[MD] Kant's Motorcycle

[Case]

First can we please quit talking about a priori motorcycles. This is the
gnawing little irritation that got me started on this. If by "a priori
motorcycle" Pirsig just means "Kant's Scooter", fine. I am willing to cut
him some slack, artistic license. But I can find nothing that would indicate
this is a correct what to use the term in an explanation of Kant. The
fundamental concepts which Kant calls a priori are like space and time. We
can not have an idea that does not include or imply space and time. This is
why cosmology gives us fits. It is impossible to imagine what there was
before the beginning. Or the edge of space, beyond which there is no more
spaces. 

I think Kant in his pre-everything-interesting sort of way, is talking about
the biological functions inherent in our nature. So I would put him the same
camp as Jung and Freud attempting to identify the structure of thought from
the inside.

Kant was attempting to resolve the dualism of his time which was essentially
SoM. The Rationalist held that Subjects are the fundamental stuff.
Empiricists claimed knowledge is OF Objects known through the senses. Kant
resolved the dualism by claiming that while we do have senses we format
their input. This act of formatting or perception is a how we construct
reality. He claims on the one hand that all we can really know about is what
we can format but that something unknowable is being formatted.

It seems to me what Pirsig is after is this formatting process. Experience
is where sensation arrives and is processed. Out of this process come
subjects and objects, in fact all distinction. Experience is where the
friction is. It is reality smeared. Pasta shapes in six dimensions. Leave it
to a German to make that seem boring and ugly.

Here is how I described it to Scott Roberts last year:

"I would say that the brain is a tabla rasa 
except that unlike slate it's texture is not always smooth or even flat.  
In places you have to use a special marker.  
If the light is not just right, in some places you can't read what's
written.  
Some places are self luminescent.  
It almost always, changes form when you stimulate it.    
 
But it starts out clean."

I think Pirsig is just making a bobber out of Kant's scooter. Where Kant
sees a priori moral laws Pirsig sees Value. That "know it when you see it"
groove. Kant's idea that duty and conscience are part of human nature seem
true enough to me. In large measure I share Kant's world view but I am open
to the idea that these might not be central to someone with a different
world view. But I think Jung and Campbell were looking for structures of
thought. That is, the framework inherent in the nature of the tabla rasa. 

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.