The Question That Cannot Be Avoided
Why increase our knowledge? This seemingly simple question opens onto a landscape of profound implications. Knowledge matters because it shapes our capacity to understand reality, make wise decisions, solve problems, and act effectively in the world. But this immediately raises a more searching question: if knowledge matters, does all knowledge matter equally? The answer forces us into uncomfortable territory, territory that many intellectuals desperately wish to avoid.
Not all knowledge pursuits carry equal weight. Some represent what might be called intellectual hedonism: the pursuit of knowledge purely for pleasure or amusement, without regard to truth, utility, or human flourishing. While curiosity itself is natural and even virtuous, we cannot escape the question: which knowledge has the highest value? And more pressingly: what kind of knowledge should we be pursuing?
The Collapse of Relativism
Many of my colleagues, when confronted with this hierarchy of value, retreat to a familiar defense: "You can't measure value like this, it's all subjective." Yet these same individuals clearly believe their own pursuits stand higher than many others. They don't recognize that this argument is fundamentally nihilistic. If true, it would mean that one is not only justified in pursuing pure intellectual hedonism, but may actually be cheating oneself by not doing so. (This leads to a collapse of disciplined knowledge).
The contradiction is immediate and fatal. The moment someone admits to any difference in value, the moment they claim that philosophy matters more than playing checkers, or that their research has greater significance than trivia, they have shattered their own relativism. They have implicitly admitted a standard of value. But they refuse to follow this standard to its logical conclusion, afraid it will end in the negation of their own hedonistic pursuits.
This is convenient denial, nothing more. Once value distinctions exist, hierarchy becomes inescapable. To deny hierarchy is ultimately to deny meaning itself. And yet we can press further: why not keep asking the question of value to determine an even higher value? This disciplined ascent, this Socratic questioning, naturally points upward toward standards that transcend personal preference.
Without a real hierarchy of value, everything becomes equal, and all pursuits, including pure hedonism, become equally justified. This is the nihilistic endpoint that relativism cannot escape. Those who deny standards of intellectual evaluation while claiming their work matters are engaging in philosophical self-contradiction.
Intelligence as Summons
But intelligence itself calls us to ask: What really matters? What should I focus my energy on learning? This is not an optional question for those capable of serious thought. Intelligence is the capacity to perceive order, to discern that some things are higher, truer, or more essential than others. True intelligence moves from cognition to wisdom, from information to orientation.
The danger is real: a clever person can rationalize almost anything through sheer intellectual agility (and many studies have told us that the more intelligent a person is, the more likely they are to use their intelligence to validate their bias). Intelligence can become an instrument of self-deception, making sophisticated arguments for trivial pursuits or morally questionable paths. This is why the hierarchy of knowledge is not merely theoretical, it is a safeguard against the corruption of intelligence itself.
Intellectuals should prioritize knowledge that cultivates understanding and wisdom, not mere cleverness or amusement. More than this: intellectuals should seek pursuits that help others obtain wisdom and the tools of emancipation. They should strive to defend society, to preserve and transmit what is most essential. Knowledge becomes most valuable when it equips others to think clearly, choose wisely, and achieve intellectual and moral freedom.
The Foundation Revealed
In asking what truly matters (what demands our primary focus) we arrive at a conclusion both profound and certain. All valuable knowledge, regardless of domain, shares one thing in common: the laws of logic.
Logic is not merely one pursuit among many. It occupies a unique and foundational position. Consider what logic makes possible:
- Logic allows us to discern truth from falsehood
- Logic enables us to evaluate arguments rigorously
- Logic connects knowledge across all domains coherently
- Logic exposes self-deception and rationalization
- Logic emancipates thought from manipulation and confusion
But we must go deeper than the formal claim that logic governs validity. Formal logicians often miss the more fundamental truth: without the laws of logic, we cannot make any meaningful statements whatsoever. Logic makes all learning (indeed, all knowledge) possible.
