Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values -- Robert M. Pirsig (pp. 28-32)
“Let's tell stories then,” Chris says. He thinks for a while. “Do you know any good ghost stories? All the kids in our cabin used to tell ghost stories at night.”
“You tell us some,” John says.
And he does. They are kind of fun to hear. Some of them I haven't heard since I was his age. I tell him so, and Chris wants to hear some of mine, but I can't remember any.
After a while he says, “Do you believe in ghosts?”
“No,” I say
“Why not?”
“Because they are un-sci-en-ti-fic.”
The way I say this makes John smile. “They contain no matter,” I continue, “and have no energy and therefore, according to the laws of science, do not exist except in people's minds.”
The whiskey, the fatigue and the wind in the trees start mixing in my mind. “Of course,” I add, “the laws of science contain no matter and have no energy either and therefore do not exist except in people's minds. It's best to be completely scientific about the whole thing and refuse to believe in either ghosts or the laws of science. That way you're safe. That doesn't leave you very much to believe in, but that's scientific too.”
“I don't know what you're talking about,” Chris says.
“I'm being kind of facetious.”
Chris gets frustrated when I talk like this, but I don't think it hurts him.
“One of the kids at YMCA camp says he believes in ghosts.”
“He was just spoofing you.”
“No, he wasn't. He said that when people haven't been buried right, their ghosts come back to haunt people. He really believes in that.”
“He was just spoofing you,” I repeat.
“What's his name?” Sylvia says.
“Tom White Bear.”
John and I exchange looks, suddenly recognizing the same thing.
“Ohhh, Indian!” he says.
I laugh. “I guess I'm going to have to take that back a little,” I say. “I was thinking of European ghosts.”
“What's the difference?”
John roars with laughter. “He's got you,” he says.
I think a little and say, “Well, Indians sometimes have a different way of looking at things, which I'm not saying is completely wrong. Science isn't part of the Indian tradition.”
“Tom White Bear said his mother and dad told him not to believe all that stuff. But he said his grandmother whispered it was true anyway, so he believes it.”
He looks at me pleadingly. He really does want to know things sometimes. Being facetious is not being a very good father. “Sure,” I say, reversing myself, “I believe in ghosts too.”
Now John and Sylvia look at me peculiarly. I see I'm not going to get out of this one easily and brace myself for a long explanation.
“It's completely natural,” I say, “to think of Europeans who believed in ghosts or Indians who believed in ghosts as ignorant. The scientific point of view has wiped out every other view to a point where they all seem primitive, so that if a person today talks about ghosts or spirits he is considered ignorant or maybe nutty. It's just all but completely impossible to imagine a world where ghosts can actually exist.”
John nods affirmatively and I continue.
“My own opinion is that the intellect of modern man isn't that superior. IQs aren't that much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants are to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has his ghosts and spirits too, you know.”
“What?”
“Oh, the laws of physics and of logic -- the number system -- the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.
“They seem real to me,” John says.
“I don't get it,” says Chris.
So I go on. “For example, it seems completely natural to presume that gravitation and the law of gravitation existed before Isaac Newton. It would sound nutty to think that until the seventeenth century there was no gravity.”
“Of course.”
“So when did this law start? Has it always existed?”
John is frowning, wondering what I am getting at.
“What I'm driving at,” I say, “is the notion that before the beginning of the earth, before the sun and the stars were formed, before the primal generation of anything, the law of gravity existed.”
“Sure.”
“Sitting there, having no mass of its own, no energy of its own, not in anyone's mind because there wasn't anyone, not in space because there was no space either, not anywhere...this law of gravity still existed?”
Now John seems not so sure.
“If that law of gravity existed,” I say, “I honestly don't know what a thing has to do to be nonexistent. It seems to me that law of gravity has passed every test of nonexistence there is. You cannot think of a single attribute of nonexistence that that law of gravity didn't have. Or a single scientific attribute of existence it did have. And yet it is still `common sense' to believe that it existed.”
John says, “I guess I'd have to think about it.”
“Well, I predict that if you think about it long enough you will find yourself going round and round and round and round until you finally reach only one possible, rational, intelligent conclusion. The law of gravity and gravity itself did not exist before Isaac Newton. No other conclusion makes sense.
“And what that means,” I say before he can interrupt, “and what that means is that that law of gravity exists nowhere except in people's heads! It's a ghost! We are all of us very arrogant and conceited about running down other people's ghosts but just as ignorant and barbaric and superstitious about our own.”
“Why does everybody believe in the law of gravity then?”
“Mass hypnosis. In a very orthodox form known as ‘education.’”
“You mean the teacher is hypnotizing the kids into believing the law of gravity?”
