Human Wisdom

Essays

Articles

Longer essays about worldly wisdom, judgement, criticism, choice, surprise, paradox, meaning, and perspective.

  1. Secret Life of the Obvious Why what is plain and evident can be among the hardest things to notice.
  2. Powerful inaction, conspicuous absence, bountiful void An exploration of absence, restraint, emptiness, and the power of what is not done.
  3. The Power to Make Things Simple On the knowledge and judgement required to make difficult things genuinely simple.
  4. Three kinds of Criticism A practical distinction between forms of criticism and ways of facing critique.
  5. Critical thinking is disobedient, not correct Critical thought as an independent human practice rather than a regulated performance.
  6. Strategy of Surprise Preparing for, defending against, and deliberately producing the unexpected.
  7. The Rectification of Meaning Finding words and distinctions adequate to what we are actually trying to say.
  8. The n plus minus one principle: higher, wider, different... A principle of perspective: there is always another scale, level, or point of view.
  9. The Fascination of Paradox Learning from contradiction, tension, and what cannot be understood too quickly.
  10. A choice of choices How we choose among choices, and how points of view shape the freedom we possess.
  11. Des choix de la spiritualité An illustrated French-language essay on choices of spirituality.
  12. Can wisdom be put in writing? Wise thoughts sleep frozen on tablets; the reader has to wake them.