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.)
[Krimel] I snipped your account of Kant's aesthetic. While you may help make Pirsig's point that Kant's aesthetics are not aesthetically pleasing, it makes no sense at all to attempt, as Pirsig does and you seem eager to do, to extend this into those areas of Kant's philosophy that he does discuss in great detail. In truth it is that discussion that concerns me. I do not and have never pretended to know Kant's philosophy in any depth. Much of what I know of Kant and all of my interest in Kant comes for Pirsig's account in ZMM Chapter 11. He brings up Kant to deal with the problems he raises via Hume. Hume and the other empiricists were claiming that all knowledge is derived from the senses. This was a claim to counter the assumptions of the rationalists that knowledge arises from the activities of the mind. Most of philosophy during this time was aimed at figuring out how to spin Newton. Newton's classical physics offered its own Copernican revolution and forced a radical rethinking of the way the world was to be understood. Newton personifies the effect of a shift in western thinking eloquently if not originally begun by Bacon. Prior to Bacon philosophy in general and natural philosophy in particular was locked into the Greek mode. In the Greek mode of thinking we start with general rules, principles, axioms and reason from these general rules to draw conclusions about particular instances. You know, the old: All men or moral Socrates is a man Therefore, Socrates is mortal But it wasn't just the syllogism. The greatest achievement of the Greeks is not Socrates and his followers but Euclid and the Greek mathematicians. They ruled, literally, with a compass and straight edge. They rationally conceived general principles and used reason to derive rational proofs of even more principles that could them be applied to particulars. Plato's ideal forms are clearly the result of this. The success and beauty of Greek geometry, its intellectual perfection, inspired Plato believe that it is the ideals that "real" and that the mundane world is an imperfect shadow. The Greek mathematicians were pure rationalists. The very term rational derives from the Greek belief in ratio. They thought, or at least wanted it thought, that every number can be expressed as a ratio between two other numbers. Of course this is not true. There are in fact infinitely many irrational numbers. The Pythagoreans saw mathematics as a form of mysticism. They held to a kind of rational aesthetics and sought to suppress the knowledge of imperfection in the irrational numbers just as they refused on philosophical grounds to acknowledge the number zero. After these Greek ideas were reimported into Europe after the crusades, the task of the scholastics was to reconcile Aristotle with church dogma. This reinforced the notion that the world we live in is fallen and ugly, a shadow of the perfection found in the ideal. By Bacon's time this was getting boring. Bacon advocated an overturning of deductive reason. He argued that rather than seeking after ideals to apply to the "real" world we should look to the dirty mundane to world to construct general rules. This inductive style of reasoning IS the scientific method. Here general rules are abstracted from observations of the world around us. We make observations and construct general rules from them. Hence in Bacon's time observations were made and a general rule was constructed: All swans are white. Bacon was well aware of at least two problems with this method. First a single green swan or an entire species of black swans would invalidate the general rule. Which results in the second problem, that no amount of observation could provide "proof" of the general rule. As Pirsig points out in his discussion of Hume this was among the difficulties in establishing causality. Our sense of causality is not the result of some built in general rule but derives from the accumulation of past experience and a belief that the future will be like the past. On the other hand as Popper made such a big deal about, a single observation or a set of observations can "prove" that our general rule is false. Consider, Ham's view of Essence, for example. It is a throw back to the Greek style. Essence exists independently of the real world. The real world is a fragmentation of this Essence. You see this view also in the notion held by some mathematicians that ideas in math are not invented but discovered. Whitehead held to something like this as well claiming that the ideal forms exist as a kind of template of what is possible. Whitehead and Russell went seeking after a set of logical principles from which the rest of mathematics could be derived. This is pure rationalism. Key to Russell and Whitehead's attempt was both the ideas of set theory and the notion of starting with logical definitions. Here the idea is that the Essence of a set, or the defining properties of a set can be specified at the outset. Membership in the set is established by the degree to which individual elements conform to the definition. This is a purely Greek exercise in deduction. In the deductive mode a set is the result of the application of a rule for forming the set, a definition of its essence. In the inductive method the essence of the set is found or derived from the common characteristics of its members. Within ever set we find a kind of Bell Curve archetypal exemplars of a set are the average but we are guaranteed of finding exemplars that fall near the edges of our set and in fact many perhaps even most sets have fuzzy edges and it is hard to say whether some exeplars should fall inside or outside the set. Robins and ostriches both fall into the set of birds but robins seem to me to be closer to the "essence" of "bird" than do ostriches which lack flight and flight really is one of the defining characteristics of "bird". Hume and Locke in the wake of Newton were trying to use a purely inductive understanding of the world that is derived for the accumulation of experience writing willy nilly on us as tabula rasa. Which brings us back to Kant. As I said I do not understand Kant well but what I do understand suggests that Pirsig doesn't understand him very well either. So please be advised that what follows is more about what Pirsig says about Kant than actually being about Kant. Kant wanted to show that not ALL knowledge is derived from sense data. His conception of the apriori is that some knowledge is there before hand. I think Pirsig uses this incorrectly when he talks about an aprioi motorcycle. A motorcycle is not and can not be apriori. It is the underlying assumptions that lead to an understanding of "motorcycle" that are apriori not the motorcycle itself or any set of sense impressions. As I understand "apriori" it is more like something inherited. It results from the structure and function of the brain itself. As the organ of awareness it takes in information and processes it in certain ways. Some of those we learn in some of them are built in. We can not understand even sense impressions that are not formatted in terms of space and time. Our brains would have no way of handling such data if it existed. If we did encounter such data we would understand it by reformatting it into a form that can be