Philosophy, so taught Plato, means ‘love of wisdom’. And from the Buddha, to Kant and Einstein, there’s barely a thinker dead or alive who hasn’t extolled its virtues. But for a concept so omnipresent, there’s a surprising lack of clarity over what wisdom is and who might have it, argues Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology, Steve Fuller. ‘Wisdom’ has a highly troubled past, is used to justify lazy prejudice, and should be taken off the pedestal that we’ve placed it on.
‘Philosophy’, so Plato taught us, means ‘love of wisdom’. Yet, ‘sophia’, the Greek word for wisdom, is also the root of such anti-philosophical words as ‘sophistry’ and ‘sophism’. Similarly, the English word ‘wisdom’ shares its roots with the Americanism ‘wiseguy’. The French word ‘savant’ has similar Janus-faced connotations, as any Enlightenment thinker could have told you. Clarity about the nature of wisdom is not helped by its relative absence as a topic in modern Western philosophy. When wisdom has been discussed, say, by Descartes or Hobbes, it appears against the unflattering light of science. Nowadays we might condescendingly call it ‘folk knowledge’. Of course, popular self-help authors continue to promote something they call ‘wisdom’, which amounts to a pastiche of the Hellenistic life-philosophies – Stoicism and Epicureanism -- and the great Eastern religions. Notwithstanding this less than promising pedigree, admirers of wisdom remain convinced of its unequivocally positive nature, whatever that might be.
Wisdom started to acquire its current potency in 1808, when Friedrich Schlegel published On the Language and Wisdom of India, which proposed Sanskrit as the source of the Indo-European languages. A champion of Romanticism, Schlegel understood Sanskrit as a pristine source of wisdom that has been both developed and distorted as it spread westward over the centuries. We can find here the origin of the ‘genealogical’ method that would later lead Nietzsche and Heidegger to seek the deepest philosophical truths in philology, albeit closer to home in Greek. However, wisdom’s general association with the great civilizations of Asia remained and acquired increasing significance over the next century, taking a decisive turn at the end of the First World War.
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The ‘gospel of progress’ had by that time become a secular version of the Christian salvation story.
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The First World War was about the future. It began when a Serbian nationalist assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, signaling in the strongest terms a desire for a different future for his people. The ensuing conflict marked the bloodiest mass encounter in human history up to that point. It was aided by cutting edge science and technology and abetted by its leading practitioners who campaigned on behalf of their respective countries. The ‘gospel of progress’ had by that time become a secular version of the Christian salvation story. The disillusionment that overcame the European mind after the debacle on the battlefield was profound.
Also, by that time, the academic study of comparative religions had developed on the back of Schlegel’s initial efforts. It had come to divide world religions in terms of their orientation to prophecy or wisdom. The prophetic religions are rooted in Abraham’s covenant with God (Judaism, Christianity, Islam). They look towards a future that transcends the past and present, however difficult the path. In contrast, the wisdom religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism) envisage a future that will return to the past in never-ending cycles. For them, this is a fate to which everyone needs to grow accustomed. Unsurprisingly perhaps, the First World War refocused Western eyes on the wisdom religions, starting with Oswald Spengler’s highly influential The Decline of the West.
The traumatic First World War experience has set the baseline for arguments about human progress for the past century, resulting in the sort of hyperbolic claims that we might now call ‘doubling down’. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World provided a satirical masterclass in this vein, whereby an overriding faith in the future justified a regime based on endlessly deferred gratification. Today's transhumanists promise a more efficient form of relief on a shorter timescale. Huxley himself turned to Eastern religions, setting the stage for the ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ mentality of the 1960s, as epitomized by the Harvard behavioral psychologist Timothy Leary.
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By relying on ‘past experience’, it is bound to be fallible, especially when memory is involved.
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So, what should we make of wisdom? One thing is clear. Wisdom always applies to an individual, not the collective. Sure, twenty years ago James Surowiecki extolled the ‘wisdom of crowds’, but he was just talking about optimizing collective decision-making processes, the outcomes of which he deemed ‘wise’. For him, ‘wise’ was no more than an honorific term. However, the true purveyors of wisdom adhere to a cyclical view of history that privileges older people because they have experienced more of the cycle. In contrast, the historic antagonists to wisdom have been those who believe, as Max Planck did, that ‘science progresses one funeral at a time’. This attitude favors the latest generation, who are best positioned to sift the wheat from the chaff in their intellectual inheritance simply because they have invested less in its maintenance.
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Wisdom may be too prejudicial to function as a major philosophical concept
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But the validity of wisdom faces a bigger challenge. By relying on ‘past experience’, it is bound to be fallible, especially when memory is involved. Whereas the prophets of progress, both sacred and secular, regularly made their voices heard in various ways that were often overturned by events, the ‘wise sages’ have largely remained silent, typically relating to the world like a stopped clock that is correct twice a day. Moreover, when these ‘wise sages’ are not simply relying on the ‘tacit knowledge’ of the less educated to justify their own ability to function in the world, they rarely if ever credit the achievements of those who have underwritten their insights.
In the end, while wisdom may be too prejudicial to function as a major philosophical concept, Aristotle may have been on the right track when he referred to ‘phronesis’ as the sort of practical knowledge that enables one to thrive among one’s fellows. We normally associate such knowledge with politicians, but it also highlights the strengths and weaknesses of wisdom within clear boundary conditions. It’s too bad that our politicians lack this knowledge, but it’s unlikely that our philosophers will provide it.
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