Philosophy can be a confusing and apparently contradictory pursuit unless Wisdom and its pinnacle concept/experience is its aim. In philosophy one thing eventually appears to be another unless you include within the pursuit of knowledge a dedication to inner and outer truth and the best application of what actually works in the world we all live in. Wisdom is integration, continuous integrating of whatever one is thinking about or doing. Integration must be distinguished from compromise as in the combination of truths and untruths, workabilities and unworkabilities, applicabilities and inapplicabilities and finally, and most subtely and importantly, equivocation with basic ethical considerations like does it allow an actually enslaving condition to persist instead of terminatedly resolving it….which of course is the correct and ethical thing to do in response to slavery.

But back to the apparentcy of “talking out of both sides of one’s mouth”. Wisdom is the correct and ethical combination. In order to combine you have to have at least two ideas/theories/intentions that more often than not appear to be completely opposed to each other…..but only so as to come up with an actually third idea, theory and/or intention that is a more ethical and unified whole. So philosophy without a third and ascendant objective is nonsense and equivocation, but Wisdom (the combining of two apparently opposing ideas) with a third more truthful, workable, applicable and ethically ascendant objective is the pursuit of what every one of the world’s major wisdom traditions points at…..the unifying and resolving state/condition of Grace/graciousness.