Taking pride in ignorance First and foremost, concentrate on your strengths. Put yourself where your strengths can produce results. Second, work on improving your strengths. Third, discover where your intellectual arrogance is causing disabling ignorance and overcome it...First-rate engineers, for instance, tend to take pride in not knowing anything about people. Human resources professionals, by contrast, often pride themselves on their ignorance of elementary accounting or of quantitative methods altogether. But taking pride in such ignorance is self-defeating. Go to work on acquiring the skills and knowledge you need to fully realize your strengths. Peter F. Drucker, Managing Oneself ignorancearrogance
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus A Book by Ludwig Wittgenstein www.gutenberg.org The totality of factsEverything that can be saidI am my worldEthics and aesthetics are oneWhereof one cannot speak
The totality of facts The world is the totality of facts, not of things. The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts. For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.
Everything that can be said Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. What can be put into words understanding
I am my world What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think. In fact what solipsism means is quite correct, only it cannot be said, but it shows itself. That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of that language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world. I am my world. (The microcosm.) The thinking, presenting subject; there is no such thing.
Ethics and aesthetics are one Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher. It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one.)
Whereof one cannot speak My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. What can be put into words meaning