[Inu]

Wittgenstein's take:

>I was walking about in Cambridge and passed a bookshop, and in the window were portraits of Russell, Freud and Einstein. A little further on, in a music shop, I saw portraits of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. Comparing these portraits I felt intensely the terrible degeneration that had come over the human spirit in the course of only a hundred years.

[skoodge]

Here's another take by Wittgenstein from the preface of the Philosophical Remarks:

"This book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit. This spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand. That spirit expresses itself in an onwards movement, in building ever larger and more complicated structures; the other in striving after clarity and perspicuity in no matter what structure. The first tries to grasp the world by way of its periphery -- in its variety; the second at its centre -- in its essence. And so the first adds one construction to another, moving on and up, as it were, from one stage to the next, while the other remains where it is and what it tries to grasp is always the same."

I can't help but feel that this description of the "vast stream" captures the current trend in most of software development and academia quite well...

[javajosh]

There is a beautiful give-and-take between the experience of variety (either consuming or producing) and the grasping of essence. They do not exist independently of each other, nor is one better inherently better than the other. They must be kept in balance, and yet the world seems to favor variety over understanding at every turn.

Consider yourself lucky to be in the minority of those who appreciate what is truly rare and precious about humans, who are in turn a rare and precious part of life, which is in turn a rare and precious part of the universe.

[biztos]

> at its centre -- in its essence

This desire is precisely what leads Faust to become so frustrated with the limits of human knowledge that he makes an ill-advised bet with (more or less) the Devil, trading an option on his immortal soul for the keys to that essence.

In Goethe's Faust anyway:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goethe%27s_Faust