July 17, 2007
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wisdom
So I guess I could ask what is wisdom? The classic question. Everybody wants to know. Everybody’s got an opinion. I’ve got an opinion too but its almost incoherent and nobody cares anyway. It isn’t even all that interesting to muse on it since any particular explanation or definition will be so utterly incomplete as to be almost useless to anyone who happens to take note of it. Wisdom is just too big a thing for poor philosophers to have a hope of a hope of ever getting right.
But I think it is a little interesting to talk about the misconceptions about wisdom. Things that people think are core to the concept of wisdom or things that people mistake as wisdom but really aren’t. Let me go over one in particular that I have been thinking about a lot lately.
Caution is not Wisdom.
People think that carefully analyzing the pros and cons of a thing, weighing them, waiting until they are certain they know what the best course of action is and then acting on it is just naturally what being wise is all about. Reason and Analysis. Slow and steady. Carefully, carefully, carefully. Don’t make a mistake, don’t step on a toe, walk the wire, carefully, carefully carefully. For some, that’s the epitome of Wisdom. And the wisest are those amongst us who live in perfect accordance with the rules that keep us safe and never step out of line, never err and never have.
The Greeks knew better. For Plato, Wisdom and Courage were intrinsically linked. Courage was in many ways a part of Wisdom, the part needed by the wise in order to keep their desires in line with their reason. For Aristotle being overcautious was as bad a thing as being rash. Maybe worse.
In that philosophical landscape nobody could truly be deemed wise if they were afflicted by weakness of will, no matter how well they spouted wisdoms unto others. Those who spoke wisdom but lacked the courage to implement it were nothing but sophists and the likes of Socrates would have nothing to do with their ilk. The wise amongst us had to act wisely yes, but more importantly they had to act and do and lead whether they wanted to or not, whether it was safe or not. If you didn’t do that, then you were not only ‘not wise’ in the eyes of Plato, you were basically a fool fit for nothing more than a life enslaved to the will of your betters.
Personally I’m a lot more forgiving. I think everybody has a lot of wisdom in them and wisdom that they can share and which others can learn from and I don’t think you have to even be particularly good at exercising that wisdom in order to be able to share it. We learn from each other when we are foolish as much or more than we do when we are at our wisest.
However, I do think you become wiser the more you act wisely. It’s like a skill you can practice. And with more and more practice you get better at it, you grow in both wisdom and courage. The more you have the easier it is to get more.
But if the way to get wise is to act wise, how on Earth can you do that if you don’t know what the wise thing to do is in the first place? Well its possible that you might just make really good guesses at what the wisest course is or have a really excellent intuition as to how to be and act wise. Or it is possible that you could have a great mentor or even a slave master who just tells you out right what the wisest course is and you do it. Or you could be born into a society with very effective traditions and laws that if you but follow them all perfectly will cause your actions to ever be the wisest course.
For most people, though, the answer is that they get wiser through the good old fashioned practice of screwing up. That’s right. You just jump in and do things, not necessarily with the greatest of caution or the best of plans. Sure you follow your intuition and the advice of others as best you can, but really the only way you are definitely going to act wiser is to do lots and lots of things! Some of which you’ll recognize as having been wise after the fact and thus you’ll know to do them again and some of which you’ll realize were really really mind numbingly incomprehensibly stupid. Those, hopefully, you won’t do again.
But if you are over-cautious then you won’t act much at all and you won’t learn and get wiser at all! You’ll stagnate. At best you can be a puppet of a wiser person or to traditions or even to your own intuitions. At worst you’ll just barely manage to not do particularly unwise things but at the expense of never ever doing anything particularly wise.
Do you see what I am saying? Caution is not wisdom. It isn’t even helpful for becoming wise. Knowing when to be cautious and when to be bold is only the output you get after you have already obtained great Wisdom. And the only way to actually get that Wisdom is to be a lot more bold than cautious.
