Sleeping Beauty by Henry Meynell Rheam 1899 PD photo Wikimedia
This is not wisdom yet, this is sleeping wisdom. To wake up, it needs you.
Wisdom is learning how to understand, who to be and how to live.
Wisdom is many things. For the religious, it is a faith God-given, to obey and follow. That is certainly a wonderful guidance, untouchable by worldly decay. For some sages of legend, wisdom is an exemplary vocation and a great teaching to spread.
For many civilised people, wisdom is a practical moral code seeking the best for persons and society. From the point of view of Reason, wisdom is judicious and responsible rationality, seeking true knowledge, most useful and reliable; provided it is used with good intention. Yet other people are content to conceive of Wisdom as beneficial state or a Way to seek and live along in happiness and peace with the World. The question persists: is wisdom a means to all kinds of good or a goal? What do I know? probably both.
I see wisdom - be it secular or religious - as a major form of spirituality, of spiritual life. It may be part of a religion, doctrine or science or an alternative to them. In all its alternative forms, the reflexive concern for living well and being better is a way of elevation and excellence.
There are many ways to rise higher by belief, by knowledge or by deed. Differing and sometimes incommensurable choices of spiritual life are equally precious as ways of growing better and free, above the narrowness of immediate drives, mindless responses, passions and labour - towards great values, deep meaning, broad views and visions of the World - great ways, provided they do not forget the way back to real life and real people.
What is believed to be wisdom appears as faith, doctrines, moral codes, deep beliefs, even political ideologies. With many other people I consider the importance of certainty - be it religion, moral code or other irreducible conviction. I see this grounding as inevitable. Certainties, hard to change, determine the ulterior preferences and choices of what is true, good, just or useful. This determines the kind of wisdom that will appeals to you. But I find that, with all choices, there is an instrumental side to wisdom, and with it a substantial apprenticeship. Without practical wisdom and without its practice, grand beliefs, values and norms remain abstract, sterile and unfollowed. To be wiser and to act wisely, there are many competencies to acquire, much knowledge, many skills and ways to experience, practice and master. Some traits of the wise person may be born but most of the knowledge and the know-how can be educated. Without such an apprenticeship, one's wisdom has no legs.
Your effort to be wise is - from the beginning - the state of mind, an attitude, by which you - a person with no special power - rises beyond living the day like an animal laborans or homo faber if you prefer, domesticated to serve machines, power, money and dogmas.
There is more to wisdom that knowing it. Abundant sleepy knowledge in a head well filled, and even well made, does not equal becoming wise; the sparkling spirit of intelligence and knowledge must be grasped to wake up and become yours. It will be yours only when you understand what it means to you, deeper or higher. To you and to other people, to real life.
The state of being wise, is ultimately life grown aware of itself, affirming human life's own point of view. It emerges at the first person, in actual individuals. Wisdom (and its opposite) dwells in your image of the world, in your everyday life-space, in your good sense. It inhabits your feelings, thought, values and action. It guides you as a unique person among humans, through the unruly events of the human condition; it is your souls' awakened living in this world.
Here on Earth, in biographies rising to be life-stories, the pursuit of wisdom produces civilisation, good sense and humaneness.
Such learning makes your life-time rich and plentiful, instead of just spending it; wiser, you will author, enact and live your unique life story. Wisdom is an art to do your best with what is given, or in spite of what is given, with your means. Wisdom seeks, finds or gives meaning to one's life. Meaning that makes life worth living. Wiser, you build who you are and you navigate your life across this unpredictable ocean which is the world, instead of just being carried by the waves and the winds. Wiser, you learn to find choices and chose among choices. Wiser, you are mindful to know what you do and do what you know.
Wisdom is many things. For the religious, it is a faith God-given, to obey and follow. That is certainly a wonderful guidance, untouchable by worldly decay. For some sages of legend, wisdom is an exemplary vocation and a great teaching to spread.
For many civilised people, wisdom is a practical moral code seeking the best for persons and society. From the point of view of Reason, wisdom is judicious and responsible rationality, seeking true knowledge, most useful and reliable; provided it is used with good intention. Yet other people are content to conceive of Wisdom as beneficial state or a Way to seek and live along in happiness and peace with the World. The question persists: is wisdom a means to all kinds of good or a goal? What do I know? probably both.
I see wisdom - be it secular or religious - as a major form of spirituality, of spiritual life. It may be part of a religion, doctrine or science or an alternative to them. In all its alternative forms, the reflexive concern for living well and being better is a way of elevation and excellence.
There are many ways to rise higher by belief, by knowledge or by deed. Differing and sometimes incommensurable choices of spiritual life are equally precious as ways of growing better and free, above the narrowness of immediate drives, mindless responses, passions and labour - towards great values, deep meaning, broad views and visions of the World - great ways, provided they do not forget the way back to real life and real people.
