What is wisdom?
"The proper study of Mankind is Man." *
New version (3) 25-11-2014, 20-11-2017
What I seek is worldly wisdom.
Overall, I would describe wisdom as a plurality of world-views intended to guide us while we strive for earthly lives well lived. Applied, these ways to grasp our world expand into choices of sustainable ways to achieve the human aspirations.
Wisdom human-centred, embraces the ways of understanding the world thrust on us as a given and also the one we create. To comprehend it, wisdom examines all our kinds of knowledge, ignorance, creeds, values, interests, purposes means and limits. It considers them all in order to judge well, and act well, reasonably, in the interest of us, people. In its turn, wise understanding may shape reality and even become reality by agency and life-changing conduct.
Finally, for Man, wisdom is a way of becoming and of being. Flourishing as a better human being.
In short, the view of worldly wisdom which I will follow in this essay is organised by a simple metaphor :
Living well is rooted in four pillars : wise knowledge, good judgement, wise conduct and "being wise", a way of life which turns all the erudition and dreams about wisdom which sleeps in the mind into wisdom alive, lives well lived. For us and those around us.
With such an end goal, we seek to understand and practice what breeds sustained welfare, what rises us from among mere beasts, salary-workers, soldiers and partisans, to flourish as civilised humans. Wisdom is what keeps us alive and human when our world goes astray from time to time; what we must understand and do to help ourselves and other people to do our best in our life-times. Obviously, as the world is plural, with several cultures, histories, ways of life, domains and creeds irreducible to one, there is no unique wisdom but several incommensurable worldviews and ways of wisdom, often competing.
Living wisdom cannot be in one book.
Worldly wisdom is not a religion nor a science. It does not serve a God, sacred to us or Truth highest of moral values, whoever or whatever they may be. It serves us, people. My own belief is that religions, with their sacred wisdom, are meant to serve people too.
Wisdom is not a tool or a calculation, a cult or an art. The ultimate aim of human wisdom is to be of use to Man and Humanity, not to some servant of Humanity turned into an idol like money-making, politics, science, technology and other endeavours of which we tend to forget that they are mere lowly tools.
Wisdom conceived otherwise, as divine - which aspiration I deeply respect - sees things from a higher, over-human perspective. It reveals us what we must do. It has the infallible strength of being granted from above. The worship of the monotheistic God decrees wisdom (described in sacred texts) as His plan and will, so that for Man, the meaning of life and the beginning of wisdom shall be faith, trust, discipline, the fear of God; and the deeper path, the self-denying agony of deciphering God’s ways. This inscrutable subject is not what I pursue. But certainly, we have many precious things to learn from the good-faith study of religion and the sayings of the saints.
Passionate rationality - which, still justified today with purest reason, logic, Science and technology - knows itself to be clear and free, above mere beliefs, moral axioms and feelings - chose, on its side, to conceive wisdom (reluctantly, perhaps because Science holds traditional grudge against Religion) as essence of materialistic knowledge: impersonal, "objective", universal, tangible, controllable. Rationalistic wisdom is still dominant nowadays as “high” truth and procedural expertise, twice verified and validated, experimentally and from the point of view of Reason. However, I would say, science's wisdom is still seen from an angle of faith: the exclusive faith in an infinite Universe of matter taken to be all that exists. Nothing else counts. Reason is worshipped as the unique, unquestioned way of proper knowledge and action. Such cosmic and objective wisdom is equally beyond my ambitions.
*
Earthly Wisdoms as I see them, have their own choices of Weltanschauung and basic beliefs, their language and approach, never beyond debate. My choice is vaguely expressed by the word "humanism", meaning by it respect and bias for the human as it is, rather than some historic pre-enlightenment or post-enlightenment movement.. I try to express this outlook and clarify what I believe to be the "wise" humanist point of view. I dare to speculate how the wise thinkers may reason and the sorts of wisdom they consider from theory to practice. I also attempt to describe wisdom in its native tongue - the language of common sense (another defamed notion in need to be reclaimed and re-defined).
You will find that the way I chose to interpret wisdom is not impartial but only human and purposefully so; my effort is to outline a fair and practical description which gives form to wisdom in an intuitive way that makes sense naturally, so that it may help me and other people to make sense of our life-world, do something and improve.
I attempt a bridge between rich but incommensurable concepts of wisdom that cannot communicate with each other today - the religious spiritual view and a rationalist spirituality. Both work in good faith to elevate the human being but, because of exclusive dogma, they reject and disparage the choices of wisdom of the other view.
I wish - instead of taking sides - to accept inconsistent diversity and to defer in epoché the irreducible opposition between wisdom seen exclusively as scientific truth verified and the similarly authoritative belief in truth revealed; one, wants the criterion of wisdom to be material and logical truth; the other, affirms the truth revealed in the name of God or some other spiritual reality, unverifiable with our senses and actions. Both are marvellous, productive choices. Both prove beneficial for the way people live their life as long as they do not go to war. Both can go astray in inquisition and dehumanisation. As it appears they will have to live side by side for a long while...
