To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding. - Robert M. Pirsig
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To define something is to subordinate it to a tangle of intellectual relationships. And when you do that you destroy real understanding.
Robert Maynard Pirsig (6 September 1928 – 24 April 2017) was an American philosopher and novelist, most famous for his novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in which he proposed what has become known as his Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ).
Biography information from
Wikiquote·
Portrait adapted from
Wikimedia Commons, Ian Glendinning, en:User:IanGlendinning (CC BY)
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Robert Maynard Pirsig
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Robert Pirsig
I've noticed that people who have never worked with steel have trouble seeing this—that the motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon. They associate metal with given shapes—pipes, rods, girders, tools, parts—all of them fixed and inviolable, and think of it as primarily physical. But a person who does machining or foundry work or forge work or welding sees "steel" as having no shape at all. Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not.
Socrates is not using dialectic to understand rhetoric, he is using it to destroy it, or at least to bring it into disrepute, and so his questions are not real questions at all—they are just word-traps which Gorgias and his fellow rhetoricians fall into.
The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you actually don’t know.
