"Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

[fiefoe]

As some point of course I started treating the novel as Philosophy101 and took too many notes. Not enough Zen though.

• Kant is trying to save scientific empiricism from the consequences of its own self-devouring logic... “But though all knowledge begins with experience it doesn’t follow that it arises out of experience.”
• Kant says there are aspects of reality which are not supplied immediately by the senses. These he calls a priori. An example of a priori knowledge is “time.” You don’t see time... The a priori concepts have their origins in human nature so that they’re neither caused by the sensed object nor bring it into being, but provide a kind of screening function for what sense data we will accept. When our eyes blink, for example, our sense data tell us that the world has disappeared. But this is screened out and never gets to our consciousness because we have in our minds an a priori concept that the world has continuity.
• If there’s no logical basis for substance then there’s no logical basis for concluding that what’s produced these two views is the same motorcycle... It’s quite a machine, this a priori motorcycle. If you stop to think about it long enough you’ll see that it’s the main thing. The sense data confirm it but the sense data aren’t it. The motorcycle that I believe in an a priori way to be outside of myself is like the money I believe I have in the bank.
• say for the sake of convenience that I’ve money in the bank and say for the sake of convenience that substances compose the cycle I’m riding on. The bulk of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is concerned with how this a priori knowledge is acquired and how it is employed.
• Kant felt he had done the same thing in metaphysics. If you presume that the a priori concepts in our heads are independent of what we see and actually screen what we see, this means that you are taking the old Aristotelian concept of scientific man as a passive observer, a “blank tablet,” and truly turning this concept inside out.
• In all of the Oriental religions great value is placed on the Sanskrit doctrine of Tat tvam asi, “Thou art that,” which asserts that everything you think you are and everything you think you perceive are undivided. To realize fully this lack of division is to become enlightened.
• Because he’d given up, the surface of life was comfortable for him.
• if the school didn’t lose its accreditation. All that would happen, Phaedrus said, would simply be an official recognition of a condition that already existed. It would be similar to excommunication. What would happen is that the real University,... But this second university, the legal corporation, cannot teach, does not generate new knowledge or evaluate ideas. It is not the real University at all. It is just a church building, the setting, the location at which conditions have been made favorable for the real church to exist.
• The primary goal of the Church of Reason, Phaedrus said, is always Socrates’ old goal of truth, in its ever-changing forms, as it’s revealed by the process of rationality. Everything else is subordinate to that. Normally this goal is in no conflict with the location goal of improving the citizenry, but on occasion
• resembled is a case in point. Historically their zeal stems not from the strength of the Catholic Church but from its weakness in the face of the Reformation.
• This isn’t really a small town. People are moving too fast and too independently of one another.
• It’s an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it’s done and the talk about how it’s done never seems to match how one does it.
• The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn’t any other test.
• Actually there are hundreds of ways to put the rotisserie together and when they make you follow just one way without showing you the overall problem the instructions become hard to follow in such a way as not to make mistakes.
• Newton invented a new form of reason. He expanded reason to handle infinitesimal changes and I think what is needed now is a similar expansion of reason to handle technological ugliness.
• The whole Renaissance is supposed to have resulted from the topsy-turvy feeling caused by Columbus’ discovery of a new world. It just shook people up...  I think this fear of insanity is comparable to the fear people once had of falling off the edge of the world.
• correct grammar. Hundreds of itsy-bitsy rules for itsy-bitsy people.
• Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed.
• By reversing a basic rule that all things which are to be taught must first be defined, he had found a way out of all this.
• So would movies, dances, plays and parties. We would all use public transportation. We would all wear G.I. shoes.... The purely intellectual pursuits were the least affected by the subtraction of Quality. If Quality were dropped, only rationality would remain unchanged. That was odd.
• You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two—hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic—and the split is clean.
• “Squareness may be succinctly and yet thoroughly defined as an inability to see quality before it’s been intellectually defined, that is, before it gets all chopped up into words
• How could he say whether Quality was mind or matter when there was no logical clarity as to what was mind and what was matter in the first place?... Quality is not a thing. It is an event. Warmer. It is the event at which the subject becomes aware of the object.
• The very existence of subject and object themselves is deduced from the Quality event. The Quality event is the cause of the subjects and objects, which are then mistakenly presumed to be the cause of the Quality!..  “The sun of quality,” he wrote, “does not revolve around the subjects and objects of our existence. It does not just passively illuminate them. It is not subordinate to them in any way. It has created them.
• He simply meant that at the cutting edge of time, before an object can be distinguished, there must be a kind of nonintellectual awareness, which he called awareness of Quality.... This preintellectual reality is what Phaedrus felt he had properly identified as Quality.
• The reason people see Quality differently, he said, is because they come to it with different sets of analogues.
• What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge,
• A German named Riemann appeared with another unshakable system of geometry which throws overboard not only Euclid’s postulate, but also the first axiom, which states that only one straight line can pass through two points. Again there is no internal contradiction, only an inconsistency with both Lobachevskian and Euclidian geometries. According to the Theory of Relativity, Riemann geometry best describes the world we live in.