I attempt to change - for a try - the acid test of wisdom from how true it is from a dogmatic point of view, to how beneficial it proves, to orient and achieve better life for living persons.
*
For those of us, common-sense folks who seek wisdom, it is something we want to have and to wield.
The raison d'être of wisdom is not to build a body of knowledge or faith. It is to breed wise persons.
We wish to be wise, not to study, amass, dissect, abstract wisdom, nor to worship it by lighting candles and performing rituals in its honour.
We, lovers of wisdom, doubt that eliminating good sense in favour of exact dryness or, as another choice - unquestioning faith, will make all of us wiser or happier.
We want wisdom in order to be better humans and to live well this humble, one-time, short life we got here in this infinitesimal speck of the Universe.. We aspire to help our children or other people around us, do their best - for them and for us, not for some high, higher, highest, "cause".
To grow wiser in our mind, it seems that we experience, feel, intuit, learn from other people, reflect, grasp, discover, comprehend and mature. To be wiser, it appears to me that we also learn like an artisan's apprentice, from unique masters, by taking part in what they do; with eyes, ears and touching and trying out, in the old ways, guided by a trusted mentor.
During apprenticeship, wisdom must appear simple enough for us to understand. To make wisdom ours, the best but most costly would be to discover it, build it up, not just receive it ready-made, in words. Even to acquire the art of being wise beyond words, by observing other people wise or foolish - we still need to understand it from compelling incidents lived, to feel it at work, try it and taste it. The best curriculum of wisdom I know about is contiguity and co-action with wise mentors. It helps less to split words about its definitions and norms than to take part in it.
We emulate wisdom - if we are lucky enough to chance the company of sages - because of admiration, sometimes by faith: we marvel at this deeper humane view, that higher human condition, this amazing efficacy of simplicity and mastery. Thus, we discover spirituality, that subjective intangible experience which elevates one. Be it religious or secular spirituality. We trust those exemplary people, we observe, listen, marvel, ask and suddenly comprehend: Aha! So, this is what it is! We echo. We become. We feel that we become better people freed from the mere survival, pleasures, pains and routine of the everyday. We are contaminated with wisdom to rise higher and find, or even give meaning to our lives.
Alas, seriously wise mentors are rare.
We gain therefore our personal wisdom painfully, anew in each biography, with our own generation, eluded by short-term rainbows and victories and burned into memory by our own costly errors. Even this little requires at least a habit of learning from errors instead of denying them. If reasonably intelligent and strong, we also learn from observing other people's mistakes and drawing what we are able from the witnessing of past time sages. In this way we have a fair chance to become wiser and, in time, even wise.
Much basic but in no way minor wisdom we receive "for free", informally, as savoir-faire and shared common knowledge we absorb without noticing; it comes from the notions and turns of mind built into the mother tongue, from the folk lore instilled along our childhood, from imitating our parents and significant others, from a few key myth, tales, customs and sayings and nowadays from films, networked representations and games. All this forms a half-conscious underground of obvious wisdom (or its opposite) expressed in the universally local language of common sense, unquestioned and validated - potentially - by the intuition and the generic good sense we may have. Unfortunately, this wisdom is mixed lavishly with its opposite, prejudice, ignorance and widely accepted stupidity equally present in the received common-sense. Thus, without critical sense we can hardly differentiate wisdom from pretence.
Our would-be personal wisdom keeps evolving or regressing and even collapsing disheartened as we encounter nature, people, culture and technology. Wisdom is not guaranteed one way progress acquired once for ever. A myriad wise or misleading hints keep adding to and altering or eroding morally our world-view, year after year, glimpsed here and there, overheard, stumbled upon in formative and life-changing events, tools, books, television, browsing, readings, songs and the like... I prise the wise ones; alas the opposite learning of straying stupidity and madness is also at work, deluged upon us in the same compelling language of fads, common sense and authority.
"But where shall wisdom be found and where is the place of understanding"?
As we become purposeful to learn wisdom, we heed teachers, preachers and gurus (who may be not so bad), we read scattered books were it sleeps inert, waiting, hidden among too many words and obsolete pretence and shameless lying claims. Without critical sense and humanistic education it is often difficult to see the difference.
We long for great books containing wisdom itself, evergreen, that authentic living thing, but what we find usually is books about wisdom or worse, about somebody’s sectarian beliefs or doctrine.
Mostly, we explore dead sages' writings and their remembrance: Who were those wise ones, anyway? What particular wisdom is contained in their books? What wise actions are they remembered for? Why was that wise? Did they live as they counsel? Were they happy as a proof of their wisdom being real? Did they give meaning to their life? Did they make other people's life meaningful? Did they help other people to actually live better to be more fully human? Did they improve our world in the real-life interest of people? What is improving the world anyway?
How to discern and harvest all the scattered wisdom for our personal improvement? We need a new sage like Erasmus of Rotterdam, to compose another lifetime oeuvre, contemporary, exhaustive Adages [1] to catalogue the liberating questions and the precious responses and examples in one collection, one monumental treasury for everyone to study. Then we will still have to protect it against new beasts and barbarians eager to censor and burn it.