understood in some spacio-temporal sense. This is the problem most of have with quantum mechanics or with black holes and the Bose Einstein condensate. They are not and can not be directly experiential. I take this to mean that the empiricists are correct that experience is written on a slate. But what Kant shows is that the slate is not blank. It is a slate and what is written depends and is in some ways determined by the properties of slate and chalk. What gets written will be written in a certain format. Kant's apriori is about the properties of that formatting. Pirsig uses Kant and Hume to show that in the end we are left with not experience of objects in the world but the experience of experience. All of our experience is ultimately without "substance". Of course this is a bit unsatisfying. It leads down the road to pure idealism and pure solipsism. It lead people like you to claim that the real problem lies in the claim that "substance" causes or determines our sense of what is real. From a purely empirical perspective sense data is said to arise from something that in principle can not be experienced. Kant recognizes this. When he is talking about TiTs Kant's claim is that apart from our sense data we can not have knowledge of TiTs. I take this to sync up with Pirsig holding "quality" undefined. Regardless of whether the world itself is pure ideas or pure substance, our world, the world we "know" is sense impression. Experience is sense impressions. What lies behind those impressions is viewed "as through a glass, darkly." This is a big stumbling block. Marsha for example keeps repeating the manta that it is all just conceptual patterns devoid of "reality;" just the shifting of points of view; illusion, maya. It is not just that the TiTs are unknowable in their fullness but that they have no "existence" in any sense of the term "existence." Pirsig on that other hand is no fan of this kind of pure idealism either. Saying that something can not be fully know is not the same as saying that nothing can be known about it. Saying that something can not be fully defined is not the same as saying it can not be defined at all. Rather it invites us to view all definition as tentative. We construct definitions exactly as Bacon and Hume would have it, provisionally based on the data accumulated about it thus far. I take this to be rather close to the way you discuss pragmatic truth in your "thoughts" post. I also take this to be the inductive approach that lies at the heart of the scientific method. If there is such a thing as capital T Truth, or a TiT, we can make all kinds of guesses about it. We can seek all manner of confirmation but ultimately there will always be something left out. Some set of "facts" not known. Some aspect that is perhaps unknowable. All of this converges on what I regard to be the central issue of the MoQ and indeed the central revelation of the 20th century. Knowledge is at its root uncertain. Truth, whether it exists or not, is a bit like the mathematical concept of "limit". This concept of "limit" is the mathematical proposition that ultimately resolves Zeno's paradox. It was a concept missing from Newton but expressed by him in terms of the infinitesimals. The limit is the point at which an infinite number of calculations converge. Like Truth or TiTs no amount of observation or experience can directly contact these limits. Observation and calculation can only point in a direction that is confirmed by each experience; each experiment, each calculation, each asking of the right questions. I have attempted to make this point several times in the past but let me illustrate with an abstract but slightly more tangible example, the irrational numbers that the Greek feared so much. The square root of 2 can never be written out as specific number. I can say that the square root of 2 equals: 1.14... or I can be more specific and say that it equals: 1.41421 35623 73095 04880 16887 24209 69807 85696 71875 37694 80731 76679 73799... The second statement is more accurate, more precise than the first but neither is actually correct. There is some level of "t"ruth in both of them but "T"ruth in neither. This to me is the meaning of "holding it undefined". I know that Kant did not sees TiTs in quite this way but it does seem to be what Pirsig was aiming at and why he thought Kant would appreciate his "crystal revelation." What the Greeks wanted was "T"ruth and so did Kant and so did Russell and Whitehead and so did Einstein and so does pretty much everyone. But what the Pythagoreans viewed with horror and outrage is exactly what 20th century science and math have demonstrated. "T"ruth is probabilistic it can be specified with some almost arbitrary level of precision but any level of precision leaves something unsaid. I want to emphasize that this does not mean that nothing can be said or that what can be said does not converge on some "limit" but that limit by its very nature must always remain just beyond our grasp. I would say that much of this dilemma comes to a head in William James and Wilhelm Wundt at the end of the 19th century. Both were concerned with not just what can be known but how we know it. If as Pirsig suggests Quality is wrapped up in perception then it behooves us to understand perception. If knowledge is the product of repeated sampling of sense data then we ought to look at what sense data says and how it says it. If "phenomena" are simply appearances then we need to look at where and how they appear. Wundt, in his introduction of the first major work of any kind in the field of psychology, points to those who seek an understanding of the world and how "the mind" relates to it, they "...have tended to regard as superfluous any reference to the physical organism; they have supposed that nothing more is required for a science of mind than the direct apprehension of conscious processes themselves. It is in token of dissent from any such standpoint that the present work is entitled a "physiological psychology." In the end when Pirsig says "experience" is reality, he is just rounding "T"ruth off at a point to his liking. I personally don't think this works as "metaphysics." He claims that "experience" is not the result of the interaction of subjects with objects but rather that subjects and objects result from experience. Phenomenologically, I totally agree. The categories of subject and object are abstracted from the phenomena of experience. But as I have pointed out many times in the past in such a cosmology there can only be one "subject," that being the individual to whom the phenomena present themselves. Each individual is working out the process of convergence upon "T"ruth. Each instantiation of phenomena is the possessor of some version of "t"ruth. Collectively we share phenomena at the intellectual level. That level is the summation of our shared experience. It is the current answer in our collective approximation of "T"ruth. I suspect that this post is already too long to actually be posted and may have to be split in two. I hope it gets straight to the heart of what I for one have been beating around the bush about for a couple of years. I am doubtless wrong in this and I have glossed over a lot and left much unsaid but hey I gave it a shot... 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/
