[MD] Kant's Motorcycle

[david buchanan]

Case and all MOQers:

This thread is helping me to sort out some quotes for a paper I'm working 
on. I believe it would be of interest to any MOQer. It might look like I'm 
going to repeat myself here, but hopefully Case's comments are the only part 
that's been repeated.

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:
Eugene Taylor and Robert Wozniak wrote an introduction to a book called 
"Pure Experience, the Response to William James". (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 
1996) On the first page they explain that, "The goal of this volume is to 
introduce James's doctrine of 'pure experience' and illustrate the extent to 
which the basic import of his ideas was sidestepped by his contemporaries." 
On the last page they conclude that, "The fact was, nothing in their history 
had prepared Western philosophers and psychologists for radical empiricism. 
As the reaction to his writing showed, it is exceptionally difficcult to 
suspend our logical categories and see the immediate moment sorn of our 
labels of it. ...Yet we have in James's racical empiricism a position that 
goes right to the heart of the Western viewpoint, exposing its limits. In 
this he resembles not chaos and anarchy, as some of his rationalist critics 
might have supposed, but more the position in Western philsophy of European 
existentialism and phenomenology, or the metaphysics of Far Eastern 
psychology; the Upanishadic and the Hindu texts: the Theravada Buddhist 
image of moment consciousness as a string of pearls: the Mahayana Buddhist 
doctrine of co-dependent origination (pratityasammutpada); or Zen Suchness 
(tathata)."

Compare that to Pirsig's descriptions on page 98-99 of Lila...

"The idea that values create objects gets less and less weird as you get 
used to it. Modern Physics on the other hand gets more and more weird as you 
get into it and indicatons are that this weirdness will increase. In either 
case, however, weirdness isn't the test of truth. As Einstein said, common 
sense - non-weirdness - is just a bundle of prejudices acquired before the 
age of eighteen."

Pirsig describes James' weird doctrine on page 364-5...

"The second of James' two main systems of philosophy, whci he said was 
independent of pragmatism, was his RADICAL EMPIRICISM. By this he meant that 
subjects and objects were not the starting points of experience. Subjects 
and objects are secondary. They are concepts derived from something more 
fundamental which he described as 'the immediate flux of life which 
furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual 
categories'. In this basic flux of experience, the distinctions of 
reflective thought, such as those between consciousness and content, subject 
and object, mind and matter, have not yet emerged in the forms which we make 
them. Pure experience cannot be called either physical or psychical: it 
logically precedes this distinction."

Kant and Hegel dominated the philosophical context in which James was 
working, but like Pirsig, traces the subject-object dualism back to the 
ancient Greeks. On page 11 of his first essay, James says mind and matter 
have been with us, "from Democritus's time downward". Descrates and Locke 
have been implicated in this crime along with other Modern philosophers. I 
guess they should be considered specific kinds of SOM, which is more 
pervasive than any particular case. Its more like the metaphysical framework 
in which they all thought. On pages 315-16 of ZAMM Pirsig writes,..

"Thus, in cultures whose ancestry includes ancient Greece, one invariably 
finds a strong subject-object differentiation because the grammar of the old 
Greek mythos presumed a sharp natural division of subject and predicates. In 
cultures such as the Chinese, where subject-predicate relationships are not 
rigidly defined by grammar, one finds a corresponding absence of rigid 
subject-object philosophy."

All this talk about the origins and ubiquity of the subject-object 
metaphysic is meant to illustrate why it is that radical empiricism strikes 
us as so weird, so uncommon sensical. It explains why James' contemporaries 
sidestepped this part of his work and I think this is why Rorty thinks so 
little of it.

Also in that first essay, James explains that thoughts and things are both 
derived from pure experience, how they are both made of the same stuff... 
page 4

"My thesis is that if we start with the supposition that there is only one 
primal stuff or material in the world, a stuff of which everyting is 
composed, and if we call that suff 'pure experience' (Pirsig calls it 
Dynamic Quality and the primary empirical reality), then knowing can easily 
be explained as a particular sort of relation towards one antoher into which 
portioan of pure experience may enter. The relation itself is a part of pure 
experience; (unlike causality) one of its 'terms' becomes the subject or 
bearer of the knowledge, the knower, the other becomes the object known. 
This will need much explanation before it can be understood."

On page 27 James voices a "formidable" objection and offers a reply. If 
thoughts and things are drawn from the same stuff, then how is it that they 
seem so different to us? The fictional objector says, "As thing, ehe 
experience is extended; as thought, it occupies no space or place. As thing, 
it is red hard heavy; but who ever heard of a red, hard or heavy thought?" 
(pp 27-8). But, James points out, thoughts are derived from aesthetic 
qualities too, from the same collective of "sensible natures" (27).

"For instance, they are natural and easy or laboriuos. They are beautiful, 
happy, intense, interesting, wise, idiotic, focal, matginal, insipid, 
confused, vague, precise, rational, casual, general, particular and many 
things besides." (29)

"The two worlds differ, not by the presence or absence of extension, but by 
the relations of the extensions which in both worlds exist" (31).

"Mental knives may be sharp, but they wont cut real wood. Mental triangles 
may be pointed, but their points won't wound. With 'real' objects, on the 
contrary,, consequences always accrue; and thus real experinces get sifted 
from the mental ones, the things from our thoughts of them, fanciful or 
true, and precipitated together as the stable parts of the whole 
experience-chaos, under the name of the physical world" (33).

This explantion, I think, really illlustrates why it makes sense for Pirsig 
to describe the world of pure experience as an undifferentiated aesthetic 
continuum, as Northrop called it. Thoughts and things, then, are the 
differentiations, the static patterns of interpretation which have been 
handed down to us from the ancients. This is how it can be that we so 
habitually interpret experience in terms of subjects and objects. Our 
culture, language, our mythos contains that assumption and we absorb it in 
the process of acquiring language during childhood.

Thanks.
dmb

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