The question I spent twenty years trying to answer:
Does the path a person takes matter, or are all achievements evaluated absolutely — since an outside observer measures an objective metric, the result, while the path is a subjective one?
The answer:
Achievements matter more to the species; the path matters more to the mind.
It resembles Darwin’s concepts of inheritance and variation — interconnected in a similar way.
This line of thought also leads to a claim about the meaning of life. Though in my case, it was the other way around: I first formulated the thesis about meaning, and only later asked the question about the value of the path versus the result.
The meaning of life is reproduction and cognition.
Highbrow men immersed in relativism will call this formulation overly universal. But after going through a philosophy course, I realized: they don’t offer a coherent worldview — only an endless examination of historical contexts. In the end, the purpose of philosophy turns into an infinite analysis of other people’s delusions, where even the sharpest questions dissolve in a fog of interpretations with no constructive outcome. It resembles a collection of historical mistakes with an invariably bland ending — and in my view, offers neither progress toward truth nor inspiration for new discoveries. ■