My taste for cars drives my engineer father crazy. Every time I put the car’s attractiveness over its utility – this usually means that I end up with a cute but temperamental foreign car that is expensive to repair and costs significantly more than the “more reliable” option. My dad and I once spent three hours trying to figure out how to replace the headlight in my late New Beetle. We had to disassemble the air filter, remove the battery, and flip the stuck plastic switch like a surgeon with pliers in one hand and a screwdriver in the other, all during a blizzard. For him, the appearance of something does not really matter. What matters is its components and how well they work.
In his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Piersig divides human understanding into two types: classical understanding and romantic understanding. Piersig writes: “Classical understanding sees the world primarily as a basic form. Romantic understanding sees it primarily in terms of immediate manifestation. “
Romantic thinkers feed on inspiration, intuition, creativity, and imagination. They value looks beauty or art and are driven by their feelings. Classical thinkers value systems, laws, and logic. For them, the internal structure of a thing is much more important than its appearance.