Let me dream... there does not appear to be any build-up of progress from human recklessness to wisdom, from evil to goodness, towards some great, definitive, accumulating and evolving rational one-doctrine to be called Wisdom, or simply "Man learning to be civilised and good". Seemingly, with all the growth of knowledge, faith and technology, human beastliness did not recede; it was even amplified with expertise, powerful machines and weapons, detachment and indifference. Nowadays I even discover that the progress of technologies is itself an enemy of wisdom, a grave threat to human good life.
If you want wisdom in your life, you will have to build your own ark of it and keep it afloat on discouraging seas.
*
In my quest, I found no such thing as one universal wisdom; no systematic instruction either in a credible worldly wisdom which would have the human person at the centre instead of touting some supra-human dogma. This is a good thing after all. In fact, I am now convinced that any generic or formal wisdom put in writing is frozen, false and dangerous. Dogma is always artificial, far from people and from life, incapable to help but almost certain to rigidify and harm.
There are no absolute sages either, except in the Heavens and the tales; the celebrated sages that ever lived were not wise all over, they did mistakes too and ugly, foolish things, as it seems. As for the sages not remembered, we do not know how they were. Sages were wise in one way and less in another. Most sages honoured, were much wiser in what they urged other people than for themselves; "do what they say, not what they do"[2] Do not forget this biblical warning when you fall in admiration!
Moreover, some words of wisdom seem eternal and universal, but some move or crumble: what was wise then and there is not so here, now, for me. Wisdom is time and context sensitive. Truly wise generalizations should have a jubilee expiry date and application boundaries explicitly described.
As I love to repeat, most wisdom sleeps and needs to come alive in us as our own; at least in part, wisdom is a living thing. It is discouraging to me to observe how much past wisdom seems lost and dead instead of building up in higher civilization. As I complain elsewhere, there is wide agreement that we do not learn from History. We, the Humanity, instead of acting like an evolved, civilised community of mind still behave like a species.
And who says that all wisdom is good? the dreamers and the moralists who define it so. They are wishful that - because of being reasonable - wisdom is logically tied to the common good, they will it so. However some wise people did and do evil things and served with mercenary wisdom bad masters and nightmarish utopia. Some powerful wisdom is evil by sacrificing many for one to live a great, enviable life; flourishing, enviable life yes, but not for all. Or they rush to sacrifice the one to the many; better life for many - society or humanity - at the expense of each one individual.
Some people were exclusively wise for themselves or for the benefit of some "cause"; it is only that the ones we prefer with political correctness, were wise and good for the sake of other people.
As for the sages of today, they seem equally earthly. To respect them you must discern the wisdom from the flesh. We need keys to recognize the part which is wisdom from what they do and say.
This short supply of pure, perfect, good sages may have good reason.
I gather that it is by familiarity not only with truth, success and goodness alone but also with imperfection, loss, ignorance, error, evil and weakness, that the capable one becomes wise.
Wisdom grows from the experience and overcoming of negatives. The difference is that the ones who become wise improve from failure, stupidity and trouble, instead of going discouraged, sour and corrupt: not being without fail, but taking everything human for what it is, not alien to us, governing our and other people's strength and weakness. Wisdom is not perfection, it is a journey of elevation, a never ending struggle with the beast.
The living sage will be then wise in some way and less in another and wisely aware of it: one will be erudite, the other seasoned, one sound in reason, another an intuitive discoverer of deep human truth, yet another a nimble juggler with complexity and risk. Some are powerful in advice, capable to do things with words, born with charisma to direct people or inspiringly gifted to awake them; yet others are - as if to confuse us - ignorant, silent, shy and blissful, humble, prudent, generous, exemplary in simple vital deeds, love and humaneness.
What? One may not need much knowledge to be wise?
In fact, if we only applied the boring common-place wisdom we all know as elementary, we were instantly much, much wiser.
As much as I can see, the one thing all these wise ones seem to share is good sense; common sense - which of course is not wisdom by itself - is only the common language in which wisdom operates and speaks.
I hasten to add that the same compelling language of common sense is spoken by received thinking and prejudice of various kinds.
*
If you do not have sages within reach and cannot pilgrim to find them, you observe us, all of us common people, to catch the moments when we happen to do and say something considered by you wise (with a risk of error or of overlooking things important, larger and deeper and lighter but not conspicuous to us or simple enough).
Observe us when we keep away from being fools! Observe us when we stop loss and recover from our errors! When we correct, repent and amend. Then, we are examples of wisdom!
Watch yourself and catch yourself doing something right, achieving not to do the same mistake again, learning from other people's errors! Learning to commit less stupid blunders and fewer foolish bright things. This is when you are wise.
I believe this: the moment you come aware of unwisdom and unsatisfied enough to start seeking improvement, you become definitely wiser.
*
Examining fact, experiencing, learning from life and sagacious words is not all. Wide knowledge and intelligence are insufficient for wisdom; the very thing you find wise depends, in part, on what you look for, how you look and on the questions you ask.
You can miss wisdom while staring at it if you have wrong keys to recognize it. “Correct” questions, blinkered by the convictions of the day, are worn, second-hand doors and dead loops. You may instead need to open a new door; or an old one, forgotten. To get your useful answer, you must devise the unfettered questions first.
