Friday, July 09, 2010

Journey or Desintination

Ouroboros.
Journey leads to a destination. Which leads to another journey. So the destination actually becomes (spawns) another journey. Which spawns a destination. The destination really is the same as the journey, if you think about it. I think there's no meaningful way of separating them.



One thing I discovered about philosophical questions like this: My instinct is to get really specific definitions to the bits of the question.
What Journey? What Destination? When does the journey end?
That act of specifying tends to trivialize the question. Which is satisfying in a way. It makes everything simple and clear.
But it is unsatisfying because it doesn't really answer anything interesting.


Philosophers are naturally attracted, I think, to questions with fuzzy definitions. Those are the ones that seem to be interesting.
Wittgenstein, for example, basically said any question with simple clear statements that could be logically resolved was essentially a triviality.
A tautology. He included all of mathematics in the "trivial" category.


(Gödel actually - ironically - proved him wrong. With a mathematical proof. Gödel had sat in on Wittgenstein's seminars. Wittgenstein basically ignored his work and continued with biz as usual, which seems kind of curious).

(They sure look like smart guys, don't they?)
Anyway, I guess that means the question of Journey/Destination reduces to defining what YOU mean by Journey and Destination.
So I'm bouncing that one back to you :)