Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Phaedrus split human understanding into two classes: classical and romantic understanding. He defined classical understanding as mechanical, interested only in the underlying form of the image. It works with reason and by laws. He calls it “straightforward, unadorned, unemotional, economical and carefully proportioned.” It’s such a staple in the fields of science, law, and medicine that it’s viewed as a masculine mode. Emotion rather than fact rule the romantic understanding principle. Romantic people are creative, inspired, intuitive. Romantics are likely to be the artists and the poets in our society.