WelcomeI am a failed philosopher
Maybe it is not all bad to be a "failed" philosopher?
A large part of it is bad: I was intellectually crippled by my "preparatory" schooling, and teenage OCD obsession due to my ignorant parents not dealing with a health issue which would have been fatal.
But if the "bedrock" of thinking is inaccessible, then to "succeed in understanding everything" would be an ultimate failure.
"'Man weiss nicht von wannen er kommt und braust', wrote Schiller of the surge of language from the depths to the light. No man knows from whence it comes...." (George Steiner, "After Babel", p. 108)
Bob Dylan said in a New York Times interview in 2020 that he does not invent the lyrics for many of his songs: they come to him and he takes inner dictation. If a new idea is something that is not algorithmically generatable from what is known, then it is not any where, so if you go looking for it you won't find it even if you could exhaust the infinite search space. Metaphorically: the answer is in a dimension not defined in your basis vector set. In the end, he (she, other) who thinks has to fail. (As for new ideas, once they have come into the world, they metaphorically add new dimensions to our basis vector set and thus find their place in a expanded world they have dimensionally enlarged.)
So, to assert I am a "failed philosopher" is, partly, to succeed in philosophy. And I'm not being a smart-ass like that ugly old college phiosophy class matinee idol, Mr. Socrates (right), who said he knew nothing but really he knew how to make a mockery of other people (item: the Athenian citizenry at his famous trial) and/or to pontificate to toadies ("acolytes"): The answer just plain is not there. In what way it is not there, of course, is a philosophical task, and, analogous to how an astronomical (not ethnic) black hole emits radiation at its boundary layer, this unobservable" has effects which can be studied. How "far" I get in this endeavor is the measure of how far I am simply, not just metaphysically, a failure.
One can start with that thought that to judge the world is to go beyond being. Do you, my reader, judge your world, or do you just accept that it is what it is, or just not think about it and be part of it, whatever it happens to be?
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