If you learn from this essay, you will then also see how silly it was that it had to be explained to you in this manner. The essay is littered with appeals to historical anecdotes, and invites you defer to the way they went about it because it’s evident they had some success.
Bergman, Grothendieck, and Pascal all do this.
If the method itself doesn’t make sense to you by the light of your own reasoning, it’s not something you should be interested in taking seriously. And if the method makes sense to you on its own, you shouldn’t care whether big people have or haven’t tried it before.
But whatever words get you into the frame of attentively listening to your own mind, I’m glad those words exist, even if it’s sad that trickery was the only way to get you there.
6.54. My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
I’m sad this comment was interpreted as “combative” (based on Elizabeth’s reaction). It’s probably a reasonable prediction/interpretation, but it’s far from what I intended to communicate. I wanted my comment to be interpreted with some irony: it’s sad that this post has to be written like this in order to get through to most readers, because most readers are not already at the point where they can benefit from its wisdom unless it’s presented to them in this manner.
There’s a funny self-contradiction here.[1]
If you learn from this essay, you will then also see how silly it was that it had to be explained to you in this manner. The essay is littered with appeals to historical anecdotes, and invites you defer to the way they went about it because it’s evident they had some success.
If the method itself doesn’t make sense to you by the light of your own reasoning, it’s not something you should be interested in taking seriously. And if the method makes sense to you on its own, you shouldn’t care whether big people have or haven’t tried it before.
But whatever words get you into the frame of attentively listening to your own mind, I’m glad those words exist, even if it’s sad that trickery was the only way to get you there.
Or, more precisely, a Wittgensteinian ladder.
I’m sad this comment was interpreted as “combative” (based on Elizabeth’s reaction). It’s probably a reasonable prediction/interpretation, but it’s far from what I intended to communicate. I wanted my comment to be interpreted with some irony: it’s sad that this post has to be written like this in order to get through to most readers, because most readers are not already at the point where they can benefit from its wisdom unless it’s presented to them in this manner.