[MD] Analogy..what do we mean?

[david buchanan]

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.