Robert Pirsig

In his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig rediscovers pre-Platonic Greek philosophy and its similarities with Eastern philosophy and Zen Buddhism in particular.

• The advancement of science and technology in Western societies has occurred at the expense of alternative disciplines and worldviews, resulting in an imbalanced collective psyche.
• Modern science is rooted in ideas developed in ancient Greece, where the first subject-object distinction was made: "...in cultures whose acestry includes ancient Greece, one invariably finds a strong subject-object differentiation..."

• People who can't stand Aristotle's endless specificity of detail are natural lovers of Plato's soaring generalities. People who can't stand the eternal lofty idealism of Plato welcome the down-to-earth facts of Aristotle. Plato is the essential Buddha-seeker who appears again and again in each generation, moving onward and upward toward the 'one'. Aristotle is the eternal motorcycle mechanic who prefers the 'many'."
• ...Plato's hatred oft the rhetoricians was part of a much larger struggle in which the reality of the Good, represented by the Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented by the dialecticians, were engaged in a huge struggle for the future mind of man. Truth won, the Good lost, and that is why today we have so little difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so much difficulty accepting the reality of Quality, weven though there is no more agreement in one area than in the other.
• The results of Socrates' martyrdom and Plato's unexcelled prose that followed are nothing less than the whole world of Western man as we know it. If the idea of truth had been allowed to preish unrediscovered by the Renaissance it's unlikely that we would be much beyond the level of prehistoric man today. the ideas of science and technology and other systematically organixed efforst of man are dead-centered on it. It is the nucleus of it all.
• The Quality which creates the world emerges as a relationship between man and his experience. He is a participant in the creation of all things.
• All accounts indicate that [virtue] was absolutely central to [the Sophists'] teaching, but how are you going to teach virtue if you teach the relativity of all ethical ideas? Virtue, if it implies anything at all, implies an ethical absolute.
• 'What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism,' Kitto comments, 'is not a sense of duty as we understand it -- duty towards others; it is rather duty towards himself. He strives after that which we translate "virtue", but is in Greek aretê, "excellence"...'
• Quality! Virtue! Dharma! That is what the Sophists were teaching! Not ethical relativism. Not pristine 'virtue'. But aretê. Excellence. Dharma! Before the Church of Reason. Before substance. Before form. Before mind and matter. Before dailectic itself. Quality had been absolute. Those first teachers of the Western world were teaching Quality, and the medium they had chosen was that of rhetoric.
• '_Aretê_ implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency -- or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, and efficiency which exists not in one department but in life itself.'
• Phaedrus remembered a line from Thoreau: 'You never gain something but that you lose something.' And now he began to see for the first time the unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth -- but for this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: and understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it.

-- GeirThomasAndersen - 18 Sep 2006