Quote #59

Under Aristotle the 'Reader,' whose knowledge of Trojan arete seems conspicuously absent, forms and substances dominate all. The Good is a relatively minor branch of knowledge called ethics; reason, logic, knowledge are his primary concerns. Arete is dead and science, logic and the University as we know it today have been given their founding charter: to find and invent an endless proliferation of forms about the substantive elements of the world and call these forms knowledge, and transmit these forms to future generations. As 'the system.'

More from Robert M. Pirsig

  1. In his attempt to unite the Good and the True by making the Good the highest Idea of all, Plato is nevertheless usurping arete's place with…
  2. Poor rhetoric, once 'learning' itself, now becomes reduced to the teaching of mannerisms and forms, Aristotelian forms, for writing, as if …
  3. Plato finds it necessary to separate, for example, 'horseness' from 'horse' and say that horseness is real and fixed and true and unmoving,…
  4. The bones of the Sophists long ago turned to dust and what they said turned to dust with them and the dust was buried under the rubble of d…
  5. The Good was not a form of reality. It was reality itself, ever changing, ultimately unknowable in any kind of fixed, rigid way.
  6. In this allegory the seeker, trying to reach the One, is drawn by two horses, one white and noble and temperate, and the other surly, stubb…
  7. Why destroy arete? And no sooner had he asked the question than the answer came to him. Plato hadn't tried to destroy arete. He had encapsu…
  8. All this is just an analogy.

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