i think both of those references are exactly appropriate, because guys like Phillip and Bobby Fischer manifested perfectly the schizophrenia that results from the extreme egocentrism of Descartes and Plato… Dick expresses the dislocation experienced by a completely disembodied ego in everything he says and writes… his identity has no reference points around him, so it is free to associate with whatever images appear in his head… he is free to assume that everything around him is an illusion of some kind…
I mean if we go wide enough, Descartes was talking about it in 1641
There’s also Plato’s Cave.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave
i think both of those references are exactly appropriate, because guys like Phillip and Bobby Fischer manifested perfectly the schizophrenia that results from the extreme egocentrism of Descartes and Plato… Dick expresses the dislocation experienced by a completely disembodied ego in everything he says and writes… his identity has no reference points around him, so it is free to associate with whatever images appear in his head… he is free to assume that everything around him is an illusion of some kind…
Maybe, but I also think Dick was very well-read and probably was familiar with Plato’s analogy of the cave if not Descartes as well.
I don’t think we can blame Dick’s schizophrenia on having read The Cave.
I think you would have been closer to the truth if you had blamed it on the guilt he carried from having murdered his twin sister in utero.