It was in my 3rd year at University, that I encountered the work of Wittgenstein, and understood little, but hearing how he had rejected his early work, I recognized the pattern. And became silent. Unwilling to risk failure in the search for truth and meaning is a mistake, but I wasn't unwilling, just ignorant of my own position in the quest.
With perspective, 12 years later, I found that I had been, at the time, discovering a path exactly paralleling his. While studying 20th Century Analytical through Post-Modern philosophy, I had inadvertently come to very similar conclusions following the same sequence of ideas. And furthermore, that I had come to essentially the same conclusions, and attempted to live a true (or just) life, and published nothing, due to my own 'high standards', and loved from afar those who would be worthy of my love, so as not to miscommunicate using the distortions of language and/or destroy by some action/inaction the very things that make me feel such passion.
Oh, I knew Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege, and Art Nouveau, just as Wittgenstein, that is the essential problem, I should have known better, or at least, faster.It is hard to understand, unless you've lived in my mind, how similar our thinking and conclusions have been. Reason must be taken on faith, Science is based upon reason, thus the mathematical perfection of logic requires that we accept all thoughts as valid.
Separated by 80 years and death, and having little in common, perhaps some german blood, or a life on the edge of madness, and the privileges of time to self-actualize, we flew like two birds the same path through the peaks, only I had the jet-engine he designed to accelerate the journey.
Beyond reason, even though our a priori experience demonstrates the valid practicality of probability, the natural philosophy of physical reality is itself only a way of understanding within the context of our minds, it does not, can not exist without consciousness, and the reality has no meaning, lest we provide it so. Vodka, not water. I'm not claiming genius, not the kind that designs blood pressure cuffs and new engines, my math and engineering skills are largely undeveloped, and I had the advantages of perspective and a thousand professional philosophers trying to publish, but independently, we shared the same pattern of logic, the same thoughts.
Discovering that I have once again walked the same road as other minds is a blessing, as it lends me confidence that I have ability and am not crazy (at least no more crazy than the others), but it also defeats me, for it was to avoid reinventing the work, rediscovering the trail, that I spent so much life in school. To find that I could not short cut the process, that even in my study, I was just reproducing the journey on a meta-level, subconsciously repeating the cycles of the very minds I was attempting to grasp.
It is depressing to realize that even with all the information available, even with the best minds trying to communicate the wisdom, and teach us to avoid the pit-falls and dead-ends, we still need to experience the journey, in-order to gain the altitude necessary, the perspective required, to know where we have been.
Having experienced the same realization about the greek philosophers at 19, and Renaissance minds at 33, I now look back at all the time spent studying philosophical anthropology and putting ideas into historical context, and wonder what would have happened if I had just wandered the world on my own, and forced myself to discover the wisdom naturally, rather than polluting my mind with all the conceptions and misconceptions, vocabularies and translations, ideologies and theories of a thousand books and lectures?
Could I have discovered the same wisdom independently? perhaps I did, perhaps I do? But if I had gone that way, would it have taken my lifetime, as it did Ludwig, or has my study accelerated my mind as was my goal, and only applied a small tax, to be paid in translation and threats of madness?
If I've learned anything from my formal education, it had much less to do with the intended teachings, than pointing me along the same meta-philosophical paths, giving me opportunity to seek out other brains, off which to bounce ideas and gauge the size of the terrain.
I often learned more about politics, psychology, economics, education and social reality than about the specific subjects of philosophy which were the point of the schooling, but perhaps that human context is necessary to reveal the quest for truth and meaning, that brings people like myself, like Wittgenstein, to the work.
If we never encounter war and the banal people that struggle in the common way, or evade the academic world to avoid the word games, and deny the realms of business and politics because we recognize their illusions, perhaps we would not, could not, understand the thing that makes us different. Perhaps we could not find truth without the lies?
Only a baker can understand.
