This is not wisdom yet, this is sleeping wisdom. To wake up, it needs you.
Perhaps, some of the greatest sages, like Confucius, Zarathustra, The Buddha, the Prophets of the Bible, Socrates, the Christ, or even Homer and Aesop never wrote, because they knew the danger of wise thoughts sleeping frozen on tablets: "...if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence." (Phaedrus, 275, D). Wisdom is not science which you can write down as general laws and logic, one for all; it is bespoke personal judgement, offered by unique thinkers to uphold unique persons through the unruly events of the human condition.
The trouble with wisdom, cast in writing to be preserved, is that it sleeps suspended in time half-alive half dead. To be useful anew, it needs to be resurrected from that slumber in changed times and circumstances. To rise and serve you, to be your own, those notable words - accounts, maxims, metaphors and symbols - must turn from other people’s explanations into your own understanding. Understanding is a living state of mind which you can only experience by yourself. Like all ideas, wise truth must translate from general theory to present common sense and obviousness. It must consider your point of view and fit your situation.
Even the common places of good sense, so universal and accessible, change their references with the centuries. Wisdom being contextual and tailor-made in its nature, its meanings may be alien to some dissimilar world where they come back to life. They may wake up alone, without their previous fellowship of understanding. A little high wisdom stirred in isolation and applied "in general" can even be a dangerous thing, with legs too short to reach the ground. By its nature, wisdom does not instruct, it hints; it helps only when fine-tuned with esprit de finesse and applied with prudent good sense. That is, wisdom received helps only when used wisely. It usually inspires you see things in a new light, counsels you what and what not, what is good, right, beautiful, what is preferable or evil and maybe why, but it doesn't tell you in what measure, how exactly, when, and where, and with whom.
Accordingly, you should not believe what you read here but rather examine with critical sense and try out carefully. I only point at promising ways and fresh starts but I cannot tell one in writing when to join that path and where to stop. Judging right, intelligent conduct in a moving context, is a matter of having your own head well made, an open mind, good masters and many flying hours of learning from your own life experience; sagacity is, before everything else, a mindset to ceaselessly and seamlessly repair errors as you do them. There is no answer right from the beginning. Yet again the rich – the intelligent and educated, the continuously learning and unlearning ones - will become richer and the poor in spirit will stay as dumb as they were found.
I admire and respect the treasuries of wisdom amassed in the sacred writings of the world religions but the “wise words” gathered here are worldly wisdom, not divine: things I lived, observed, or read, or heard, or understood, or thought up and worded myself. I collect, in the flow of the following pages, turns of mind and examples of what I found to be wise understanding and wise action, which I believe to serve the human person. That is, what appeared to me to be wise. Some of it proved to be sensible in my experience, as it bettered my life and who I am. Much of it helped other persons to do better. It is easier to help other people than to help yourself.
I believe now that wise words offer advice to questions like: What to know, to understand and do, in order to live well instead of just consuming life? What to want? What is of value and worth? What gives meaning to what I do, what makes me matter? What counts for those around me? How to be loved, respected and remembered? What to avoid? How to go about things, to get what I want and to avoid what I do not want? How to live now but also leave something behind me? How to be an author and freer actor of my life, instead of a mere social animal or a cog, a toy of circumstances and received ideas?
Over the years this "page" is growing into a curious kind of book; a labyrinth of commonsense subjects inter-related and deepened in time, as I reflect and learn more.
I will never be able to claim that my journeys are more than incessant beginnings, often unfinished, but I observed that starting anew things you want, ceaselessly, with resilience, is a way of freedom, of life, of agency beyond success or failure; success in your projects depends on many things and people, but starting new things depends on you. In the end you are what you did; many, many, beginnings, add up to a whole life of flourishing, at least of being yourself.
My findings are not wise enough to grant advice for everyone; of course I will be wrong here and there. My counsel is not science but instead - purposefully - a toolbox of common and uncommon sense devices. This collection evolved over years, in a web of intuition and of thoughts. I also take my sides and follow my values. This wisdom seems verified or at least its moral value confirmed in my circumstances. Your own wisdom may arise by reaching an opposite conclusion to what I write. Some value is certain, if not in my conclusions, but in provoking one’s thoughts about these matters. The odyssey is more important than the destination I reached. Do your own journey!
Ioan Tenner
Even the common places of good sense, so universal and accessible, change their references with the centuries. Wisdom being contextual and tailor-made in its nature, its meanings may be alien to some dissimilar world where they come back to life. They may wake up alone, without their previous fellowship of understanding. A little high wisdom stirred in isolation and applied "in general" can even be a dangerous thing, with legs too short to reach the ground. By its nature, wisdom does not instruct, it hints; it helps only when fine-tuned with esprit de finesse and applied with prudent good sense. That is, wisdom received helps only when used wisely. It usually inspires you see things in a new light, counsels you what and what not, what is good, right, beautiful, what is preferable or evil and maybe why, but it doesn't tell you in what measure, how exactly, when, and where, and with whom.
Accordingly, you should not believe what you read here but rather examine with critical sense and try out carefully. I only point at promising ways and fresh starts but I cannot tell one in writing when to join that path and where to stop. Judging right, intelligent conduct in a moving context, is a matter of having your own head well made, an open mind, good masters and many flying hours of learning from your own life experience; sagacity is, before everything else, a mindset to ceaselessly and seamlessly repair errors as you do them. There is no answer right from the beginning. Yet again the rich – the intelligent and educated, the continuously learning and unlearning ones - will become richer and the poor in spirit will stay as dumb as they were found.
