Krimel asked: Do you seriously think calling Kant ugly is an argument? dmb says:It's not the whole argument, of course, but it's a very important phase in his overall project. (He admires Kant's skill despite the fact that he disagrees with him.) Ironically, the ugliness he finds in it is directly related to Kant's logical rigor. In that sense he was one of the squarest squares of all time. The central idea in Kant's aesthetic theory can be summed up in the phrase "disinterested contemplation". The value of a work of art, he thought, could best be determined by putting aside one's personal feelings. It shouldn't be evaluated in terms of what we like and don't like, he thought. If we love a painting because it depicts something we love, that's bad. If it inspires desire for the things depicted, that's just a kind of pornography even if its just a lovely landscape where we'd like to be. Art should have no practical purpose. It should inform or persuade because then it would merely be propaganda. You know, art for art's sake. You see this attitude in abstract art, where the artists attempt to produce a purely aesthetic canvass of shapes and colors that resemble no known objects. (Here I think of Kandinski or maybe even Jackson Pollack.) And there was even a kind of objectivity to his theory. If a rose really is beautiful, then everyone should agree that it is beautiful. You know, beauty is a property of the thing itself. For Pirsig, I suppose, this sort of attitude is effectively a way to drain the quality out of aesthetic experience. And since Quality is what you know before you know anything else, a theory like this will tend to distort things pretty badly. As I understand it, things like rationality and logic have their own aesthetic qualities. That square side has its own kind of austere beauty. Naked women have another kind. The fine arts can't rightly be measured by those other standards, but that doesn't mean those other standards don't count. I think this is what Pirsig is getting at in saying "Quality was a cleavage term". We find Quality on the classical side, the square side, as well as the romantic, humanistic side. Its almost as if Kant took the romance out of beauty, wanted it to be some kind of "fact". (His theory of morality does the same kind of thing. You're supposed to do what's "right" universally and rationally no matter what the consequences are for you personally.) That's what's so ugly about his hyper-rationality. It's a kind of inhuman machine. And this attitude is still detectable among today's neo-Kantians. Habermas, for example, only barely admits personal feelings into the process of rational discourse about law and morality and basically makes a case that people can only be moral if they're rational first. That's not a crazy idea, but its increasingly clear to me that morality is primarily an intuitive, instinctual thing that is very much tangled up with feelings and emotions. We can and should add principled thought to these basic instincts but I don't think its even possible to replace them with rationality and we shouldn't replacement even if we could. And this isn't just from Pirsig's thought. I've been persuaded by the moral theorist who have been studying primates as a window onto our own evolutionary development. It's pretty clear that human emotion and morality begins in the animal world. I image William James would have been thrilled for the way it corroborates his view that emotions exist in the body before we're even aware of them.
I don't know if Pirsig refers to Kant's "things in themselves" in that section of ZAMM, but its pretty clear that the a priori motorcycle is just that. Pirsig does make an explicit denial about TITS, but I think it is made in answer to a question and so it might not be in either book. Maybe a letter to McWatt or Lila's Child. Sorry, but I forget where that is. And the extent to which Kant is operating within SOM is all the freaking way, baby. As you can tell, all this is just off the top of my head. Time to get ready for a party. _________________________________________________________________ Windows Live™ Hotmail®: Chat. Store. Share. Do more with mail. http://windowslive.com/explore?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_t1_hm_justgotbetter_explore_012009 Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
