I walked home in the twilight and I said to myself, “Of course, I can’t know if I’m doing the right thing, nobody can know if they’re doing the right thing really—I think I am, but I can’t know for sure.” At that moment, I looked up and the night’s first star blinked on in the sky right before me. It seems like a clear sign to me that I am on the right track. At a certain point, you have to follow the stars—even modern philosophers come to learn that.
Schopenhauer, for example, claimed to have discovered “the castle”—the castle in the forest, Castle Will. He said he was the first man to have described this castle, the castle that lay behind everything—the academic philosophers had been too busy or too vain to notice. It took an unfashionable independent philosopher to find this castle. Yet Schopenhauer, though he was proud to discover it, could only walk around Castle Will—he could walk around it, sketch its towers and crenellations in precise detail. Yet he could never step inside; so he was, in fact, just like Kant—a man he criticised—with his noumena that remain inaccessible to us. Castle Will keeps its secrets.
Wittgenstein parsed logic in a more consistent way that Russell, and he came to conclude that there was something beyond logic—something that could only be pointed to, not described. So you see, all the philosophical firmament’s brightest modern philosophers arrive at the conclusion there is “some thing” out there that can be inferred from logic or reason and yet is not accessible to either—they all arrive at the gates of Castle Will. To step inside the castle, you have to become magical—and, since religion is codified and refined magic, you have to become religious. This is to say that to understand reality you have to go to the limits of logic and reason—and, once there, put your faith in the stars.