It may be that the quest for wisdom is a school of marvel and curiosity, unceasingly asking questions; your own questions. Definitely, asking fertile questions is a fount of wisdom even if mere curiosity is no guarantee of it.
*
The queries I found most useful, conceive wisdom as a mindful way of living your own life better and ask how to achieve this ideal; a modest progression with many faces and layers, a slow metamorphosis, not an application of finished mould, theory or a doctrine.
These are the leading questions I chose to ask - doors opening on invited answers - which you may want to consider too:
Is wisdom’s unique territory that which wise people know for true? Is wisdom instead in the very selection of subjects considered relevant? Or is it to be found as well in people's longing and will to do their best, to see life in a better light, in humble awareness of what they know and cannot know, of their and other people's force and limits? Is it not, strikingly, beyond knowing fact, in what they understand as important from the facts? The way they look at our world? Is wisdom a way of interpreting one's world, of understanding it? Is it a creation of new, more compassionate worlds brought from imagination into reality by means of our words and actions?
Does wisdom consist in a competence of conduct, in negotiating better the games-people-play [3], rituals-people-perform and scenarios-people-stage to live better in the world?
*
What amputation prevents the philosophers and scientists of today to consider and respect that wisdom also dwells, as it seems to me, in a realm beyond the verified knowledge of "reality" given, in that spiritual which wise people imagine, believe, feel, value, decide and affirm in order to live human life better?
Or, perhaps, is there wisdom in what people are freed from believing and which prevents them to live their life fully?
Can it be sustained that wisdom is not only in what we find as real and given but also in what we invent and give to the world?
Is wisdom skilful behaviour trained or rather deliberated conduct, agent action? Is it perhaps embodied in entire life-histories enacted, driven with purpose, with a call, charted and navigated by flourishing people?
Must we not investigate in terms of "wisdom" what wise people do, cause or allow in fact and in time? How they go about things? What they do not do? What they care for? What sages chose? What they abstain from or avoid? What they detest? What if wisdom were also in that which people abhor?
How to take into account the crucial observation that when the wise do the right thing and certainly when they avoid the wrong thing, the proverbial symptom is that we do not observe anything? That sages prevent harm and danger when it is minute, or circumvent it seamlessly as the Far East suggested to us?
And what about stupidity? Is it possible to understand what wisdom is without understanding its companion opposite - foolishness? What if the slip into stupidity were an inseparable companion and inciter of wisdom?
In this great voyage of human improvement in the middle of imperfection and error and in spite of imperfection and delusion is it not a good definition of wisdom to say that growing wise means growing less foolish, less stupid? Or at least learning to detect and correct our ever active stupidity?
*
Is worldly wisdom a historical sum of guidance in matters of human life? Learning from History as I wish? History made simple for persons? Rules of life found in the words wise people said and wrote? What they made explicit to other people?
Is then wisdom a product, a heap of ripe fruit ready to eat; a select course to take, diamonds and pearls of wisdom to string your neck? Treasuries of words to shelve?
*
What if wisdom was not in the great book of nature nor in the one of human knowledge but in the manner the sages use these books? In the way they interpret experience, facts and explanations? In their attitude to knowledge? Yes, wisdom could be an elective affinity with knowledge, a relationship to what we know which is conducive to better life.
Maybe wisdom could be discerned in the choice of relevant knowledge considered, the style, the modalities of “processing” by which the sagacious flow of reasoning fits the aims and the moving richness of real life in its concrete, moving complexity, instead of reducing and of abstracting away from it? Wisdom could be reasoning which avoids disconnected simplification.
*
How to take into consideration that some people appear to be wise with mere basic common knowledge? Is wisdom possible without “good” education and culture, by common sense? How to account for so many highly educated people who blatantly lack wisdom by lacking good sense? The possibility must be investigated that wisdom – at least part of it - is more closely related to common sense used with intelligence than to rich knowledge.
*
Finally, what if wisdom were of all the above, a rich living view of the world and a way of living the world that resists reductive classification: knowledge, experience, belief, feeling, vision, norm, understanding, judgement, a state of mind, a disposition, attitude, energy, action; a way of life conducive to human flourishing? The way wise ones take life as it is and live it as well as possible in their times and country? The way they author their life?
Can we make this complexity simple enough to cope with it?
*
In the next chapters I attempt to describe what wisdom is by grouping its aspects as if they were four pillars; four pillars of wisdom.
*
Wisdom can be represented as four founding pillars of flourishing life:
(I) Wise knowledge; a way to understand knowledge
(II) Good judgement; a way of composite practical reasoning
(III) Wise conduct; a way of mindful action
(IV) Being wise; a way of being
__________________________________________________
*”Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man.”Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, ii 1
[1] Erasme de Rotterdam, Les Adages, Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 2013
[2] “..All things therefore whatsoever they shall say to you, observe and do: but according to their works do ye not; for they say, and do not.”Matthew 23:2-3 Douai-Rheims Bible (Not bad to know from where we free spirits draw our words.)
