Such learning is hard and endlessly complicated. “Making it simple” will not be here reducing or vulgarising. It means that we translate complex Wisdom into the universal language of the common sense, coherent and understandable to critical spirit. The reader will choose.
*
What wisdom is — its many forms, secular and religious, the place of certainty, and the apprenticeship it asks — now opens the essay What is wisdom?.
Your effort to be wise is - from the beginning - the state of mind, an attitude, by which - with no special power – a person 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 than knowing about 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. Wisdom (and its opposite) dwells in one’s image of the world, in your everyday life-space, in your good sense. It inhabits your feelings, thought, values and action. It guides one as a unique person, through the unruly events of the human condition; it is our souls' awakened living in this world. I wonder how other beings’ Wisdom could be.
Here on Earth, in biographies rising to be life-stories, the pursuit of wisdom produces mainly civilisation, good sense and humaneness. Such learning makes a life-time rich and plentiful, instead of just spending it; wiser, you will, as author and actor, enact and live your unique life story. Wisdom is then 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 the unpredictable ocean which is the World, instead of just being carried by the tides and the winds. Wiser, you learn to find choices and choose among choices. Wiser, you are mindful to know what you do and do what you know.
*
Whether wisdom can be put in writing — Plato, the sleeping treasury of maxims, and why wisdom must be woken — is now the essay Can wisdom be put in writing?.
I honour divine wisdom and the sacred writings that bear it, but the inquiry pursued here is worldly in scope: wisdom as it is lived, tested, misunderstood and renewed by persons on Earth. I am influenced by things I lived, observed, or read, or heard, or understood, or thought up and worded myself. It is all about life on earth. 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.
The questions wise words answer — what to know, what to want, what to avoid, what gives meaning — now stand in Why Wisdom, a Provisional Foreword.
Over the years my 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 and do; many, many, beginnings, add up to a whole life of flourishing, at least of being yourself and human. Wisdom seems to be the search of wisdom.
Do not expect grand feats. To emulate my role model, Michel de Montaigne, I cannot keep a record of my life by my actions, what I was able to achieve places them too low.* These then, are thoughts about wisdom and some words of wisdom I found to be deep and true in my life, formed in the world of the twentieth century in which I lived, and reconsidered from the changing world in which I still live.
Proofs, replicability, and the freedom to just think: that is a doubt about this whole book, and it now stands in Doubts.
Ioan Tenner 2011- 2026
"Wisdom, sleeping..." is another quiet place of exchange on Internet where all people are invited. But the world is plural and we do not own the one right answer. There seems to be more than one wisdom.
This is not a chronological blog in which the newest entry displaces the old. It is a revisable online commonplace book: older pages remain alive and may deepen with time. The reader will understand that this web-page is the contrary of the 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 the articles and even some of the oldest little thoughts, 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 on 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 whose text is ideally meant to be endlessly continued and improved by my son... if he will care...
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 things 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 runs dry..
I want to leave to my family, if it will choose to perdure as I hope, in the house of tomorrow, the one I cannot visit, that written record which my parents did not have the leisure to leave 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 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", now or later. His role is inevitable: to challenge 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 be in time a dialogue between father and son. Even when I will no more be able to answer.
I still dream 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...
* Montaigne, Michel de - Complete Works Essays, translated by Donald M. Frame. (Everymans Library, 2003), III.9, “Of Vanity,” p 876. Note : but I would replace “fortune” with “what I was able to achieve”.
** Cather, Willa (1922) One of Ours, Dover.. Mineola, NY 2007
| Four Pillars of Wisdom study in progress... |