Peace comes dropping slow

The trouble with philosophy is that it’s too easy. A good student can mug up a period or personality in Philosophy in a few hours and know enough to pass an exam. With more extensive study a good degree may be got without any real deep understanding of the issues. After all exams are graded on the basis of information and if a student gets that right he has to get the marks. So it has come to pass that academic Philosophy has been polluted by good students. There is no sure way to tell whether this learned person understands whereof he speaks. I take Wittgenstein as an example of a poor student who entered deeply into the oddities of knowledge and was able to circumnavigate the ‘known’ globe of justified true belief and the islands of orthodoxy.

At a certain point this savant, the idiot good student, will wake up and discover that there is no empirical justification for many of the positions of the great ones and from the dream of enlightenment he will wake up screaming - where’s the beef, even, where’s the sandwich. Calming him with a cup of cocoa a mentor will utter: What has happened here is that you were never puzzled, you were never visited by a genuine aporia even one that seemed foolish and contrary. You thought that all this poring over the legends of the great ones would lead to a question that was finally settled. To paraphrase Wittgenstein, there is no peace. Each new resolution dies and suffers the judgement of the Japanese joiner on the stainless steel square - it does not give me peace.

It may not be too late for the troubled one to go into neuroscience. There it will make no difference whether he thinks that the brain secretes consciousness and memory magically creates its own subject. Just keep sacrificing those chickens chum.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

Addendum 25/3/13:
I’m worried about evening full of the linnet’s wings. Can one linnet with one pair of wings fill an evening? Inishfree is a small island I’ve seen it, no more than a large rock with a lot of scrub on it, and possibly not much room for more than one linnet’s territory. This is like Wordsworth’s ten thousand saw I at a glance . You can’t see ten thousand at a glance, perhaps 200 at most. This should be looked into.

Maybe linnet’s is a misprint that has become canonical. Should it be linnets’?