Reflections on Wisdom
The more we try to describe it, the further we are from it.
Opening Thoughts
“A wise old man” is a tenuous recollection of my answer to the question inevitably asked of kids — “what do you want to be when you grow up?”. The memory is tenuous because it is almost sixty years old. And tenuous to the point of thinking, “Yeah, nah. You made it up.”
What makes it feel real is a sense of embarrassment and shame attached to an equally tenuous but inseparable recollection of laughter of my classmates. Maybe this is why the memory sticks? It is a window into the subconscious desires of a nine-year-old who had a desire to please people, a tendency to take everything personally, and no intrinsic grasp of a need to filter ‘inside voice’.
For some unknown reason I was drawn to the parables, epigrams, ‘truisms’, aphorisms typical of, and appropriated by, a middle-class western Judaeo-Christian mid-20th century upbringing. They purported to express, or even be, ‘wisdom’. While others were fascinated by more worldly things such as rocks, reptiles, and/or football, the attraction of trying to understand ‘the profound’ seemed natural even if not ‘normal’.
Through my teens and well into my twenties, I read both traditional sources, and many associated with the western ‘age of Aquarius’ era. Yet my recollection is that they always felt thin, empty. Even as there was a promise of ‘truth’, or some kind of window into understanding ‘the profound’ on offer, there was nothing sticky about them.
The promise of wisdom seemed no more than empty words.
It took decades to even begin to get a faint sniff of what these purported bearers of ‘wisdom’ might feel like in an affective way. The IQ tests of the time said I was not lacking intellectual firepower. So, what was it about wisdom I was missing?
This essay follows the structure of ‘Reflections on Philosophy’ in a ‘me-then/me-now’ sense while looking into the question of what can be said about ‘wisdom’. A short, but cryptic answer is, “it depends on why you want to know”.
Unsurprisingly, wisdom is paradoxical by nature. Describing it as an abstract concept is not what it actually is. So can it be understood as it is?
I think the answer is, “yes, in the same way a fish understands water”. In this light, a better answer to that question — what do you want to be when you grow up? — would have been just a single word.
Content.
When I grow up, I want to be content. Not in a valueless, descriptive, abstract sense, but in the sense of being so with myself and the world in a generally positively unitive way. I think it would be nice to attain this as an abiding state of mind. 😊
A Slippery Little Sucker
‘Wisdom’, like ‘wise’, is a word that gets thrown around a lot, isn’t it? More often than not in ways that seem to ‘fit’ in a superficial sense, just as long as we don’t stop and ask what we actually mean by it.
For instance, the recent Medium newsletter #164 offered links to “three pieces of wisdom for your week.” Shortly after, Medium newsletter #171 asks the reader to “tell us your favorite piece of writing wisdom”. Taken at face value, these say ‘wisdom’ consists in particular combinations of words.
There is a plausible argument for why words cannot be a “piece of wisdom”. It goes something like this.
Premise 1 > Words are wisdom
Premise 2 > New Year’s Eve (NYE) resolutions are expressed in words
Conclusion 1 > it is wise to stick to NYE resolutions
Premise 3 > people often fail to stick to NYE resolutions
Conclusion 2 > Either words are wisdom or NYE resolutions exist
Premise 4 > NYE resolutions exist
Conclusion 3 > words are not wisdom
In other words, if words are wisdom, then New Year’s Eve resolutions would not exist for the same reason that magic spells would — thinking/saying the words makes things come to pass. Fortunately for all of us, this is most probably not how the world works.
Just as saying I wanted to grow up to be a wise old man, or even thinking “I want to be a wise old man”, does not make me a wise old man, so saying “here are three pieces of wisdom” does not make them wisdom. There is no affective stickiness in words or ideas alone. So, what is wisdom?
A more analytical perspective on this makes for a long dry read. For the sake of brevity, what can be drawn from not just academic literature, but a broader pool of literature from different traditions (including oral traditions), is that wisdom is a quality, or state, of mind of a wise person.
This is all well and good, but what does this mean? What kind of qualities would be observable in a wise person? And, how would a wise person manifest them as observable qualities?
While these are obvious questions, and are important to an academic perspective on wisdom, they draw us into maze of abstract concepts and theses. For doing so takes us away from what it is into how it can be described. These are very distinct and different domains.
What offers an alternative way into understanding wisdom as a concept is why it has long been considered to be something of meaning and value. Is it an end in and of itself, or just a means to an end?
There is an end that is commonly associated with the idea of a wise person, and it is not wisdom as such for its own sake. For if this were the case, then life as a common conscious experience would be absurd. What can be said to be invariably common across cultural traditions is that a wise person strives to live a virtuous or ‘good’ life in a way that not only makes for a flourishing individual, but a flourishing individual that participates in and contributes to a flourishing community/society.
