I just received the book Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations via Amazon. (Thank you Amazon!)
It’s recommended reading for the one-day course An Introduction to Wittgenstein: Games, Pictures, Rules, and Therapies which I will be taking this May through Oxford’s Continuing Education program. Although I am reasonably well-read in Western Philosophy, I do have some holes, and one of my deepest is Wittgenstein. I’m hoping reading this book and taking this course will allow me to start filling it with a couple of shovels of knowledge.
Ah, but why am I even bothering to fill it? At my age, what is its practical value?
That’s an interesting question; the answer centers around how I now approach my education.
I use to see education more like mountain climbing. The purpose of taking classes was to get a degree to help me pursue my career goals, and these degrees were similar to “bagging peaks.”
I’ve bagged an undergraduate degree in engineering, a master’s degree in physics, a doctorate in medicine, and a whole bunch of smaller board certifications and certificates along the way. In a sense, these classes and their degrees and certifications were a means to an end, rather than an end in of themselves.
But now I see my education more like a continuously flowing river, and when I swim in it, it’s for the joy of the swim itself. My search for knowledge is no longer a means to an end, it’s an end in itself.
Should all education be approached like this? I am not sure. After all, those earlier “means to an end” degrees did allow me to experience things that only a few people get to experience—for better and for worse.
But I do think it’s valuable to consider how we see (and have seen) our education—as a tool to use, or as a universe to explore?