[MD] Kant's Motorcycle

[david buchanan]

Case said:
What this leaves out altogether is the things in themselves. Pirsig may as 
you say dismiss these, I think he assumes them. But I can not escape the 
idea that my sensations are OF something. That in Maya there is a dream OF 
something. That although reality could be shaped in other ways it is always 
shaped some way and this is a shape OF something.

dmb says:
I know. It's not easy to escape this idea. But I'd like to convince you that 
Radical Empiricism is aimed at exactly that. Its a way out of the whole 
Kantian problem. As David Hildebrand succinctly puts it, "Realists and 
idealists assume that subject and object are discrete and then debate which 
term deserves first rank" (27). There were endless debates about how to 
bridge the gap between subjective experience and the objective world, about 
how they related to each other. And all this hard implications for our 
notions of what's real and true. In this case, Hildebrand is talking about 
the late Victorian era, when James and Dewey were working. As I understand 
it this Kantian problem more or less dictated the terms of the debate, no 
matter which side of the street you were working. Despite all the 
disagreements between them, the realist and idealist were both operating 
with the assumptions of a subject/object metaphysic. So William James' 
radical empiricism was invented as a response to that. There is a collection 
of papers by William James called Essays in Radical Empiricism, the first of 
which was published in an academic journal in 1904. Its called "Does 
'Consciousness' Exist?", which is actually a lot more fun to read than you 
might imagine. He concludes it like this...

"The 'I think" which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is 
the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them. There are other internal 
facts besides breathing.., and these increase the assets of 'consciousness,' 
so far as the latter is subject to immediate perceptions; but breathe, which 
was ever the original of 'spirit,' breath moving outwards, between the 
glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which 
philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness. 
THAT ENTITY IS FICTITIOUS, WHILE THOUGHTS IN THE CONCRETE ARE FULLY REAL. 
BUT THOUGHTS IN THE CONCRETE ARE MADE OF THE SAME STUFF AS THINGS ARE" (37).

(The emphasis is indicated by italics in the original. It only seems like 
shouting here because I can't italicize my font and can't think of a better 
way than caps.)

Anyway, this is the Victorian way of saying that philosophers have invented 
entities out of hot air. The consciousness, the Kantian "I think" is the 
subjective self we all know from common sense. This is the framework in 
which the Positivist theory of correspondence is concieved. This basic idea 
is also called representationalism. The scientific idea of objective 
knowledge is a version of these, so that "the correct" view of reality is 
one where the subjective idea matches the "real" objective world. I usually 
imagine this in terms of the way an image can be captured on film. I'm sure 
the basic idea of a self in the world goes way back, but James and Dewey 
were opposed to moves that turned it into a metaphysical entity. Here is 
Hildebrand again...

"In contrast to rationalist, empiricist, and Kantian traditon, Dewey is 
unwilling to stipulate that nature is ultimately mind or matter; nor will he 
stipulate that whatever nature is, we can never know it. No transcendental 
gaps are posited; we ARE OF NATURE, LIVE WITH NATURE. Yet experience shows 
that we individuate our selves from nature, and this is justified by regular 
encounters with the surprising, novel and recalcitrant. Inquiries into these 
features often identify patterns that may fruitfully be used to guide 
experience. ..surprises never cease, and novelty is admitted as a genuine 
feature of nature, not merely the subjective or naive reaction of finite 
minds.
In "The Quest for Certainty" Dewey characterizes his philosophy as effecting 
a Copernican revolution, this time upon Kant himself" (60).

"While a situaltion in which knowing takes pace may be individual and 
perspectival, no subjectivism looms here because we experience a continuity 
between knower and known: 'Habits enter into the CONSTITUTION of the 
situation; they are IN AND OF it, not, so far as it is concerned, something 
outside of it" (Dewey). Realist and idealist assume that subject and object 
are discrete and then deate which term is deserves first rank. Dewey assumes 
that what is primary is a whole situation - 'subject' and 'object' have no a 
priori, atomistic existence but are themselves DERIVED from situations to 
serve certain purposes, usually philosophical. Does the distinction between 
subject and object collapse all together in Dewey's view? Yes, if the 
distinction is supposed to be absolute or transcendental. No, if the 
distinction is particularized to function in unique and existential 
inquiries" (27).

Dewey and James were very close on this view. Dewey's "immediate empiricism" 
and the "radical empiricism" of William James may not be identical, but 
agree that the subject-object metaphysic is the cause of the gap between 
ourselves and the world. They don't want to say that its easy and natural 
cross this epistemic gap or that its impossible to cross it. (They don't 
call him Kan't for nothing.) They don't want to build a new bridge between 
us and the things in themselves or discover the reality behind its 
appearance. They are saying that there is no such gap. They're saying that 
the assumptions of SOM have created the gap and that these assumption are a 
fiction, are made of hot air. Here is James again in the first essay on 
radical empiricism...

"As 'subjective' we say that the esperience represent; as 'objective' it is 
represented. What represent and what is represented is here numerically the 
same; but we must remember that no dualism of being represented and 
representing resies in the experience PER SE. In its pure state, or when 
isolated, there is no self-splitting of it into consciousness and what the 
consciousness is 'of'. Its subjectivity and objectivity are functional 
attributes soley, realized only when the experience is 'taken,' i.e., 
talked-of, twice, considered along with its tow differing contexts 
respectively, by a new retrospective experience, of which that whole past 
complication now orms the fresh content.
The instant field of the present is at all times what I call the 'pure' 
experience. It is only virtually or potentially either object or subject as 
yet" (23).

"If one were to make and evolutionary construction of how a lot of 
originally chaotic pure experiences became gradually differentiated into an 
orderly inner and outer world, the whole theory would turn upon one's 
success in explaining how or why the quality of an experience, once active, 
could become less so, and, from being and energetic attribute in some cases, 
elsewhere lapse into the status of an inert or merely internal 'nature.' 
This would be the 'evolution' of the psychical from the bosom of the 
physical, in which the esthetic, moral and otherwise emotional experiences 
woud represent a halfway stage" (35-36).

I suspect Robert Pirsig's MOQ is the sort of thing James was hoping for 
there. It seems James is asking for an evolutionary accout of the static 
patterns that emerge from pure experience, and that pure experience is the 
pre-intellectual experience Pirsig calls Dynamic quality. And he blames the 
subject-object metaphysic for excluding the "esthetic, moral and otherwise 
emotional" from our account of "reality". (99 LILA)

To be continued...

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