A Word to the Wise

Philosophy is a sailboat that deftly catches the fair breeze…

By Andrew Porter

We live in a time in which most people, were you to ask them ‘Do you think you’re wise?’, would look askance or confused and not answer straightforwardly. They are not prepared for the question by long anticipation and living in that habitat. But you might hear answers such as, ‘I’m wise about some things’ or ‘I’m pretty savvy when it comes to how to handle people’. But your question would remain unanswered.

Maybe it’s the circles I run in, but it seems that there's little to no hankering for wisdom; it is not prevalent. It is as if many people feel that moral relativism – the common zeitgeist – has taken them off the hook and they are relieved. But choices have a way of illuminating obvious help or harm. There’s really no getting off the hook.

Wisdom can be encapsulated in a reasoned decision by an individual, but it is always in tune with larger reason. One of the great things about Plato as a philosopher is that he walks around and into the thick of the question of wisdom with boldness and perspective. A champion of reason, he grounds human morality in virtue, but emphasises that it is part of a ‘virtue’ of reality: the nature and function of the ontologically real is to be good, true, and beautiful.

This immersion of humankind and personal choices in a larger environment seems a crucial lesson for our times. This odd and ungrounded era we live in does not have a ready and able moral vocabulary; it, more often than not, leaves moral nuance like an abandoned shopping cart in the woods. Why is Plato one of the best voices to re-energise as his philosophy applies to current-day issues and angst?

One of the problems of individuals and institutions in contemporary times is that they think they are wise without ever examining how and if that’s true. So often, they – whether you yourself, a spouse, a boss, politicians, or fellow citizens – assume a virtue they own not. This is exactly what Socrates, in Plato's hands, addresses. What are some of the problems in the world open to reform or transformation?

Certainly, social justice issues continue to rear their head and undermine an equitable society. Entrenched power systems and attendant attitudes are not only slow to respond, but display no moral understanding. Today, it seems there is a raft of problems, from psychological to philosophical, and the consequences turn dire. At the root of all actual and potential catastrophes, it seems, is a lack of that one thing that has been waylaid, discarded, and ignored: wisdom.

Plato crafted his philosophy about soul and virtue, justice and character, in alignment with his metaphysics. This is its genius, making a harmony of inner and outer

In the Republic, Plato himself oscillates between saying that a philosopher-king, the only assurance the city would be happy and just, would be a lover of wisdom and actually wise. In our time, the problem is a lack of desire to find or inculcate wisdom. Societies have, in general, hamstrung themselves. We do not have ready tools to care about and value wisdom, however far off. We do not, to any cogent degree, educate children to be philosopher-kings of their own lives.

Western societies and perhaps Eastern ones as well have not increased in wisdom because they have abandoned the pursuit. The task is left unattended. The current problem is not that the world (or smaller entities such as companies, schools, and individuals) cannot find a truly wise person; so-called civilisation acts wilfully against finding or even thinking about finding such. It is a mobile home that's been put up on blocks.

Philosophy can inculcate the kind of consciousness that the 20th century Swiss philosopher, Jean Gebser, called integral reality, which perceives a truth that, as he says, ‘transluces’ both the world and humankind (in the sense of shining light through). In short, philosophy holds the promise of educating. It is not a crazy old man on his porch, moving his cane to tell the traffic to slow down; rather, philosophy is a sailboat that deftly catches fair breeze – and moves us forward.

What Is Wisdom?

Posted by Keith Tidman

Wisdom is often offered as a person’s most-valuable quality, yet even ardent admirers might struggle to define or explain it. Some of philosophy’s giants, whether Confucius, Buddha, Plato, or Socrates, have concluded that wisdom is rooted not so much in what we do know, but in acknowledging what we don’t know — that is, in realising the extent of our own ignorance.

This humbleness about the limits of our knowledge and, further, ability to know — sometimes referred to by academics as ‘epistemic humility’ — seems a just metric as far as it goes. The term ‘epistemic’ referring to matters of knowledge: what we believe we know, and in the particular case of epistemic humility, the limitations of that knowledge. An important thread begins to appear here, which is the role of judgment in explaining the totality of wisdom.

To repudiate boundaries on our knowledge, or just as importantly on the ability to know, would amount to intellectual hubris. But, epistemic humility, while arguably one among other qualities of a person we might characterise as wise in some limited capacity, is not anywhere nearly enough to explain all that wisdom is.