I admire and respect the treasuries of wisdom amassed in the sacred writings of the world religions but the “wise words” gathered here are worldly wisdom, not divine: things I lived, observed, or read, or heard, or understood, or thought up and worded myself. I collect, in the flow of the following pages, turns of mind and examples of what I found to be wise understanding and wise action, which I believe to serve the human person. That is, what appeared to me to be wise. Some of it proved to be sensible in my experience, as it bettered my life and who I am. Much of it helped other persons to do better. It is easier to help other people than to help yourself.
I believe now that wise words offer advice to questions like: What to know, to understand and do, in order to live well instead of just consuming life? What to want? What is of value and worth? What gives meaning to what I do, what makes me matter? What counts for those around me? How to be loved, respected and remembered? What to avoid? How to go about things, to get what I want and to avoid what I do not want? How to live now but also leave something behind me? How to be an author and freer actor of my life, instead of a mere social animal or a cog, a toy of circumstances and received ideas?
Over the years this "page" is growing into a curious kind of book; a labyrinth of commonsense subjects inter-related and deepened in time, as I reflect and learn more.
I will never be able to claim that my journeys are more than incessant beginnings, often unfinished, but I observed that starting anew things you want, ceaselessly, with resilience, is a way of freedom, of life, of agency beyond success or failure; success in your projects depends on many things and people, but starting new things depends on you. In the end you are what you did; many, many, beginnings, add up to a whole life of flourishing, at least of being yourself.
My findings are not wise enough to grant advice for everyone; of course I will be wrong here and there. My counsel is not science but instead - purposefully - a toolbox of common and uncommon sense devices. This collection evolved over years, in a web of intuition and of thoughts. I also take my sides and follow my values. This wisdom seems verified or at least its moral value confirmed in my circumstances. Your own wisdom may arise by reaching an opposite conclusion to what I write. Some value is certain, if not in my conclusions, but in provoking one’s thoughts about these matters. The odyssey is more important than the destination I reached. Do your own journey!
Ioan Tenner
"Wisdom, sleeping..." is another quiet place of exchange on Internet where all serious people are invited to contribute with critique (always welcome) and with opinions and different knowledge. The world is plural and we do not own the one right answer.
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The reader will understand that this web-page is not a "Blog" at all. It is the contrary of the blog mentality in which the latest "post" discards the previous ones, based on the enlightenment-born belief that "old" means obsolete and "new" means progress. In fact I often modify some of the oldest little chapters to improve them with whatever I understood deeper after decades of re-visiting. All the subjects are as fashionable or out-of-date as you find them. To follow your interest instantly, simply type a keyword or phrase in the search-windows in the upper side of the pages.
With this "page" I also try another traditional genre in a form less usual: an old-time, first-person, intimate intellectual diary and commonplace book, in public, electronic form. Moreover, the text is ideally meant to be endlessly continued and improved by my son... if he will care.
In my youth I lived in denial of the simple fact that parents are with us only for a while; I did not ask the questions I should have and I was too busy to at least listen to what they learned from life and would have liked to give me. Later, often, I longed to ask, but they were dead. The well was dry.
I want to leave to my family which will continue, I hope, in the house of tomorrow, the one I cannot visit, that written fountain-head which my parents did not have the leisure to build for me - a later possibility to come and reconsider more than treacherous memory of how and what I learned and thought, and said. Thus, the bold hope goes, the next generation may reach higher than I, up from my shoulders, beyond my insights and my errors, instead of repeating the same.
I asked my son, Daniel Tenner, for whom I mainly write, to read the "posts" and comment, now or later. His role is clear and unavoidable: to challenge me, in a dialogue between father and son, as equals. He will riposte to my claims, on-line or in private: “Why do you say this? I find that reality, my reality, is different. The world is different now! This is how I see things.”
I dream to prove false the eternal complaint of the generational gap so well put in words by Willa Cather:
“The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.”
Let me dream.
*
The reader will understand that this web-page is not a "Blog" at all. It is the contrary of the blog mentality in which the latest "post" discards the previous ones, based on the enlightenment-born belief that "old" means obsolete and "new" means progress. In fact I often modify some of the oldest little chapters to improve them with whatever I understood deeper after decades of re-visiting. All the subjects are as fashionable or out-of-date as you find them. To follow your interest instantly, simply type a keyword or phrase in the search-windows in the upper side of the pages.
With this "page" I also try another traditional genre in a form less usual: an old-time, first-person, intimate intellectual diary and commonplace book, in public, electronic form. Moreover, the text is ideally meant to be endlessly continued and improved by my son... if he will care.
In my youth I lived in denial of the simple fact that parents are with us only for a while; I did not ask the questions I should have and I was too busy to at least listen to what they learned from life and would have liked to give me. Later, often, I longed to ask, but they were dead. The well was dry.
I want to leave to my family which will continue, I hope, in the house of tomorrow, the one I cannot visit, that written fountain-head which my parents did not have the leisure to build for me - a later possibility to come and reconsider more than treacherous memory of how and what I learned and thought, and said. Thus, the bold hope goes, the next generation may reach higher than I, up from my shoulders, beyond my insights and my errors, instead of repeating the same.
I asked my son, Daniel Tenner, for whom I mainly write, to read the "posts" and comment, now or later. His role is clear and unavoidable: to challenge me, in a dialogue between father and son, as equals. He will riposte to my claims, on-line or in private: “Why do you say this? I find that reality, my reality, is different. The world is different now! This is how I see things.”
I dream to prove false the eternal complaint of the generational gap so well put in words by Willa Cather:
“The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.”
Let me dream.
These then, the following, are some thoughts about wisdom and some words of wisdom I found to be deep and true in my life, in the times and the world of the Twentieth Century where I lived:
