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What is a priori knowledge? What does Robert Pirsig say about it in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?
Robert Pirsig explores many concepts in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. One of these is a priori knowledge, which is not dependent on the senses to learn because there are things we innately know.
Keep reading to find out more about a priori knowledge according to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.
A Priori Knowledge and What It Means
In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig explains how a priori knowledge works and how it can apply to life.
Chautauqua: The High Country of the Mind
When Phaedrus turned to philosophy, he did so because he was at pains to answer the most fundamental questions of human existence: What is truth? What is knowledge? Why are we here? These questions lie at the very top of the hierarchy of knowledge—in the high country of the mind and a priori knowledge.
To answer these questions, Phaedrus read widely, including in his studies lesser known thinkers alongside people like Aristotle and Einstein. By academic standards he was doing subpar work, but he was making original discoveries, even if he didn’t know it yet. The problem, however, was his approach: He read each thinker he encountered brutally, trying to find the flaws and inconsistencies in their thought.
Pirsig recalls Phaedrus’s study of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Although Phaedrus didn’t agree with Kant, he respected the care with which Kant formulated his arguments, and his thought was integral to Phaedrus’s later resolution of the classical/romantic divide.
To understand Kant, however, one must begin with the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. Hume is an empiricist—that is, one who believes knowledge depends on the senses. Imagine a human being born without any of the five senses and nourished intravenously for the first ten years of its life: Does this person think? Has this person ever had a thought? Hume would say no.
Empiricism is not very different from what we think of as “common sense.” For our entire lives, the sun has risen every morning, so it’s common sense to expect it to rise tomorrow as well. We base this assumption on our empirical—sensory—knowledge of the world.
There are problems with empiricism, however, that show its shortcomings as a philosophical approach: * The question of “substance.” If all knowledge is derived from sensory data, how can we know what is producing (or “giving off”) that data? Consider a motorcycle. If we’re asked what it’s made of, we can answer steel (among other metals and materials). But what’s steel? Using our senses, we can tell that steel is hard, cold, and a host of other things, but all we’ve done is describe the data our senses are giving to us—we haven’t actually said what steel is.
The question of causation. Sensory knowledge also doesn’t explain causality. For example, when the sun rises, nothing in our senses tells us why or how it rises. Because of this fact, based purely on our sensory knowledge, we can never be absolutely certain the sun will indeed rise tomorrow.
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Here's what you'll find in our full Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance summary :
- How an unnamed narrator and his son are on a cross-country motorcycle journey
- Why technology can be creative
- How to focus on what's in front of you in order to get exactly what you need