What is believed to be wisdom appears as faith, doctrines, moral codes, deep beliefs, even political ideologies. With many other people I consider the importance of certainty - be it religion, moral code or other irreducible conviction. I see this grounding as inevitable. Certainties, hard to change, determine the ulterior preferences and choices of what is true, good, just or useful. This determines the kind of wisdom that will appeals to you. But I find that, with all choices, there is an instrumental side to wisdom, and with it a substantial apprenticeship. Without practical wisdom and without its practice, grand beliefs, values and norms remain abstract, sterile and unfollowed. To be wiser and to act wisely, there are many competencies to acquire, much knowledge, many skills and ways to experience, practice and master. Some traits of the wise person may be born but most of the knowledge and the know-how can be educated. Without such an apprenticeship, one's wisdom has no legs.
Your effort to be wise is - from the beginning - the state of mind, an attitude, by which you - a person with no special power - rises beyond living the day like an animal laborans or homo faber if you prefer, domesticated to serve machines, power, money and dogmas.
There is more to wisdom that knowing it. Abundant sleepy knowledge in a head well filled, and even well made, does not equal becoming wise; the sparkling spirit of intelligence and knowledge must be grasped to wake up and become yours. It will be yours only when you understand what it means to you, deeper or higher. To you and to other people, to real life.
The state of being wise, is ultimately life grown aware of itself, affirming human life's own point of view. It emerges at the first person, in actual individuals. Wisdom (and its opposite) dwells in your image of the world, in your everyday life-space, in your good sense. It inhabits your feelings, thought, values and action. It guides you as a unique person among humans, through the unruly events of the human condition; it is your souls' awakened living in this world.
Here on Earth, in biographies rising to be life-stories, the pursuit of wisdom produces civilisation, good sense and humaneness.
Such learning makes your life-time rich and plentiful, instead of just spending it; wiser, you will author, enact and live your unique life story. Wisdom is an art to do your best with what is given, or in spite of what is given, with your means. Wisdom seeks, finds or gives meaning to one's life. Meaning that makes life worth living. Wiser, you build who you are and you navigate your life across this unpredictable ocean which is the world, instead of just being carried by the waves and the winds. Wiser, you learn to find choices and chose among choices. Wiser, you are mindful to know what you do and do what you know.
*
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." (Plato, Phaedrus, 275, D).
Epic of Gilgamesh, Story of the Flood 7th century BC.(CC0 1.0) Wikimedia
The trouble with the knowledge of wisdom, cast in metaphors, maxims and fables - to be preserved and simple enough to be understood by many - is that it sleeps suspended in time, half-alive half dead. It is like the grains in the Parable of the Sower; most are waisted on bad soil, some fall on good fertile earth. The meaning of wise words is hardly separable from the one who gives it and from the one who receives it. To be useful anew, elsewhere and someday, wisdom needs to be resurrected from its slumber in changed times and circumstances. To rise and serve you, the seeker of wisdom, to become your own, those notable words - accounts, ideas, precepts and symbols - must turn from other people’s interpretations into your own understanding. Understanding is a living state of one individual mind, similar to the surprise of discovery, which you can only experience by yourself. Like all ideas, wise truth must translate from general thoughts into present commonsense and obviousness, practicable. It must augment your point of view and fit your situation. It must project light in front of you - to illuminate your way - and not into you eyes - to dazzle you and lead you in awe but half blinded, ready to be led.
Wisdom may grow "out of sync". Even the common places of good sense, so universal and accessible, wear and 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 and shared values. A little high wisdom stirred in such isolation and applied "in general" can even be a dangerous thing, with legs too short to reach the ground.
By its nature, genuine wisdom does not instruct, it does not "train", it hints, points, asks questions and shapes experience with a soft touch; heeding 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 to see things in a new light, counsels you what and what not, what is good, right, beautiful, useful, what is preferable or on the contrary damaging and evil. Maybe it explicates why, for what purpose, but it doesn't tell you in what measure, how exactly, when, and where, and with whom.
In my personal record called Wisdom sleeping... which is built like a maze of thoughts, I only point at promising ways and fresh starts but I cannot tell one in writing if and when to join that path and where to stop. Judging right, intelligent conduct in an ever moving context, solving new problems, 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 seamlessly recognise and repair errors as you do them. There is no answer right from the beginning to the end. Yet again, alas, the rich – the ones intelligent, resourceful and educated, the continuously learning and unlearning ones - will become richer and the poor in spirit will stay as dumb and dupe as they were found.
Accordingly, you are not expected to believe what you read here but rather examine with critical sense. If it tells you something try it out carefully.
I admire and respect the treasuries of insight amassed in the sacred writings of the world religions but the wisdom sought here is worldly, not divine: things I lived, observed, or read, or heard, or understood, or thought up and worded myself. It is all about life on earth, not afterlife, nor some other over-human utopia.
