“Early zoologists classified as mammals those that suckle their young and as reptiles those that lay eggs. Then a duck-billed platypus was discovered in Australia….

The platypus isn’t doing anything paradoxical at all. It isn’t having any problems. Platypi have been laying eggs and suckling their young for millions of years before there were any zoologists to come along and declare it illegal…

Quality is in the same situation as that platypus.

Because they can’t classify it the experts have claimed there is something wrong with it….

Should reality be something that only a handful of the world’s most advanced physicists understand? ”

That’s Robert Pirsig in “Lila,”

Update: I thought I should add this to make it clear what Pirsig was trying to do. It’s from an Amazon reviewer, Ralph Blumenau, who, from his profile is a retired teacher (his students were lucky – the review is spot on).

“He had felt that the two modes of western thinking, the classical and the romantic, were both unsatisfactory. The romantic, which will not come to grips with the underlying meaning of phenomena, is basically superficial. The classical mode, with its analytical procedures, often destroys what it investigates. The romantic mode stresses the subjective impact on the observer; the classical stresses the objective nature of the things observed. Both are part of what, in Lila, Phaedrus calls the subject-object metaphysic; and the concept that the world can be understood in terms simply of subject and object has been deeply embedded in western thought ever since classical Greek philosophy. However, the pre-classical Greeks, through their concept of arete, held out the possibility of a richer understanding. Phaedrus translates arete as “Quality” (and sometimes as “Value”), and it is by Quality that the conclusions reached by the classical or the romantic processes need to be judged.”