsha uses the phrase as a smug way to evade every question but Pirsig is
neither smug nor evasive. He uses "analogies" to describe the world as we
understand it, to describe the conceptual world, to describe all the static
patterns we use to make sense of experience. As he explained it to the faculty
in Bozeman....
"In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our
environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and
heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy,
engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And
they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing
that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into
an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality.
Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create
the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it."
To understand the world as an inherited pile of analogies is to understand that
we created this world, that we carved it out, that it is far more plastic and
malleable than the realists can imagine. When the oceans, earth, and sky are
understood as analogies, as concepts, then the world of understanding looses
its foundational status, its ontological primacy and is instead seen as an
elaborate set of human concepts.
The explanation to the faculty in Bozeman (above) is prior to the scenes in the
Chicago classroom, where Phaedrus says, "Of course it's an analogy. Everything
is an analogy. But the dialecticians don't know that." (Thanks, Arlo.) His
reply to the Chairman ("This entire description is just an analogy.") connects
quite neatly with his earlier explanation of the world as "an invention" made
up of "many marvelous analogues". And maybe it goes without saying but the
scope and reach of this claim is consistent, simple, and clear. In Bozeman he
says, "All of it. Every last bit of it." And in Chicago he says, "Everything is
an analogy."
Of course, none of this can be said about DQ itself. The concepts and ideas
that make up the MOQ are all analogies, just like everything else, but the
primary empirical reality itself is not an analogy, but the source of all
analogues, of all static patterns.
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