The past is full of new ideas. In 1914, Bertrand Russell and his disciple Ludwig Wittgenstein took opposite paths. Russell would abandon Philosophy and mathematics to focus on his radical pacifism, ending up in prison in 1918, and Wittgenstein would begin to collaborate with the Austrian government. He fought at the front in 1916 and in the trenches his Tractatus took a new direction: to build bridges between logic and the meaning of life, beauty and God. He believed that only in the horror of war would he be able to build them.

For Wittgenstein, philosophical work consists in the search for the meaning of life, an activity that brings a person out of his or her intellectual inertia. But doing Philosophy is not easy; as he writes, "thinking about these things is not shuddering, but often repugnant. And when it's disgusting, it's the most important thing." The disgust of thinking is based on discovering the errors and nonsense that sustain the comfortable prison where the fictitious self dwells. The well-being of that prison is fragile. War would be the worst fruit of this intellectual inertia.

But words are not enough. Not even with a prison testimony like Russell's. For Wittgenstein, war begins in thought and is only overcome in life, by first attending to one's own itches. "To improve the world, improve yourself." He does not exclude social action; he indicates his starting point, the "work on himself." And then? Nothing ensures the correct reception of the anti-war speech . "It is impossible to say in my book a word about what music has meant in my life. How can I expect to be understood?". But war experience is no less important than artistic experience. "Yesterday I was shot at. I felt fear. I want to live. It's hard to give up life when you've taken a liking to it. But that is 'sin,' unreasonable life, false conception of life."

He is convinced that only those who follow the same pathos can fully share the communicative acts. This fullness is reached by poetic activity, where "by not trying to express the inexpressible we achieve that nothing is lost. But the inexpressible will be - inexpressibly - contained in what is expressed." Only this subject of aesthetic non-leadership can prevent war, forming sensibilities before intelligences. In a generalized context of corruption of sensibility, he assumes that only experiences as intense as those of war can "open more eyes." Although, he laments, without guarantees.

One of the worst manifestations of intellectual inertia is to remain oblivious to the limits of language, which are also those of the scientific method. The error of absolutizing mathematical reason, of not understanding that there are things that can only be shown (shown by living), leads to thinking like machines - and to delegating ethical judgments to machines. Wittgenstein may exaggerate in identifying this error as the main root of violence, but his advice is still fully valid today, a time in which mere computations, perhaps already being processed with Artificial Intelligence, seem to be imposing themselves in the most important geopolitical decisions.

Three decades later, with the atomic bomb, Wittgenstein writes: "It brings out the end, the destruction, the evil of a disgusting science." The potential use of AI for war purposes would only reinforce his view of uncritical trust in science. Wittgenstein accompanies this idea with a disturbing prediction, "It is not foolish to think that the scientific and technical age is the beginning of the end of humanity." We will have to work to ensure that this is not the case. But is it possible to reverse this uncritical confidence without all of us, parents and children, going through barbarism? Could it be avoided if we went back to the times of the warrior kings of the first millennium? Would decisions be different if rulers led their armies from the front line of battle? Warrior kings turned into philosopher kings, into poet kings; an embellished politics, revitalized with less cold minds. Perhaps then peace.