Whether it be the Buddhist spiritual goal that necessarily entails individual equanimity which projects outwards into society. Or the Daoist spiritual goal, if it can be called this, of attaining a state of harmony and balance within and between oneself and the world. Or the African philosophy of Ubuntu that entails manifesting humanist communitarian principles by positively improving ourselves and our community. Or the Christian morality of striving to be a better person helping to make a better society. Or the Ancient Greek objective of striving to live a virtuous life that contributes to a just society as being the highest good. We can say the idea of positively improving both ourselves and our society is a commonly held ‘highest good’.
In this light, wisdom is no more than a tradition-transcendent means of seeking the highest good of becoming a flourishing individual that contributes to a flourishing community/society. And for it to be this, to be a means of value and utility directed towards an end, it can only be a quality or state of mind from which all action, both physical and mental, arises. As is often alluded to in non-academic literature, for instance, , wisdom is not just a way of seeing the world, but of effectively, actively participating in creating, molding, guiding it in a positive way.
It is unsurprising, then, that two important aspects of wisdom so construed stand out. Firstly, it is, somewhat ironically but invariably, a personal quality that is judged by others. Secondly, and also invariably, it entails learning to step outside, and be a positive part of something much bigger than, ourselves.
Now, as a nod to the delusional Libertarian contradiction of individual freedoms being somehow the ‘highest good’, we obviously don’t have to accept this view. But it is, without cultural exception, up until the advent of this delusion, considered a ‘wise’ approach to life. Funny thing, that, eh?
Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head
Those familiar with 20th century , may know this evocative phrase. I like to think of it as a humorous insight into the Socratic conception of wisdom, which is, very roughly, the humility of not pretending to know things we do not know, and not demanding the things we do know be the only things to know.
In preparing for this essay, I skimmed the surface of a limited selection of academic literature, including philosophy (e.g. Ancient Greek/western, eastern, African), psychology (e.g. gerontology research on wisdom), sage/guru wisdom (e.g. Daoism, Buddhism, Hinduism), sage/ancestor wisdom (e.g. indigenous/folk oral traditions). Over the years I’ve read a limited selection of non-academic literature that might be said to relate to the idea of wisdom. From religious and spiritual books like The Wisdom of Solomon, the Bible, the Bardo Thodol, to philosophy such as Plato’s ‘Republic’ and Aurelius’ ‘Meditations’. And then there are others such as Pirsig’s ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’, Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’, Seligman’s ‘Flourish’, to name a fraction of them. It is a long eclectic mix.
In spite of much reading, I am no ‘wiser’ about wisdom. Not least because of the paradoxical nature of such an inquiry — can something be understood by reading about, or describing, it? Even more perplexing, do I understand wisdom as such? For now, what I think I can say is that it feels unwise to ask such a question. For it feels a little like asking if a fish understands water as such.
In this light, on reflection, a better answer to that inevitable question — what do you want to be when you grow up? — would have been just a single thought.
Content.
When I grow up, I want to be content in the sense of being so with myself and the world in a generally positively unitive way. That this seems to have been a long-standing, culture-transcendent idea makes me think it is probably something worthwhile in today’s world, and so would be nice to attain as an abiding state of mind.
Closing Thoughts
States of mind have quite particular ‘raw feels’. There is something it is like to be in a particular state of mind. It is a particular quality of conscious experience that ‘colours’ our sense of self and our perspective on the world.
We cannot ‘know’ this in an objective, descriptive sense for the simple reason that we ‘know’ it by being it. Immediately, directly, continuously. So it necessarily eludes description because it disappears as it is being described. If I were to posit a human ‘superpower’, it would not be this immediacy of ‘being’ a state of mind, as wondrous as it is, but our power of imagination.
For want of a way of explaining being ‘content’ in the absence of being it, I like to imagine it would feel like what peace-of-mind might feel like. A calmness, or equanimity, that has a deeply existential sense in a feeling-like-being-a-meaningful-part-of-a-greater-whole sense.
A kind of feeling that is beyond words, but is ‘bright’, enveloping. I can imagine it would feel like being part of something much bigger and grander than just my own limited interest demands of the world. Yes, it can obviously be said to be imagining a ‘spiritual’ feeling. It is for me, however, as rare and fleeting as any imagining can be.
Reflecting on wisdom says it is a quality of mind we judge in others, not ourselves. It is not an end in and of itself, but a means of becoming that, no matter the cultural context, is always moving or growing towards positively improving as people and societies. Otherwise, nothing about human life, and arguably by extension all life, makes any positive rational sense.
Irrespective of whatever psychological causes that gave rise to my unfiltered nine-year old thinking-out-loud voice, what I draw from this now is that my answer was at best a naïve, if unrealisable, hope. The most I hope for now is to feel content.
Whether it is ‘wise’, well, I imagine that is best left to others to judge. 😂
