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NO SHAM WISDOM: This philosophy would indeed be vain, stupid, and meddlesome if, instead of putting me on the path to enlightenment, it goaded me towards a refutation of our natural tendencies, i.e. of being stupid, deluded, illogical, unjust, sad, evil, presumptuous, superficial, etc., when the need or inevitability of such tendencies was indisputably manifest. For me to set out on the path of endeavouring to eliminate whatever idiosyncratic predilections for folly I may possess would be the height of folly! To imagine myself on the road to profundity by making an earnest endeavour to eliminate what superficiality I may possess would likewise constitute a similar absurdity, making me superficial rather than profound.

If knowledge is to serve any useful purpose, it must free me from the constricting prevalence of false wisdom, render me increasingly aware of the obligations imposed upon a healthy life, and lift me above the intellectual fog invariably engulfing the technical nature of wisdom, morality, religion, politics, art, truth, metaphysics, etc., which blinds so many people to the essence of reality. It is all very well for a man to seek wisdom, to require of philosophy that it teach him how best to live. But if that wisdom subsequently conflicts with his deepest predilections as a human being and thereby transpires to being little more than a caricature of wisdom, a metaphysical misunderstanding, an inversion of terminology, a mere shadow play, a medicine where there was no sickness or, worse still, a sickness where there had been no ill-health, then it were better that he dispensed with philosophical formulae altogether and learnt to follow his natural inclinations again - the very inclinations which, in the final analysis, constitute the real sagacity of life.