[3] Berne, Eric, games People Play – The Psychology of Human Relationships, Grove Press, New York, 1964
What I seek is worldly wisdom.
Overall, I would describe wisdom as a plurality of world-views intended to guide us while we strive for earthly lives well lived. Applied, these ways to grasp our world expand into choices of sustainable ways to achieve the human aspirations.
Wisdom human-centred, embraces the ways of understanding the world thrust on us as a given and also the one we create. To comprehend it, wisdom examines all our kinds of knowledge, ignorance, creeds, values, interests, purposes means and limits. It considers them all in order to judge well, and act well, reasonably, in the interest of us, people. In its turn, wise understanding may shape reality and even become reality by agency and life-changing conduct.
Finally, for Man, wisdom is a way of becoming and of being. Flourishing as a better human being.
In short, the view of worldly wisdom which I will follow in this essay is organised by a simple metaphor :
Living well is rooted in four pillars : wise knowledge, good judgement, wise conduct and "being wise", a way of life which turns all the erudition and dreams about wisdom which sleeps in the mind into wisdom alive, lives well lived. For us and those around us.
With such an end goal, we seek to understand and practice what breeds sustained welfare, what rises us from among mere beasts, salary-workers, soldiers and partisans, to flourish as civilised humans. Wisdom is what keeps us alive and human when our world goes astray from time to time; what we must understand and do to help ourselves and other people to do our best in our life-times. Obviously, as the world is plural, with several cultures, histories, ways of life, domains and creeds irreducible to one, there is no unique wisdom but several incommensurable worldviews and ways of wisdom, often competing.
Living wisdom cannot be in one book.
Worldly wisdom is not a religion nor a science. It does not serve a God, sacred to us or Truth highest of moral values, whoever or whatever they may be. It serves us, people. My own belief is that religions, with their sacred wisdom, are meant to serve people too.
Wisdom is not a tool or a calculation, a cult or an art. The ultimate aim of human wisdom is to be of use to Man and Humanity, not to some servant of Humanity turned into an idol like money-making, politics, science, technology and other endeavours of which we tend to forget that they are mere lowly tools.
Wisdom conceived otherwise, as divine - which aspiration I deeply respect - sees things from a higher, over-human perspective. It reveals us what we must do. It has the infallible strength of being granted from above. The worship of the monotheistic God decrees wisdom (described in sacred texts) as His plan and will, so that for Man, the meaning of life and the beginning of wisdom shall be faith, trust, discipline, the fear of God; and the deeper path, the self-denying agony of deciphering God’s ways. This inscrutable subject is not what I pursue. But certainly, we have many precious things to learn from the good-faith study of religion and the sayings of the saints.
Passionate rationality - which, still justified today with purest reason, logic, Science and technology - knows itself to be clear and free, above mere beliefs, moral axioms and feelings - chose, on its side, to conceive wisdom (reluctantly, perhaps because Science holds traditional grudge against Religion) as essence of materialistic knowledge: impersonal, "objective", universal, tangible, controllable. Rationalistic wisdom is still dominant nowadays as “high” truth and procedural expertise, twice verified and validated, experimentally and from the point of view of Reason. However, I would say, science's wisdom is still seen from an angle of faith: the exclusive faith in an infinite Universe of matter taken to be all that exists. Nothing else counts. Reason is worshipped as the unique, unquestioned way of proper knowledge and action. Such cosmic and objective wisdom is equally beyond my ambitions.
*
Earthly Wisdoms as I see them, have their own choices of Weltanschauung and basic beliefs, their language and approach, never beyond debate. My choice is vaguely expressed by the word "humanism", meaning by it respect and bias for the human as it is, rather than some historic pre-enlightenment or post-enlightenment movement.. I try to express this outlook and clarify what I believe to be the "wise" humanist point of view. I dare to speculate how the wise thinkers may reason and the sorts of wisdom they consider from theory to practice. I also attempt to describe wisdom in its native tongue - the language of common sense (another defamed notion in need to be reclaimed and re-defined).
You will find that the way I chose to interpret wisdom is not impartial but only human and purposefully so; my effort is to outline a fair and practical description which gives form to wisdom in an intuitive way that makes sense naturally, so that it may help me and other people to make sense of our life-world, do something and improve.
I attempt a bridge between rich but incommensurable concepts of wisdom that cannot communicate with each other today - the religious spiritual view and a rationalist spirituality. Both work in good faith to elevate the human being but, because of exclusive dogma, they reject and disparage the choices of wisdom of the other view.
I wish - instead of taking sides - to accept inconsistent diversity and to defer in epoché the irreducible opposition between wisdom seen exclusively as scientific truth verified and the similarly authoritative belief in truth revealed; one, wants the criterion of wisdom to be material and logical truth; the other, affirms the truth revealed in the name of God or some other spiritual reality, unverifiable with our senses and actions. Both are marvellous, productive choices. Both prove beneficial for the way people live their life as long as they do not go to war. Both can go astray in inquisition and dehumanisation. As it appears they will have to live side by side for a long while...
I attempt to change - for a try - the acid test of wisdom from how true it is from a dogmatic point of view, to how beneficial it proves, to orient and achieve better life for living persons.
