4 Robert M. Pirsig Quotes on Aristotle

Robert M. Pirsig quotes on aristotle

39. Aristotle has always been eminently attackable and eminently attacked throughout history, and shooting down Aristotle's patent absurdities, like shooting fish in a barrel, didn't afford much satisfaction.

41. 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.'

58. 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 dialectically determined truth. Once the Good has been contained as a dialectical idea it is no trouble for another philosopher to come along and show by dialectical methods that arete, the Good, can be more advantageously demoted to a lower position within a 'true' order of things, more compatible with the inner workings of dialectic. Such a philosopher was not long in coming. His name was Aristotle.

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.'