As an undergraduate I often felt such a strong identity with authors I read—Plato in particular—that I would say to myself, “That’s precisely what I think; that’s me.” From the standpoint of consciousness that is correct; my thought was his thought; we are the same consciousness. But from the physical standpoint, of course, it is nonsense—although there is something in Plato’s Meno and Phaedrus that makes us want to believe that we are the person we identify with, having passed through the river Lethe to come back to life.
That was my feeling with many philosophers I read after switching from science to philosophy—which probably explains why I did very well in the subject. That same feeling occasionally occurred with novelists like Tolstoy and Camus (“The Stranger”), Thomas Mann (“The Magic Mountain”), and Henry James (“Wings of the Dove”), and with poets like Wordsworth and Keats (Keats’s “Odes” especially); but here the identity was only partial because I realized I had no ability to write fiction or poetry. The same is true of the arts—music, sculpture, and painting. That’s why my dissertation at Emory and my teaching of the humanities was effective; I could convey their content to the better students in my classes.
But with philosophers (the best of them) the identity of consciousness was complete, and that is one reason I gave up teaching: in explaining the achievements of the great philosophers I was forced to temporarily abandon my own attempts to develop a philosophy to add to its history. As it turns out I have extended the tradition from Democritus through Epicurus, Spinoza, Kant, William James (his “Essays in Radical Empiricism”) and Bertrand Russell, though clumsily and incompletely</p>
Now I have (or would have if I had the strength) a desire to return to teaching again, not because I have discovered the Truth, but because I have discovered a next stage to that ever elusive goal. We hope, of course, that goal is God.
It is satisfying that E.O. Wilson seems to have reached the same conclusion, though having followed a different path—his a path of consistent effort, mine one of desultory laziness.