*
For those of us, common-sense folks who seek wisdom, it is something we want to have and to wield.
The raison d'être of wisdom is not to build a body of knowledge or faith. It is to breed wise persons.
We wish to be wise, not to study, amass, dissect, abstract wisdom, nor to worship it by lighting candles and performing rituals in its honour.
We, lovers of wisdom, doubt that eliminating good sense in favour of exact dryness or, as another choice - unquestioning faith, will make all of us wiser or happier.
We want wisdom in order to be better humans and to live well this humble, one-time, short life we got here in this infinitesimal speck of the Universe.. We aspire to help our children or other people around us, do their best - for them and for us, not for some high, higher, highest, "cause".
To grow wiser in our mind, it seems that we experience, feel, intuit, learn from other people, reflect, grasp, discover, comprehend and mature. To be wiser, it appears to me that we also learn like an artisan's apprentice, from unique masters, by taking part in what they do; with eyes, ears and touching and trying out, in the old ways, guided by a trusted mentor.
During apprenticeship, wisdom must appear simple enough for us to understand. To make wisdom ours, the best but most costly would be to discover it, build it up, not just receive it ready-made, in words. Even to acquire the art of being wise beyond words, by observing other people wise or foolish - we still need to understand it from compelling incidents lived, to feel it at work, try it and taste it. The best curriculum of wisdom I know about is contiguity and co-action with wise mentors. It helps less to split words about its definitions and norms than to take part in it.
We emulate wisdom - if we are lucky enough to chance the company of sages - because of admiration, sometimes by faith: we marvel at this deeper humane view, that higher human condition, this amazing efficacy of simplicity and mastery. Thus, we discover spirituality, that subjective intangible experience which elevates one. Be it religious or secular spirituality. We trust those exemplary people, we observe, listen, marvel, ask and suddenly comprehend: Aha! So, this is what it is! We echo. We become. We feel that we become better people freed from the mere survival, pleasures, pains and routine of the everyday. We are contaminated with wisdom to rise higher and find, or even give meaning to our lives.
Alas, seriously wise mentors are rare.
We gain therefore our personal wisdom painfully, anew in each biography, with our own generation, eluded by short-term rainbows and victories and burned into memory by our own costly errors. Even this little requires at least a habit of learning from errors instead of denying them. If reasonably intelligent and strong, we also learn from observing other people's mistakes and drawing what we are able from the witnessing of past time sages. In this way we have a fair chance to become wiser and, in time, even wise.
Much basic but in no way minor wisdom we receive "for free", informally, as savoir-faire and shared common knowledge we absorb without noticing; it comes from the notions and turns of mind built into the mother tongue, from the folk lore instilled along our childhood, from imitating our parents and significant others, from a few key myth, tales, customs and sayings and nowadays from films, networked representations and games. All this forms a half-conscious underground of obvious wisdom (or its opposite) expressed in the universally local language of common sense, unquestioned and validated - potentially - by the intuition and the generic good sense we may have. Unfortunately, this wisdom is mixed lavishly with its opposite, prejudice, ignorance and widely accepted stupidity equally present in the received common-sense. Thus, without critical sense we can hardly differentiate wisdom from pretence.
Our would-be personal wisdom keeps evolving or regressing and even collapsing disheartened as we encounter nature, people, culture and technology. Wisdom is not guaranteed one way progress acquired once for ever. A myriad wise or misleading hints keep adding to and altering or eroding morally our world-view, year after year, glimpsed here and there, overheard, stumbled upon in formative and life-changing events, tools, books, television, browsing, readings, songs and the like... I prise the wise ones; alas the opposite learning of straying stupidity and madness is also at work, deluged upon us in the same compelling language of fads, common sense and authority.
"But where shall wisdom be found and where is the place of understanding"?
As we become purposeful to learn wisdom, we heed teachers, preachers and gurus (who may be not so bad), we read scattered books were it sleeps inert, waiting, hidden among too many words and obsolete pretence and shameless lying claims. Without critical sense and humanistic education it is often difficult to see the difference.
We long for great books containing wisdom itself, evergreen, that authentic living thing, but what we find usually is books about wisdom or worse, about somebody’s sectarian beliefs or doctrine.
Mostly, we explore dead sages' writings and their remembrance: Who were those wise ones, anyway? What particular wisdom is contained in their books? What wise actions are they remembered for? Why was that wise? Did they live as they counsel? Were they happy as a proof of their wisdom being real? Did they give meaning to their life? Did they make other people's life meaningful? Did they help other people to actually live better to be more fully human? Did they improve our world in the real-life interest of people? What is improving the world anyway?
How to discern and harvest all the scattered wisdom for our personal improvement? We need a new sage like Erasmus of Rotterdam, to compose another lifetime oeuvre, contemporary, exhaustive Adages [1] to catalogue the liberating questions and the precious responses and examples in one collection, one monumental treasury for everyone to study. Then we will still have to protect it against new beasts and barbarians eager to censor and burn it.
