Well, you do sound as if you’ve grown up in the past year or so—all calm and all—, but I find it hard to believe: hence this post.
There’s really only one alternative, though. We’ll have to test and taste you to see if yours is really the alternative to that alternative.
I think it’s rather as follows. Only very few philosophers, if they are indeed exceptions, have stopped at the point where they thought they were pursuing truth for its own sake, had completely rid themselves of every dark, deep backdrop of false judgment, every partiality, limitation, and (evolutionary- and group-)psychological impetus—the cave, as Plato called it.
Ah yes, those picturesque, naïve philosophers of old… But what if those weren’t really all that naïve? What if that was their disguise, even as poetry had long been their disguise, and being a political academic is their disguise today? You may have misunderstood them as well as yourself.
“Wisdom” was what the philosophers called it when they were still in pursuit of the world beyond the cave. They subsequently kept the name, and the myth of the cave, not for theoretical but for practical reasons.
But what if those weren’t really all that naïve? What if that was their disguise, even as poetry had long been their disguise, and being a political academic is their disguise today? You may have misunderstood them as well as yourself.