How far can knowledge make us better human beings?

Perhaps you too know people who hold the finest and most enlightened beliefs yet act against those beliefs throughout their lives.

The truth is that all of us suffer from this deficiency to some degree, and none of us is as good as what we know. What, then, is the distance in this world between knowing what we regard as right and acting on that knowledge?

Understanding this gap makes clear why Kierkegaard understands faith not as a matter of belief but as a matter of action. We admire the heroes of myths with wonder and satisfy ourselves with the thought that we too believe in their path and in the truth for which they stood. Yet how many of us are prepared to act on what we know to be right? Myths do not become myths merely because their heroes know the truth of their story; between being a reader and living within the myth, the hero chooses the latter.

Philosophy—philo + sophia—means love of wisdom, not the acquisition of wisdom. Philosophy in its most authentic form is love, and love does not belong to the realm of knowledge alone but to action. The path is not merely to know the truth but to live in truth.

Aydin Areta