The years teach much which the days never know. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of course experience changes us all, and in ways that our younger selves would never truly understand. As a prepubescent, read every book about sex, but I doubt that you will have anything interesting to say on the matter until you’ve doused the fire in your loins together with another human being. A bright teen is a brilliant thinking machine, but mere logical consistency is not truth. At some point, we turn our backs on questions that once preoccupied us, less because we’ve found the answer and more because we’ve convinced ourselves that there’s nothing there, or that perhaps the way forward will require a more circumlocutory route.
Perhaps the positive changes in our beliefs are something akin to wisdom, while the negative are more along the lines of cynicism, with it being our fate to never be sure about which is which.
I suspect that when sifting through our mature ideas for what might qualify as wisdom, we should try to separate what we believe we have learned about ourselves and about our times, and consider whether any of it necessarily applies to others more widely. I believe it is wisdom, not always granted to everyone, to discover what things in this world can serve us as individuals, while also remembering that one man’s meat is another man’s poison.
Also, it would be ironic if a rationalist ended up in a place where he doubted his progress.
All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience. -- Goethe
The years teach much which the days never know. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Of course experience changes us all, and in ways that our younger selves would never truly understand. As a prepubescent, read every book about sex, but I doubt that you will have anything interesting to say on the matter until you’ve doused the fire in your loins together with another human being. A bright teen is a brilliant thinking machine, but mere logical consistency is not truth. At some point, we turn our backs on questions that once preoccupied us, less because we’ve found the answer and more because we’ve convinced ourselves that there’s nothing there, or that perhaps the way forward will require a more circumlocutory route.
Perhaps the positive changes in our beliefs are something akin to wisdom, while the negative are more along the lines of cynicism, with it being our fate to never be sure about which is which.
I suspect that when sifting through our mature ideas for what might qualify as wisdom, we should try to separate what we believe we have learned about ourselves and about our times, and consider whether any of it necessarily applies to others more widely. I believe it is wisdom, not always granted to everyone, to discover what things in this world can serve us as individuals, while also remembering that one man’s meat is another man’s poison.
Also, it would be ironic if a rationalist ended up in a place where he doubted his progress.
All truly wise thoughts have been thought already thousands of times; but to make them truly ours, we must think them over again honestly, till they take root in our personal experience. -- Goethe