[MD] Kant's Motorcycle

[david buchanan]

Case said (in the "Flying Spagetti Monsters" thread):
...this reminds of something that has bothered me for sometime. Pirsig is 
said to have rejected Kant. But the only actual reason I can find for saying 
that is when he says Kant's ethics are ugly. Which seems a kind of "Yo' 
Mama" dismissal. Also his explanation of Kant, using the example of an a 
priori motorcycle has always bothered me. I understand a priori concepts to 
be hardwiring. That is space, time substance etc. are intrinsic to the way 
we think. As someone I read described it, this is how we "format" reality. 
Kant was avoiding Hume's problems and the problems of pure empiricism by 
saying that our definition of reality is a function of how the mysterious 
"things in themselves" register and are
recorded by us.

dmb says:
The a priori motorcycle is used to illustrate the difference between Hume 
and Kant. The copernican revolution that Kant used against Hume is pretty 
much as you've described it. The logic of Hume's pure empiricism led to 
solipism and so Kant introduced the notion that human nature equips us with 
certain conceptual categories which shape and organize sense data. Kant was 
trying to save empirica' reason. In chapter 11 of ZAMM Pirsig quotes Kant 
making this distinction in his brand of empiricism. "But though all 
knowledge begins WITH experience, it doesn't follow that it arises OUT OF 
experience" (116). Kant said that unless we apply the a priori concepts like 
time and space, the incoming sense data will be incomprehensible. Thus Kant 
shifted the center from the objects experienced to the nature of the 
experiencer's mind.

I don't think that Pirsig rejects this, exactly, but preforms a similar, but 
even more radical copernican revolution of his own. This discussion of Kant, 
he says, is just a way to prepare the reader for the epistemological moves 
that Phaedrus makes later. This is thee move. This is not just about Kant or 
Hume, but the most basic assumptions they both shared. He says that 
experience is not caused by the subject or the objective world or the 
interactions between them. Instead, both of those are caused by experience. 
That's what it means to say that Quality is the parent of subjects and 
objects.

As I understand it, the ugliness of Kant's ethics is unrelated to these core 
issues of empiricism.

Case said:
I have found references to the synthetic a priori which may be what Pirsig 
is talking about with the a priori motorcycle but if anyone can elaborate I 
would find it helpful. Also where does Pirsig give a reason for abandoning 
Kant beyond saying that he is ugly?

dmb says;
Check out the last few pages of chapter 11. I think you'll see he's using it 
to get at the difference between Hume and Kant. He says that this a priori 
mototcycle, like substance itself, is something we believe for the sake of 
convenience. Its a way to organize the sense data and it works. I think 
Pirsig is planting the seeds of doubt with respect to the assumptions of SOM 
in general and scientific materialism in particular. And then in Lila he 
rolls the radical empiricism of William James, which is a more mainstream, 
academically acceptable way to talk about this same idea.

And it seems to me that Pirsig puts the evolution of analogues in the place 
of Kant's categories so that concepts like space and time aren't quite so 
permanent or universal, even if they are especially common and persistant. 
This shift helps Pirsig make the case that notions like "substance" can be 
traced back and seen as inventions, as convenient analogies for what we 
experience rather than what's "real".

Thanks.
dmb

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