Words&Dirt

“‘Some people take days, sweat buckets, endure pain and cold and risk injury and––in some cases––permanent death to achieve the summit of a mountain only to discover there a party of their peers freshly arrived by aircraft and joying a light picnic.’

‘If I was one of those climbers I’d be pretty damned annoyed.’

‘Well, it is considered rather impolite to land an aircraft on a summit which people are at that moment struggling up to the hard way, but it can and does happen.  Good manners indicate that the picnic ought to be shared and that those who arrived by aircraft express awe and respect for the accomplishment of the climbers.

‘The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they’d wanted was to absorb the view.  It is the struggle that they crave.  The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself.'”

––Look to Windward, by Iain M. Banks, pg. 300

“Metaphysical arguments are like trees.  Their exact position, and their shape, are to a certain extent matters of preference: the metaphysician can choose where exactly to plant them, and how to trim them.  But he cannot choose whether they will grow or not; some spots on the conceptual landscape are more fertile than others.  If with the positivist axe we chop the trees down, they grown again.  If with the Wittgensteinian spade we start digging up the roots, we shall, fascinatedly, go on and on.  For even if we dig up one set of roots, there will be, if it was a stout tree, many others.  Perhaps digging is the proper philosophical activity at this time––certainly mere pride in having grown a tree larger than anyone else’s is no longer enough.  But there was something that justified such pride––the knowledge that the metaphysician’s green fingers had found the spot where acorns could grow.”

––Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, by Bernard Williams, pg. 33