Those who say and preach that the perfection of man consists in the knowledge of truth and that all his ills come from false opinions and from ignorance are quite wrong. And so are those who say that the human race will finally be happy when all or the great majority of men know the truth and organize and govern their lives according to its norms. These are things said by almost all philosophers, ancient and modern. . . . I'm not unaware of the fact that the ultimate conclusion we draw from perfect and true philosophy is that we must not philosophize. From which we infer, in the first place, that philosophy is useless, for to achieve the effect of non-philosophizing, we don't need to be philosophers; in the second place, that it is extremely harmful, for that ultimate conclusion can be learned only at one's own expense, and once it has been learned, it can't be put in operation because it is not in the power of men to forget the truths they know and because one can more easily lay aside any other habit than that of philosophizing. In short, philosophy starts out by hoping and promising to cure our ills and ends up by desiring in vain to find a remedy for itself.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Those who say and preach that the perfection of man consists in the knowledge of truth and that all his ills come from false opinions and from ignorance are quite wrong. And so are those who say that the human race will finally be happy when all or the great majority of men know the truth and organize and govern their lives according to its norms. These are things said by almost all philosophers, ancient and modern. . . . I'm not unaware of the fact that the ultimate conclusion we draw from perfect and true philosophy is that we must not philosophize. From which we infer, in the first place, that philosophy is useless, for to achieve the effect of non-philosophizing, we don't need to be philosophers; in the second place, that it is extremely harmful, for that ultimate conclusion can be learned only at one's own expense, and once it has been learned, it can't be put in operation because it is not in the power of men to forget the truths they know and because one can more easily lay aside any other habit than that of philosophizing. In short, philosophy starts out by hoping and promising to cure our ills and ends up by desiring in vain to find a remedy for itself." in the context of "Giacomo Leopardi, trans. Giovanni Cecchetti, "Dialogue between Timander and Eleander", Operette Morali: Essays and Dialogues (1983), " to mean that wisdom is timeless.