Let me dream... there does not appear to be any build-up of progress from human recklessness to wisdom, from evil to goodness, towards some great, definitive, accumulating and evolving rational one-doctrine to be called Wisdom, or simply "Man learning to be civilised and good". Seemingly, with all the growth of knowledge, faith and technology, human beastliness did not recede; it was even amplified with expertise, powerful machines and weapons, detachment and indifference. Nowadays I even discover that the progress of technologies is itself an enemy of wisdom, a grave threat to human good life.
If you want wisdom in your life, you will have to build your own ark of it and keep it afloat on discouraging seas.
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In my quest, I found no such thing as one universal wisdom; no systematic instruction either in a credible worldly wisdom which would have the human person at the centre instead of touting some supra-human dogma. This is a good thing after all. In fact, I am now convinced that any generic or formal wisdom put in writing is frozen, false and dangerous. Dogma is always artificial, far from people and from life, incapable to help but almost certain to rigidify and harm.
There are no absolute sages either, except in the Heavens and the tales; the celebrated sages that ever lived were not wise all over, they did mistakes too and ugly, foolish things, as it seems. As for the sages not remembered, we do not know how they were. Sages were wise in one way and less in another. Most sages honoured, were much wiser in what they urged other people than for themselves; "do what they say, not what they do"[2] Do not forget this biblical warning when you fall in admiration!
Moreover, some words of wisdom seem eternal and universal, but some move or crumble: what was wise then and there is not so here, now, for me. Wisdom is time and context sensitive. Truly wise generalizations should have a jubilee expiry date and application boundaries explicitly described.
As I love to repeat, most wisdom sleeps and needs to come alive in us as our own; at least in part, wisdom is a living thing. It is discouraging to me to observe how much past wisdom seems lost and dead instead of building up in higher civilization. As I complain elsewhere, there is wide agreement that we do not learn from History. We, the Humanity, instead of acting like an evolved, civilised community of mind still behave like a species.
And who says that all wisdom is good? the dreamers and the moralists who define it so. They are wishful that - because of being reasonable - wisdom is logically tied to the common good, they will it so. However some wise people did and do evil things and served with mercenary wisdom bad masters and nightmarish utopia. Some powerful wisdom is evil by sacrificing many for one to live a great, enviable life; flourishing, enviable life yes, but not for all. Or they rush to sacrifice the one to the many; better life for many - society or humanity - at the expense of each one individual.
Some people were exclusively wise for themselves or for the benefit of some "cause"; it is only that the ones we prefer with political correctness, were wise and good for the sake of other people.
As for the sages of today, they seem equally earthly. To respect them you must discern the wisdom from the flesh. We need keys to recognize the part which is wisdom from what they do and say.
This short supply of pure, perfect, good sages may have good reason.
I gather that it is by familiarity not only with truth, success and goodness alone but also with imperfection, loss, ignorance, error, evil and weakness, that the capable one becomes wise.
Wisdom grows from the experience and overcoming of negatives. The difference is that the ones who become wise improve from failure, stupidity and trouble, instead of going discouraged, sour and corrupt: not being without fail, but taking everything human for what it is, not alien to us, governing our and other people's strength and weakness. Wisdom is not perfection, it is a journey of elevation, a never ending struggle with the beast.
The living sage will be then wise in some way and less in another and wisely aware of it: one will be erudite, the other seasoned, one sound in reason, another an intuitive discoverer of deep human truth, yet another a nimble juggler with complexity and risk. Some are powerful in advice, capable to do things with words, born with charisma to direct people or inspiringly gifted to awake them; yet others are - as if to confuse us - ignorant, silent, shy and blissful, humble, prudent, generous, exemplary in simple vital deeds, love and humaneness.
What? One may not need much knowledge to be wise?
In fact, if we only applied the boring common-place wisdom we all know as elementary, we were instantly much, much wiser.
As much as I can see, the one thing all these wise ones seem to share is good sense; common sense - which of course is not wisdom by itself - is only the common language in which wisdom operates and speaks.
I hasten to add that the same compelling language of common sense is spoken by received thinking and prejudice of various kinds.
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If you do not have sages within reach and cannot pilgrim to find them, you observe us, all of us common people, to catch the moments when we happen to do and say something considered by you wise (with a risk of error or of overlooking things important, larger and deeper and lighter but not conspicuous to us or simple enough).
Observe us when we keep away from being fools! Observe us when we stop loss and recover from our errors! When we correct, repent and amend. Then, we are examples of wisdom!
Watch yourself and catch yourself doing something right, achieving not to do the same mistake again, learning from other people's errors! Learning to commit less stupid blunders and fewer foolish bright things. This is when you are wise.
I believe this: the moment you come aware of unwisdom and unsatisfied enough to start seeking improvement, you become definitely wiser.
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Examining fact, experiencing, learning from life and sagacious words is not all. Wide knowledge and intelligence are insufficient for wisdom; the very thing you find wise depends, in part, on what you look for, how you look and on the questions you ask.
You can miss wisdom while staring at it if you have wrong keys to recognize it. “Correct” questions, blinkered by the convictions of the day, are worn, second-hand doors and dead loops. You may instead need to open a new door; or an old one, forgotten. To get your useful answer, you must devise the unfettered questions first.
