[MD] Kant's Motorcycle

[ian glendinning]

DMB, Case,

DMB said
"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".

I think that's a pretty useful (pragmatic and synthetic) view.
Evolution of analogues. Must remember that.

Ian


On 11/18/06, Case <Case at ispots.com> wrote:
> dmb,
>
> Thanks for the excellent response.
>
> I could see Pirsig's description of a motorcycle mentally formed and shaped
> by a priori concepts, but he seemed to saying the concept of motorcycle is a
> priori. When he says:
>
> "We have in our minds a very real a priori motorcycle whose existence we
> have no reason to doubt, whose reality can be confirmed anytime."
>
> You read this "a priori motorcycle" to be the product of sense functions
> formatted by a priori concepts?
>
> If a priori concepts are part of our nature, how would you compare them to
> the archetypes of Jung's collective unconscious? Although he was a mystical
> kind of guy, Jung always talked about the collective unconscious as an
> inherited part of biological human nature. He saw the archetypes as patterns
> of thought we are predisposed to have knowledge of as part of our structure.
> Rather like categories of experience, would you say?
>
> I have been puzzled a couple of times by people saying Pirsig rejects Kant
> but I read it very much as you describe it. If this is the case I tend to
> see Pirsig more as Kepler refining the shape of orbits not starting a whole
> new revolution. Kant may offer SOM in the extreme from some vantage point
> but Pirsig has essentially turned "things in themselves" into Quality.
>
> "In the sense-representation of external things, the quality of space in
> which we intuit them is the merely subjective side of my representation of
> them (by which what the things are in themselves as objects is left quite
> open." Open (undefined)?
>
> Pirsig can be read as saying that Subjects and Objects arise from
> relationships among unknowable, indefinable "things in themselves". In this
> way experience captures these relationships in a temporal bubble. Very fifth
> dimensional. Once in this temporal memory bubble these relationships are
> replayed, compared with other such relationships categorized and fit
> together. The capturing and organizing of these relationships is a function
> of our biological systems. How they are categorized and shaped is in some
> measure determined by the nature of the biological system, hence a prioris
> and archetypes. What we call memory is the after image of experience.
> Conceptualization is the organization of the after images and consciousness
> it the evaluation of the resulting structure...
>
> Just sketching and stretching here. You know, playing with the tinker
> toys...
>
> Case
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------
> 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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