“The truths Phaedrus began to pursue were lateral truths; no longer the frontal truths of science, those toward which the discipline pointed, but the kind of truth you see laterally, out of the corner of your eye. In a laboratory situation, when your whole procedure goes haywire, when everything goes wrong or is indeterminate or is so screwed up by unexpected results you can't make head or tail out of anything, you start looking laterally. That's a word he later used to describe a growth of knowledge that doesn't move forward like an arrow in flight, but expands sideways, like an arrow enlarging in flight, or like the archer, discovering that although he has hit the bull's-eye and won the prize, his head is on a pillow and the sun is coming in the window. Lateral knowledge is knowledge that's from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that's not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one's existing system of getting at truth.”

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About Robert M. Pirsig

American writer and philosopher

Robert Maynard Pirsig was an American writer and philosopher. He is best known for Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, published in 1974, and Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, published in 1991. His work is shaped by philosophical questions about values, morals, and quality. He also co-authored On Quality: An Inquiry Into Excellence: Selected and Unpublished Writings with his wife and editor, Wendy Pirsig, which was published in 2022.

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Books by Robert M. Pirsig

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

2000

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