Think about this for one moment. Remove the laws of logic and you can learn nothing, because everything becomes undifferentiated noise. Without the law of identity (that a thing is itself), the law of non-contradiction (that a thing cannot both be and not be in the same respect), and the law of excluded middle (that a proposition is either true or false), there would be no coherent world of objects, relations, or meanings to contemplate.
Raw sensory data without logic is mere chaos. Perception gives us data; logic gives us form. Every act of knowledge (scientific, moral, aesthetic) requires both, but logic provides the very structure that transforms experience into intelligibility. Even the simple recognition "this is red" presupposes the law of identity ("this") and the law of non-contradiction ("this color is not green").
The Deductive Proof
We can formalize this insight into a deductive argument that directly answers the question: "What should I focus my attention on learning first?"
Premise 1: The Principle of Foundational Value
The highest intellectual priority must be given to the knowledge that acts as the necessary precondition for the existence, coherence, and correct evaluation of all other knowledge.
(The condition that makes everything else possible holds the highest foundational value.)
Premise 2: The Coherence Requirement
Any instance of learning, thought, or understanding requires the ability to make and maintain coherent distinctions (e.g., between true and false, same and different, existent and non-existent).
(Without distinction, experience is only undifferentiated noise, incapable of being known.)
Premise 3: Logic as the Necessary Precondition
The ability to make and maintain coherent distinctions depends entirely on the Laws of Logic (specifically Identity, Non-Contradiction, and Excluded Middle).
(Logic is what transforms raw sensory data or conceptual elements from chaos into intelligibility.)
Premise 4: Logic Makes All Knowledge Possible
Therefore, the Laws of Logic are the absolute and necessary precondition for the possibility of all learning, thought, and knowledge.
(If logic were removed, all attempts to know, reason, or even communicate would collapse into meaninglessness.)
Conclusion: The Priority of Logical Knowledge
Therefore, the first and highest priority in the pursuit of knowledge (what one ought to focus on learning) is the knowledge of Logic, because it is the ultimate foundation upon which all other intellectual value and possibility rests.
This is not merely an epistemic claim about how we validate arguments. It is an ontological and cognitive claim about the very conditions of intelligibility. Logic is not secondary to experience but co-fundamental with it. Logic stands both at the summit of the hierarchy of knowledge and at the foundation of all value, it is simultaneously the highest and the deepest principle.
The Moral and Existential Imperative
The implications extend beyond epistemology into ethics and existence itself. If logic holds the highest value, then the intellectual life acquires clear direction and profound responsibility:
- The pursuit of logic is a moral act, not merely a cognitive one
- To align oneself with logic is to align with the structure of reality itself
- Every act of genuine understanding moves toward truth and coherence
- Every act of willful irrationality moves toward disintegration and chaos
The highest intellectual pursuit demands fidelity to logic, which stands as the fundamental intellectual virtue. Through it, the mind participates in the structure of reality, guaranteeing the conditions for all meaningful knowledge and civilization. This is not cold formalism, it is intellectual and even spiritual discipline. Logic demands honesty, humility, and courage, because it has no sympathy for comforting falsehoods.
Conclusion: The Inescapable Truth
We have demonstrated two profound truths in this inquiry:
First, the hierarchy of value is inescapable and real. The moment one distinguishes between better and worse, important and trivial, one has invoked this hierarchy. To deny it is self-defeating, for even denial presupposes that truth is better than falsehood— which is itself a value judgment.
Second, logic occupies the place of highest value within that hierarchy. Logic is the light of intelligibility by which all things are seen, it is the grammar of being itself. Without it, there can be no truth, no meaning, no differentiation, no knowledge whatsoever.
Therefore, those who pursue knowledge bear a responsibility not to their own amusement or comfort, but to truth itself. The question "What should I learn?" finds its first and most certain answer in logic, not because logic is merely useful, but because it makes the very possibility of useful knowledge intelligible.
Intellectual hedonism, however pleasant, represents a betrayal of what intelligence demands of us. Intelligence calls us upward, toward what is highest and most real. And at the foundation of that ascent, making the climb itself possible, stands logic, universal and indispensable.
-
-
-
