Before you can get wisdom, you first have to love wisdom.  To love something means that you want it, you desire it, and most importantly you pursue it.   The degree to which you pursue the object is an indication of how much you love the object.   In this way, philosophy as the love of wisdom is synonymous with the pursuit of wisdom.

The key to wisdom is contained in the background wallpaper of this web page, but you must not assume that wisdom is easily revealed -- it requires a long pursuit involving translation, interpretation, understanding, and appropriation.  Given this qualification, some of you may think the pursuit of wisdom and meaning a waste of time (or not worth the effort), in which case you probably believe one of the following:

(a) you already have wisdom (or at least enough of it) and know enough of what is real to get by in life, hence no pursuit of it is necessary.

(b) there is no wisdom, hence no pursuit is necessary.

(c) wisdom, if it exists, is so deep that you cannot understand it, hence no pursuit is necessary since you would not understand it if you found it.

(d) you are not sure what you believe about the pursuit of wisdom and life's meaning (you may not have given it much thought), in which case you would not know whether you believe (a), (b), (c), or that the pursuit is worthwhile.

For those of you who identify with position (d) however,  there is the following thought experiment that you can try to help you decide whether you think the pursuit of wisdom worthwhile or not.  This experiment comes to us from G.E. Lessing and Soren Kierkegaard.

Suppose God offers you the following two choices (with the condition that you can choose one or the other but not both):
 

GOD'S LEFT HAND CHOICE THE ETERNAL PURSUIT OF WISDOM Click Here to ETERNALLY pursue Wisdom, Truth, and the Complete Answers to life's big questions.  In short, click here to pursue Wisdom without ever reaching it--the beginning of a never-ending journey, in which you might find Lessing's and Kierkegaard's choices among other things.

GOD'S RIGHT HAND CHOICE WISDOM Click Here to download and understand Wisdom, Truth, and the Complete Answers to all of life's big questions.  In short, click here to receive Complete Wisdom thus ending the pursuit of wisdom.  After downloading, simply execute the WISDOM. EXE program and the meaning of life will be clear to you.

If you choose God's Right Hand, then you very likely lean toward position (a), (b), or (c) above and do not intrinsically value the pursuit of wisdom.  If you choose God's Left Hand (and have read this far on the web page), then you appear to have the desire to PURSUE questions, answers, and wisdom, which I invite you to continue in a philosophy course at Armstrong Atlantic State University.