Hello All.
I'd just like to state for your information that what I had to say earlier
was not as alledged by Jonathan "Kant's view" but my own. It does cause
annoyance when, as often happens in philosophy, you offer people apples and
they say "no thanks I don't like pears". The difficulty, I think, is that
paying attention to anything new is so difficult that the mind says to
itself: 'here's one I paid attention to earlier'.
I suppose I am to blame for talking about Forms as 'a priori concepts'. I
sensed that this might mislead, and I will try to make ammends as part of an
argument about Pirsig might think about time. It seems to me that a close
examination of why what I said about time differs from what Kant said can
illuminate something important about the pirsigian view.
The problem with a priori concepts is: prior to *what*? "A priori" in
Kantian terms is prior to all experience. But when I used the expression 'a
priori concepts' I was speaking of something necessary and prior to
*experience of particular objects* - which I absolutely do not take to be
the same thing as 'all experience'. It is exactly this distinction between
*all experience* and *all experience of*, *all experience of objects (and
subjects)*, that I take to be the central insight and merit in RMP's
world-view. We mustn't forget the aesthetic continuum, Dynamic Quality - DQ
isn't something you have experience *of* - it *is* experience simply,
purely, a priori, that is prior to all concepts.
The question of what an 'a priori concept' is must therefore be understood
in the light of the fact that concepts are not prior - concepts are *not*
first. So what can we possibly mean by 'a priori concept', if concepts
themselves come second? Well, we might mean that *of all the concepts*
these must come first - like coming first in class in Le Mans, not like
winning the race outright. From that point on, we can start to think about
where these first-in-class concepts can possibly originate if they do not
originate in experience, and I have tended to give the platonic answer on
this point as you know.
I have so far introduced my thought that:
(1) Kant is saying that certain concepts including he thinks a 'concept'
called Time are necessary to all experience whatsoever
(2) Pirsig is saying that no concepts can be necessary to all experience
whatsoever
Well, what is my position? Do I agree with Kant or Pirsig? Well, in
accordance with my Platonic appreciation that in Experience Flux Is First I
agree with RMP, as I hope to make perfectly clear....
JONATHAN WROTE:
> It appears that Magnus and Elephant take Kant's view:
>
> MAGNUS
>> I don't mean to make fun of the second law, and maybe I'm just old-fashioned
>> about this time concept, but time seems to be a more basic concept than the
>> rest of the second law.
>
> ELEPHANT
>> A short comment. Simplicity and complexity are features of our picture of
>> the world rather than of the world (which is continuous and therefore not
>> individuated, and so neither simple nor complex). For this reason I do not
>> find *definitions* of the passage of time in terms of entropy movement on
>> the complex - simple axis terribly plausible. Time passes, and there's an
>> end on it. This is as much as we can say, this is what time is.
>
> I think we all agree that time is some sort of pattern of value, but is Kant
> right that it is somehow "more real" than other patterns?
ELEPHANT:
No we don't all agree on that, no Kant isn't right, no Kant didn't say that,
and no I do not take Kant's view. And furthermore no, what I was getting at
in my comment is not similar to Magnus' thought that time is a basic
concept. Other than these minor misunderstandings, I agree with everything
you say Jonathan.
To clarify. To my knowledge Kant held no degrees of reality thesis. As far
as Kant is concerned, something is either real or unreal, period. You are
possibly mixing up Kant with Plato and his degrees of reality thesis, which
is unfortunate, as the the two couldn't be further apart. Kant is a
transcendental idealist and an empirical realist whereas Plato is a
transcendental realist and an empirical idealist. That's in a nutshell.
Remember that Kant said that Hume woke him from his slumbers and
reinvigorated his philosophical understanding? Plato would have told Hume
to stop making such a childish protagorean racket and go back to sleep so
that grown men can keep their wits about them for the morrow. Experience
comes in discrete little packets called 'Simple Impressions'? Pah!
Experience is a relation between the perceived and the perceiver? Pah! No,
Experience is an aesthetic continuum, as RMP and Northrop agreed.
Let me acknowledge that there is ceaseless disagreement about what "Kant's
view" is anyway. But what Kant *is* agreed to be interested in is the
possibility of something called the "synthetic apriori". Kant thinks of
causal and temporal relations (i.e. the passing of time) as something which
we do (synthetic) but which is nevertheless categorically prior to all
other synthetic operations : "The order and regularity in objects, which we
entitle nature, we ourselves introduce. The understanding is itself the
lawgiver of nature". This statement could be brought to accord with Plato
but for one crucial point which is relevant to Jonathan's misunderstanding.