“Sure.”
“That's absurd.”
“You've heard of the importance of eye contact in the classroom? Every educationist emphasizes it. No educationist explains it.”
John shakes his head and pours me another drink. He puts his hand over his mouth and in a mock aside says to Sylvia, “You know, most of the time he seems like such a normal guy.”
I counter, “That's the first normal thing I've said in weeks. The rest of the time I'm feigning twentieth-century lunacy just like you are. So as not to draw attention to myself.
“But I'll repeat it for you,” I say. “We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he was born and that magically he discovered these words. They were always there, even when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and then they applied to it. In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world. That, John, is ridiculous.
“The problem, the contradiction the scientists are stuck with, is that of mind. Mind has no matter or energy but they can't escape its predominance over everything they do. Logic exists in the mind. Numbers exist only in the mind. I don't get upset when scientists say that ghosts exist in the mind. It's that only that gets me. Science is only in your mind too, it's just that that doesn't make it bad. Or ghosts either.”
They are just looking at me so I continue: “Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It's all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It's run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.”
John looks too much in thought to speak. But Sylvia is excited. “Where do you get all these ideas?” she asks.
I am about to answer them but then do not. I have a feeling of having already pushed it to the limit, maybe beyond, and it is time to drop it.
After a while John says, “It'll be good to see the mountains again.”
“Yes, it will,” I agree. “one last drink to that!”
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“Kant called his thesis that our a priori thoughts are independent of sense data and screen what we see a 'Copernican revolution.' By this he referred to Copernicus' statement that the earth moves around the sun. Nothing changed as a result of this revolution, and yet everything changed. Or, to put it in Kantian terms, the objective world producing our sense data did not change, but our a priori concept of it was turned inside out. The effect was overwhelming. It was the acceptance of the Copernican revolution that distinguishes modern man from his medieval predecessors” (Pirsig, ibid.).
And it signifies the coming of the Age of Enlightenment, whereby, through the use of one's own reason mankind frees himself from his “self-imposed immaturity.” “Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another” (Kant, What is Enlightenment? (1784)).
Kant’s most important works, Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason, and Critique of Judgment (Urteilskraft), all speak about the valid use of reason. And productive imagination (Einbildungskraft) plays an important role in elucidating this.
First, a few words over the productive imagination from Critique of Pure Reason:
The unity of apperception in relation to the synthesis of imagination is the understanding; and this same unity, with reference to the transcendental synthesis of the imagination, the pure understanding. (CPR, A119.)
[„Die Einheit der Apperzeption in Beziehung auf die Synthesis der Einbildungskraft ist der Verstand, und eben dieselbe Einheit, beziehungsweise auf die transzendentale Synthesis der Einbildungskraft, der reine Verstand.“]
“The abiding and unchanging ‘I’ (pure apperception) forms the correlate of all our representations in so far as it is to be at all possible that we should become conscious of them. [….] It is this apperception which must be added to pure imagination, in order to render its function intellectual. [….] And while concepts, which belong to the understanding, are brought into play through relation of the manifold to the unity of apperception, it is only by means of the imagination that they can be brought into relation to sensible intuition.
“A pure imagination, which conditions all a priori knowledge, is thus one of the fundamental faculties of the human soul. By its means we bring the manifold of intuition on the one side, into connection with the condition of the necessary unity of pure apperception on the other.” (CPR, A124, emphasis added)
[„Denn das stehende und bleibende Ich (der reinen Apperzeption) macht das Korrelat um aller unserer Vorstellungen aus, sofern es bloß möglich ist, sich ihrer bewußt zu werden [….]Diese Apperzeption ist es nun, welche zu der reinen Einbildungskraft hinzukommen muß, um ihre Funktion intellektuell zu machen. [….]Durch das Verhältnis des Mannigfaltigen aber zur Einheit der Apperzeption werden Begriffe, welche dem Verstande angehören, aber nur vermittelst der Einbildungskraft in Beziehung auf die sinnliche Anschauung zustande kommen können.
„Wir haben also eine reine Einbildungskraft, als ein Grundvermögen der menschlichen Seele, das aller Erkenntnis a priori zum Grunde liegt. Vermittelst deren bringen wir das Mannigfaltige der Anschauung einerseits, und mit der Bedingung der notwendigen Einheit der reinen Apperzeption andererseits in Verbindung.“]
In Critique of Judgment (Urteilskraft), the free, productive power of imagination, tempered by understanding, will be seen as the product of genius and as the gift of Spirit [Geist]. Apart from applying “understanding’s causal law” via the concepts of the understanding, the subject must learn to distinguish “objects” as they have been expressed for him by “someone” - ultimately the scientist and genius (i.e., the spirit as it is manifested purposively within one’s culture, and “other” cultures s within the world, at a specific moment in time). This positing of “common sense” knowledge within culture by genius relates to Kant’s idea of the “ultimate purpose” of spirit (‘Geist’) in nature (in the world).