It may be that the quest for wisdom is a school of marvel and curiosity, unceasingly asking questions; your own questions. Definitely, asking fertile questions is a fount of wisdom even if mere curiosity is no guarantee of it.
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The queries I found most useful, conceive wisdom as a mindful way of living your own life better and ask how to achieve this ideal; a modest progression with many faces and layers, a slow metamorphosis, not an application of finished mould, theory or a doctrine.
These are the leading questions I chose to ask - doors opening on invited answers - which you may want to consider too:
Is wisdom’s unique territory that which wise people know for true? Is wisdom instead in the very selection of subjects considered relevant? Or is it to be found as well in people's longing and will to do their best, to see life in a better light, in humble awareness of what they know and cannot know, of their and other people's force and limits? Is it not, strikingly, beyond knowing fact, in what they understand as important from the facts? The way they look at our world? Is wisdom a way of interpreting one's world, of understanding it? Is it a creation of new, more compassionate worlds brought from imagination into reality by means of our words and actions?
Does wisdom consist in a competence of conduct, in negotiating better the games-people-play [3], rituals-people-perform and scenarios-people-stage to live better in the world?
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What amputation prevents the philosophers and scientists of today to consider and respect that wisdom also dwells, as it seems to me, in a realm beyond the verified knowledge of "reality" given, in that spiritual which wise people imagine, believe, feel, value, decide and affirm in order to live human life better?
Or, perhaps, is there wisdom in what people are freed from believing and which prevents them to live their life fully?
Can it be sustained that wisdom is not only in what we find as real and given but also in what we invent and give to the world?
Is wisdom skilful behaviour trained or rather deliberated conduct, agent action? Is it perhaps embodied in entire life-histories enacted, driven with purpose, with a call, charted and navigated by flourishing people?
Must we not investigate in terms of "wisdom" what wise people do, cause or allow in fact and in time? How they go about things? What they do not do? What they care for? What sages chose? What they abstain from or avoid? What they detest? What if wisdom were also in that which people abhor?
How to take into account the crucial observation that when the wise do the right thing and certainly when they avoid the wrong thing, the proverbial symptom is that we do not observe anything? That sages prevent harm and danger when it is minute, or circumvent it seamlessly as the Far East suggested to us?
And what about stupidity? Is it possible to understand what wisdom is without understanding its companion opposite - foolishness? What if the slip into stupidity were an inseparable companion and inciter of wisdom?
In this great voyage of human improvement in the middle of imperfection and error and in spite of imperfection and delusion is it not a good definition of wisdom to say that growing wise means growing less foolish, less stupid? Or at least learning to detect and correct our ever active stupidity?
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Is worldly wisdom a historical sum of guidance in matters of human life? Learning from History as I wish? History made simple for persons? Rules of life found in the words wise people said and wrote? What they made explicit to other people?
Is then wisdom a product, a heap of ripe fruit ready to eat; a select course to take, diamonds and pearls of wisdom to string your neck? Treasuries of words to shelve?
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What if wisdom was not in the great book of nature nor in the one of human knowledge but in the manner the sages use these books? In the way they interpret experience, facts and explanations? In their attitude to knowledge? Yes, wisdom could be an elective affinity with knowledge, a relationship to what we know which is conducive to better life.
Maybe wisdom could be discerned in the choice of relevant knowledge considered, the style, the modalities of “processing” by which the sagacious flow of reasoning fits the aims and the moving richness of real life in its concrete, moving complexity, instead of reducing and of abstracting away from it? Wisdom could be reasoning which avoids disconnected simplification.
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How to take into consideration that some people appear to be wise with mere basic common knowledge? Is wisdom possible without “good” education and culture, by common sense? How to account for so many highly educated people who blatantly lack wisdom by lacking good sense? The possibility must be investigated that wisdom – at least part of it - is more closely related to common sense used with intelligence than to rich knowledge.
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Finally, what if wisdom were of all the above, a rich living view of the world and a way of living the world that resists reductive classification: knowledge, experience, belief, feeling, vision, norm, understanding, judgement, a state of mind, a disposition, attitude, energy, action; a way of life conducive to human flourishing? The way wise ones take life as it is and live it as well as possible in their times and country? The way they author their life?
Can we make this complexity simple enough to cope with it?
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In the next chapters I attempt to describe what wisdom is by grouping its aspects as if they were four pillars; four pillars of wisdom.
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Wisdom can be represented as four founding pillars of flourishing life:
(I) Wise knowledge; a way to understand knowledge
(II) Good judgement; a way of composite practical reasoning
(III) Wise conduct; a way of mindful action
(IV) Being wise; a way of being
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*”Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man.”Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, ii 1
[1] Erasme de Rotterdam, Les Adages, Les Belles Lettres, Paris, 2013
[2] “..All things therefore whatsoever they shall say to you, observe and do: but according to their works do ye not; for they say, and do not.”Matthew 23:2-3 Douai-Rheims Bible (Not bad to know from where we free spirits draw our words.)
[3] Berne, Eric, games People Play – The Psychology of Human Relationships, Grove Press, New York, 1964