From Mike Cooper
Talking of the “selves” we create as “useful fictions”, Simon Blackburn says: “The awkward, lurking question of who is the author (and who the audience) of these stories is best left a little vague,” (12 August, p 48). This strikes me as an intellectual cop-out.
Wouldn’t we do better to admit that not only do we “not need to understand ourselves theoretically to get on in the world”, we can’t? What would be the empirical basis of such a theory, beyond an imagination imagining an imagination?
Wouldn’t an admission that we are out of our depth here be a better curb to any mayhem that might arise from our inevitable misunderstandings than leaving the question “a little vague”?
Berkeley, California, US
