Every person yearns to do good. Every person experiences a drive for truth. And every person seeks beauty.
The question of the good, the true, and the beautiful is central to human history. Cultures and societies are founded on what are considered the answers to these questions, on what is seen as good, true, and beautiful. But ultimately, these three, in the absolute, universal form that human beings desire—and of which they often feel or intuit that they exist in that way—are unknowable. They are eternal problems that define our lives.
Wittgenstein's Tractatus, in my opinion, has one valid point, and that is an idea of the limitations of our world 1. Ethics, aesthetics, and any fundamental truth (the sense of the world, for example) lie, as Wittgenstein admits in the Tractatus, beyond this limit—they are unattainable. In their pure, absolute, and universal form, the three elements will never be found in the objective world. But they can show themselves to us in what Wittgenstein calls “the mystical”.
No matter how hard we search, reason, or debate, we will only hear an echo. We encounter the absurd: we sense that there is more; the concepts of goodness, truth, and beauty are deeply ingrained in us, but we do not possess the key to deciphering them. Their reality extends no further than subjective, sometimes mystical experience. For while there are many ways to objectively find good, truth and beauty, none of them is sufficient to satisfy the absolute and universal forms of good, truth and beauty from our intuition and feelings. And any attempt to find them in this absolute and universal form ends in nothing more than disagreement over subjective matters.
Nevertheless, the search for these three has always preoccupied humanity, and our place in that search determines our way of life—whether as an individual or as a culture as a whole. It is the joke of our existence: we lack something or someone that gives clear value to life, something that tells us why we are here and what we are meant to do, and precisely when we guess at what it might be, we assign the value ourselves.
But herein lies the danger, because as soon as someone claims to have found the good, the true, and/or the beautiful, and becomes deeply convinced of this, they can use this as an instrument of power and oppression. The result: dogma, ideology, the end of critical thinking and dialogue, and the legitimization of power structures and oppression. Open a history book and you will find countless examples.
Precisely for this reason, it is in the fundamental unknowability of these three that human freedom resides. The search for the good, the true, and the beautiful not only determines how we live, it also ensures our freedom. We should interpret Socrates' famous saying, "I know that I know nothing", not just as an epistemology, but as a life lesson. For as long as we are aware that the good, the true, and the beautiful are fundamentally unattainable, we are free from dogma, and everything else is free from our imposition. As long as we are still searching, as long as we know that we know nothing, we are free.
1. We can recognize this idea in Wittgenstein's later works as well, see for example On Certainty.