“Because spirit involves the universal, it is so to speak ‘divinae particula aurae’ [a particular emanation of the divine] and it is created out of universal spirit. That is why spirit has no specific properties; rather according to the different talents and sensibilities it affects, it animates in varying ways, and, because these are so manifold, every spirit has something unique. One ought to say not that it belongs to genius. It is the unity of the World soul (‘Weltseele’).” (Reflection 938 (1776—8), A.A. 15:326; in J. Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s ‘Critique of Judgment’. (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1992) p. 304, fn60)
Kant states that: “Geist is the active principle; ‘soul’ is what is animated. Geist is the source of animation and can be derived from nothing prior. (Kant, Reflection 934 (1776-8), A.A. 15:326; J. Zammito, p. 304, fn59) Zie ook de Critique of Judgment (Trans. by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianaplolis: Hackett Publ. Co., 1987. (CJ)): “Spirit [Geist] in an aesthetic sense is the animating principle in the mind.” (CJ, §49, 313) [“Geist, in ästhetischer Bedeutung, heißt das belebende Prinzip im Gemüte.”]
This animating principle is, according to Kant, nothing but the ability to exhibit aesthetic ideas – a presentation of the imagination. [“[D]ieses Prinzip sei nichts anders, als das Vermögen der Darstellung ästhetischer Ideen; unter einer ästhetischen Idee aber verstehe ich diejenige Vorstellung der Einbildungskraft .” ( CJ, §49, 314)] The role of the genius-artist in society is thus to produce the aesthetic ideas (the symbolic reference to the sublime transcendental ideas) which lead man toward his highest teleological fulfillment.
The “aesthetic idea” produced by the genius:
is a presentation of the imagination which is conjoined with a given concept and is connected, when we use imagination in its freedom, with such a multiplicity of partial presentations that no expression that stands for a determinate concept can be found for it. Hence it is a presentation that makes us add to a concept the thoughts of much that is ineffable, but the feeling of which quickens our cognitive powers and connects language, which otherwise would be mere letters, with spirit. ( CJ, §49, 316) [“[D]ie ästhetische Idee ist eine einem gegebenen Begriffe beigesellte Vorstellung der Einbildungskraft, welche mit einer solchen Mannigfaltigkeit der Teilvorstellungen in dem freien Gebrauche derselben verbunden ist, daß für sie kein Ausdruck, der einen bestimmten Begriff bezeichnet, gefunden werden kann, die also zu einem Begriffe viel Unnennbares hinzu denken läßt, dessen Gefühl die Erkenntnisvermögen belebt und mit der Sprache, als bloßem Buchstaben, Geist verbindet.”]
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If we can understand the soul (psyche) we will be well on the way to understanding life itself. For, according to Aristotle “the soul is in some sense the principle (archê) of animal life.” (De Anima 1.1.402a5-7) One of the major elements Aristotle will try to clarify in De Anima is if “there is any way of acting or being acted upon proper to soul.” If so, “soul will be capable of separate existence; if there is none, its separate existence is impossible.” (De Anima 1.1.403a 8-10)
Now, how is the imagination related to the soul? He speaks of three types or forms of imagination: sensitive imagination (phantasia aisthetike), deliberative imagination (phantasia bouleutike) and rational/calculative imagination (phantasia logistike). - which seems identical with, or very similar to, deliberative imagination.
All animals, including man, have sensitive imagination (phantasia aisthetike), for “an animal is not capable of appetite without possessing imagination” (433b, 28). And he says “imagination is a kind of thinking; for many men follow their imaginations [by which he must mean: sensitive imagination] contrary to knowledge” (433a, 21).
Deliberative imagination which would seem to be a leading candidate for being an element of the “separate existence” of the soul that Aristotle refers to, is only present in those animals that are calculative, i.e., man. With it we, not only, determine what action shall be taken, but, also, deliberative imagination is that faculty which makes a unity out of several images allowing us to have a “single standard to measure by.” (De Anima 3.11.434a5-9)
In De Anima 3.7 Aristotle claims: “the soul never thinks without an image (phantasm).” (431a 15) And “To the thinking soul images (phantasms) serve as if they were contents of perception.”
Further, Aristotle says, “no one can learn or understand anything in the absence of sense,” and “when the mind is actively aware of anything it is necessarily aware of it along with an image; for images are like sensuous contents except that they contain no matter” (432a, 7, emphasis added).