Kant thought there was always a thing-in-itself *to which* these law-giving
concepts were applied. I.E. he held on to a Humean/Protagorean view of
experience as having content - objects - impressions, in contrast with a
Platonic account of raw sensation as continuous flux. The whole point is
expressed in the thought that our intellect introduces the "order and
regularity" in objects, which is not the (Platonic) thought that intellect
introduces the objects *in their entirity*. So, Kant, like Aristotle,
treats the intellect as a sort of categorising and sorting machine, like a
combine harvester, on the assumption that what goes in at the front end
already contains kernals and chaff that can be sorted out and arranged how
we require. 'How we require' of course, rather than 'how we choose',
because for Kant the bits of the machine which interest him are the sorting
arrangements which are absolutely essential to any further sorting - the
some things that are a priori in the sense of prior and necessary to any
choices, to the possibility of experience in general.
So for Kant Time can be a 'Concept' in the same sense that '2*2=4' is a
'Concept'. Both are operational instructions in a progammed process, and
Kant's point would be that up to a point *there is just one form which the
programme can take* - and the temporal arrangement of things into now,
before, after, (which is closely related to phenomena, cause, effect in ways
we won't go into here) is supposedly one such 'Concept'.
Plato's view would be different in important ways, I feel, which
curiously parrallel criticisms which existentialists later made of Kant's
picture, and are also spot-on for good Pirsigians everywhere. First, as I
have already pointed out, Plato would reject the picture of the intellect
having this thing-in-itself stuff in perception to work on. The intellect
doesn't just *arrange* the discrete things of the world in their relations,
it is reposnsible for that *discreteness* and *thinghood* as well. Compare
in Sartre's novel 'Nausea' how Roquetin's world becomes itself repleat with
gooeyness as his confidence in his intellectual picture declines - the
structural content of the world and the activity of the mind are
indissoluable. Another way of putting this is that the Kantian picture
implies a certain kind of machine processing Data into "transcendentally
necessary" kinds of pattern, while for Plato there is no Data in experience
- just as for RMP pure experience is DQ, the continuum, not of SQ objects.
This distinguishes consciousness from computation.
Secondly, Plato would be sceptical I think of any attempt to say that
some part of what we do, our syntheses, can be 'a priori' in the sense Kant
attaches to that term. Kant's 'a priori' is prior to any experience
whatsoever, and not just to experience of particular objects. Plato would
echo what I think the Buddhists say, which is that it is perfectly possible
to attain a state of 'pure perception' in which we stop doing all that busy
processing/creating and just listen. The possibility of this kind of quiet
mind is precisely what Kant's notion of a 'synthetic apriori' denies. If
some synthesis is absolutely *necessary* then we will be busy performing it
*at all times*. But this is just not the case, it seems to me, and Kant's
theories are for this reason empirically false.
There is no part of our actual synthesis which is necessary - what is
necessary is that the *means* of performing some syntheses exist prior to
the sythesis, and that is quite a different thought. The thought that some
actually performed synthesis is neccessary to experience is the kantian
thought. The thought that the *elements* of some possible syntheses exist
necessarily and prior is the Platonic thought. Two quite different
proposals, and you already know that I favour the second - for the second
allows for RMP's aesthetic continuum while the former does not.
As a consequence of my Platonism I take the view that Time cannot be
synthetic-apriori, and that it can be understood either as something
synthetic, or as something apriori, but not both. One can think of Time as
a-priori only if one is prepared to subtract from it all events, objects,
and grammar. In such circumstances only metaphors are inexact enough to
direct our attention to it's riverine colour and flow, it's lack of unity,
discreteness, separation, body - in fact here we see that Time can only be a
priori in cases where it is no longer a 'concept' as such. On the other
hand in its synthetic aspect, time is just our stories, neither more nor
less (and we can tell stories which involve entropy, or stories which do not
involve entropy, whichever one we find more valuable) - and such narratives,
whether they exist in thermodynamics textbooks or novels by french
intellectuals, one cannot describe as 'a priori'. They are as we make them
- as we choose in pursuit of Dynamic Quality.
In our ordinary lives we tend to follow Kant and confuse these two unmixable
aspects of time, the a priori and the synthetic, that are in reality like
oil and water. We say such idiotic things as that events flow and so on -
you might say that it is the first confusion of them all - but a confusion
is a confusion, not something 'necessary'. And event cannot flow - only
**that which the story of 'events' attempts so poorly to depict** can flow,
only Dynamic Quality is Dynamic, only Static Quality is Static.
But we can 'pause', escape the narrative and the programme for handling
data, look out the window and over the waters. Time passes, listen, time
passes.
Elephant
------- End of forwarded message -------
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