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A Lecturer on Pirsighttp://www.aacp.org/site/tertiary...mp;VID=2&CID=846&DID=5470In "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", Robert Pirsig tries to address the issues of figuring out what to do, learning how to do it, and doing it well, with reason and logic. To think about and act on success, we need to be able to define it. We need to know what constitutes quality performance, since quality performance implies success. Pirsig's Phaedrus refuses to define quality implying that if you can't define it, it doesn't exist. Phaedrus' answer to this, consistent with the school of realism, was: "A thing exists, if a world without it cannot function normally. If we can show that a world without quality functions abnormally, then we have shown that quality exists, whether it is defined or not". But of course, things continue to function normally, even if the "norm" is dysfunctional. Is it that we "exist in a world without quality" or is it merely dull or complacent, satisfied with the "now" and not improving our life or the lives of others? Pirsig then discusses David Hume, the Scottish historian and philosopher, who suggested that our knowledge arises out of our experiences or our senses. He implies that knowledge is something we imagine when one thing repeatedly follows another. Then in "Critique of Pure Reason", Immanuel Kant further examines how we gain knowledge and states that while "all knowledge begins with experience, it doesn't follow that knowledge arises out of experience". He is saying that there are aspects of knowledge or reality that do not relate to what we sense or experience, but rather is a priori knowledge. Pirsig states that "what we think of as reality is a continuous synthesis of elements from a fixed hierarchy of a priori concepts and the ever-changing data of the senses". So, while we have concepts of what we empirically think to be so, we also respond and change those concepts through evidence experienced by our senses. |