Consider, for illustration, those people who might assume they know things they do not, despite the supposed knowledge existing outside their proficiency. What I’d call ‘epistemic conceit’ — and again, a key matter of judgment. A case in point might be a neuroscientist, with intimate knowledge of the human brain’s physiology and functions, and maybe of consciousness, concluding that his deep understanding of neuroscience endows him with the critical-thinking skills to invest his money wisely. Or to offer cogent solutions to the mathematical challenges of the physics of ‘string theory’.

Similarly, what about those things falling within the scope of a person’s expertise, theories claimed at the time to be known with a degree of confidence, until the knowledge suddenly proved false. Take the case of the geocentric (Earth-centered) model of the universe, and secondly of optical illusions leading to belief in the existence of so-called ‘Martian canals’. These are occasions of what we might call ‘epistemic unawareness’, to which we are humanly disposed no matter how wise.

Yet, while humbleness about the limits of our knowledge may provide a narrow window on wisdom, it is not definitive. Notably, there seems to be an inverse association between the number of factors claimed vital to fully explain wisdom, and how successfully the definition of wisdom may hold up as holes are poked into the many variables of the explanation under close scrutiny.

The breadth and depth of knowledge and experience are similarly insufficient to define wisdom in totality, despite people earnest chronicling such claims through the course of history. After all, we can have little knowledge and experience and still be decidedly wise; and we can have vast knowledge and experience and still be decidedly unwise. To understand the difference between knowledge and wisdom, and to make life’s decisions accordingly, calls on judgment.

Indeed, even exceptionally wise people — regardless of their field of expertise — can and do on occasion harbour false beliefs and knowledge, which one might call ‘epistemic inaccuracy’. History’s equivalents of such intellectual giants as Plato, Sun Tzu, Da Vinci, Beethoven, Goethe, Shakespeare, Fermat, and Einstein are no exception to this encompassing rule. Einstein, for example, proposed that the universe is static, of which he was later disabused by evidence that the universe is actually expanding and accelerating.

In the same vein, Plato was seemingly wrong about the imperative to define something as an ‘ideal’ before we attempt to achieve it, potentially hobbling efforts to reach practical, real-world goals like implementing remedies for inequitable systems of justice. Meanwhile, Shakespeare made both significant historical and geographical mistakes. And Goethe, wearing his polymath hat, erroneously refuted the Newtonian theory of the decomposition of white light, suggesting instead that colours appeared from mixing light and darkness.

More generally, how might we assess the wisdom of deep thinkers who lived centuries or even millennia ago, a large number of whose presumed knowledge had long been disproved and displaced by new paradigms? I doubt those thinkers’ cogency, insightfulness, prescience, and persuasiveness at the time they lived are any less impressive because of what turned out to be the demonstrated shelf half-life of their knowledge and insights.

Meanwhile, all this assumes we consider such exceptional intellects as not just exquisitely erudite, but also mindful of their own fallibility. As well as mindful of the uncertainty and contingency of what’s real and true in the world. Both assumptions about the conditions and requirement for critical mindfulness call for judgment, too.

Even a vast store of knowledge and experience, however, does not get us all the way to explaining the first principles of wisdom writ large as opposed to singular instances of acting wisely. A wise person’s knowledge and beliefs ought to match up with her behaviour and ways of living. Yet, that ingredient in what, say, minimally describes ‘a wise person’ likewise falls short of explaining full-on wisdom. Even highly knowledgeable people, if impulsive or incorrigibly immoral or amoral, may act unwisely; as in so many other ways, their putative lack of judgment here matters.

One fallback strategy that some philosophers, psychologists, and others resort to has been to lard explanation of wisdom with an exhausting catalog of qualities and descriptors in hope of deflecting criticism of their definition of wisdom. What I’d call the ‘potpourri theory of wisdom’. Somehow, as the thinking misguidedly goes, the more descriptors or factors they shoehorn into the definition, supposedly the more sound the argument.

Alternatively, wisdom might be captured in just one word: judgment. Judgment in what one thinks, decides, opines, says, and does. By which is meant that wisdom entails discerning the presence of patterns, including correspondences and dissimilarities, which may challenge customary canons of reality. Then turning those patterns into understanding, and in step turning understanding into execution (behaviours) — with each fork in this process warranting judgment.

Apart from judgment, notably all other elements that we might imagine to partially explain wisdom — amount and accuracy of knowledge, humility of what one knows and can know, amount and nature of experience — are firmly contingent on each other. Co-dependence is inescapable. Judgment, on the other hand, is the only element that is dependent on no others, in a category of one. I propose that judgment is both enough and necessary to define wisdom.