*
The flow of the following pages collects turns of mind and examples of what I found to be wise understanding and wise action, which I believe to serve the human person capable of choice. 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. Not enough. Much of it helped other persons to do better. It is easier to help other people than to help yourself. Provided of course that they listen.
I believe now that wise words follow questions like: What to know, to understand and do, in order to live well instead of just consuming life? What to want which is worth to want? How to go about things, to get what I want and to avoid what I do not want? What to avert, what not to do? What is of value for me, for us, for other people? What gives meaning to what I am and do, what makes me matter? What counts for those around me? How to be loved, respected and remembered? How to live now, but also build something and 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", collection of thoughts endlessly rewritten, hopefully improving, 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 the things you value and want, ceaselessly, with resilience, is , in itself, a way of freedom, of life, of agency beyond submission to the given, 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 and human.
Do not expect grand feats. To quote my role model, Michel de Montaigne, "I cannot keep a record of my life by my actions, fortune places them too low. I keep it by my thoughts"* (IT: but I would replace "fortune" with "what I was able to achieve"). These then, are 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.
And what about proofs of my beliefs and advice ? Are they "objective" and "replicable" ? My collection of advice is not science but instead - purposefully - a personal toolbox of common and uncommon sense devices of practical wisdom proposing meaning and inventing conduct. I avoid jargon, write what I think and devise solutions. I gave myself the freedom to take temporary leave from the "iron-clad" requirements of Scientific method and proof. I allow myself to just think. I believe in the unique power of the human mind, as it is. Certainly, my experience is limited and my achievements humble. A web of intuition and of thoughts. I also take my sides and follow my own values. This wisdom seems verified or at least its moral value confirmed in my circumstances in my life-world. Other people seem to live in other moral spheres. Your own wisdom may arise by reaching an opposite conclusion to what I write. My findings are not wise enough to grant advice for everyone; of course I will be wrong here and there. Some worth is certain though, 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 2011- 2024
"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. There seems to be more than one wisdom.
*
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 modernist belief that "old" means obsolete and "new" means progress. I do not believe that latest, faster, cheaper, more, is better. In fact I often modify some of the oldest little chapters to improve them with whatever I understood deeper after years 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, private intellectual diary and commonplace book... in public, electronic form. In fact, I am experimenting with a book on-line. Moreover, the text is ideally meant to be endlessly continued and improved by my son... if he will care... and by his children if they ever come...
In my youth I lived - like most people - 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.
We mind the well when it ran dry..
I want to leave to my family, if it will chose to perdure as 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, rebellious memory of how and what I learned and thought, and actually said. Thus, the bold hope goes, a next generation may reach higher than I, up from my humble shoulders, beyond my insights and my errors and ignorance, instead of repeating the same.
I asked my son, Daniel Tenner, for whom I mainly wrote, to read the "posts" and comment, now or later. His role is inevitable: to challenge me, to replace me. He does and will riposte to my claims, on-line or in his mind and actions: “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 wish his response will mature in time into a dialogue between father and son. Even when I will no more be able to answer.
I still dream, poor me, to prove false the eternal complaint of the generational gap so well put in words by Willa Sibert 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 modernist belief that "old" means obsolete and "new" means progress. I do not believe that latest, faster, cheaper, more, is better. In fact I often modify some of the oldest little chapters to improve them with whatever I understood deeper after years 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, private intellectual diary and commonplace book... in public, electronic form. In fact, I am experimenting with a book on-line. Moreover, the text is ideally meant to be endlessly continued and improved by my son... if he will care... and by his children if they ever come...
In my youth I lived - like most people - 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.
We mind the well when it ran dry..
I want to leave to my family, if it will chose to perdure as 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, rebellious memory of how and what I learned and thought, and actually said. Thus, the bold hope goes, a next generation may reach higher than I, up from my humble shoulders, beyond my insights and my errors and ignorance, instead of repeating the same.
I asked my son, Daniel Tenner, for whom I mainly wrote, to read the "posts" and comment, now or later. His role is inevitable: to challenge me, to replace me. He does and will riposte to my claims, on-line or in his mind and actions: “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 wish his response will mature in time into a dialogue between father and son. Even when I will no more be able to answer.
I still dream, poor me, to prove false the eternal complaint of the generational gap so well put in words by Willa Sibert Cather**:
“The dead might as well try to speak to the living as the old to the young.”
Let me dream...
* Michel de Montaigne, the Complete Works, Tr. Donald M. Frame, Everyman library Alfred A. Knopf, New York..., 2003
** Cather, Villa (1922) One of Ours, Dover.. Mineola, NY 2007
** Cather, Villa (1922) One of Ours, Dover.. Mineola, NY 2007