[MD] Taking off the glasses

[david buchanan]

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.