[MD] Kant's Motorcycle

Sun Nov 26 11:29:41 PST 2006

Case,

Just an observation. The motorcycle in Zen was what kept Pirsig sane during
his journey into the high country of the mind. We all have something to
anchor us to sanity and his was the maintenance. Plus it provided a
"breather" for the reader. The book was song form, with the philosophy as
the verse and the maintenance as the chorus. The statement, "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", confirms that the
maintenance is his touchstone to sanity. Complete doubt is insanity.

Micah

-----Original Message-----
From: moq_discuss-bounces at moqtalk.org
[mailto:moq_discuss-bounces at moqtalk.org]On Behalf Of Case
Sent: Saturday, November 18, 2006 12:27 PM
To: moq_discuss at moqtalk.org
Subject: Re: [MD] Kant's Motorcycle

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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