Wisdom: Cultivation, Context, and Challenges
Im interested in reading member's thoughts on wisdom. What is it, and how might understandings of it have shifted over time? Can an uneducated person be wise? Does wisdom usually belong to one or two specific domains, or is it a broader category of integrated practice? To what extent does it involve practical skill, moral awareness, or both?
How important do we think wisdom is in our lives, and do we agree with contemporary thinkers like John Vervaeke that we suffer a wisdom famine in the West? It seems to me that when I discuss this topic with others, everyone tends to view themselves as cultivating wisdom, while it is others, particularly those with different values, who are most bereft of it. Are you wise, or getting there? Is wisdom a key goal of philosophy or is this an archaic construction?
Personally, I wouldnt say I am wise, but I do have experience and competence in some areas. Do I actively cultivate wisdom? I rarely think about it. Do I notice wisdom in others? How would I recognise what I myself lack? If you wish to explore a distinction between practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom, great.
How important do we think wisdom is in our lives, and do we agree with contemporary thinkers like John Vervaeke that we suffer a wisdom famine in the West? It seems to me that when I discuss this topic with others, everyone tends to view themselves as cultivating wisdom, while it is others, particularly those with different values, who are most bereft of it. Are you wise, or getting there? Is wisdom a key goal of philosophy or is this an archaic construction?
Personally, I wouldnt say I am wise, but I do have experience and competence in some areas. Do I actively cultivate wisdom? I rarely think about it. Do I notice wisdom in others? How would I recognise what I myself lack? If you wish to explore a distinction between practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom, great.
Comments (105)
Old English wis, Proto-Germanic *wissaz, *wittos of PIE root *weid- "to see", although early uses seem to relate to practical stuff, trades and crafts - still seen in the suffix "-wise" as in clock-wise - "in this way". So it seems to shift from seeing (witness) to doing, then to knowing over time.
Oddly, "wise" and "video" are cognates. Having seen YouTube, I find that ironic.
Quote of the day right there.
From a neurocognitive viewpoint, I would say the most useful definition is to oppose wisdom and cleverness. They relate to each other as the general and the specific. Or in brain terms, wisdom is accumulated useful habits and smartness is focused attention on a novel problem.
So wisdom comes with age and cleverness with youth. Being wise means hardly having to think about what is generally best while being smart is being able to leap to a particular answer.
These are not two unrelated qualities as any brain relies on its accumulated habits and its moment to moment attention. The best adjusted mind would need to do both things rather well. But if we indeed suffer a wisdom famine, I guess that could be blamed on the modern novelty feast.
Yet I dont think that really makes for a penetrating analysis. If modern society was making us all smarter, then it would be achieving that same win/win balance of a greater collective wisdom and a greater individual genius.
It felt like that this project - born in the Enlightenment era - was making progress despite all its critics. But now with social media, Trump, AI, private equity, crypto, identity politics - the usual suspects - not so much.
But in general, wisdom and cleverness are a natural dichotomy that organises the brain. And so also organise society as our collective brain. We have something of major metaphysical importance that goes beyond personal neurology and speaks to our societies as the combinations of its institutions and its innovations.
There is something there to be debated - a philosophical imperative - when it comes to our politics, economics, and the humanities in general. How do the two sides of this equation play into each other, and is something new indeed occurring as a next phase of its evolution?
No. That said, there are many ways to educate ourselves. I don't mean academically. Reading, listening to other reputable people, and watching the actions of those you respect.
Quoting Tom Storm
Wisdom is whole. So, a wise person should have wisdom in all aspect of their life -- practical skills and moral awareness.
Quoting Tom Storm
Very important. I don't mean being a sage. Vervaeke could be right. Anytime someone points to the west, they mean the insatiable appetite to amass great wealth and conquer whatever it is to be conquered. At the expense of wisdom, there is suffering as a result of this behavior.
Here's the ngram.
We might continue to do the sort of analysis Austin suggested, looking to subtleties and distinctions in our ordinary use of the word "wisdom". To begin, consider wise versus smart. Wisdom has a moral implication, but being smart is fairly neutral. Or wise versus clever; wisdom is never immoral, but clever can be. We say someone is intelligent when they demonstrate analytic capacity but wise when they make good judgements.
To say of someone is wise is to acknowledge their authority, but not if theyre a wise guy. A good choice might be the convenient choice, but a wise choice may be better in the long term.
You can be too clever by half but never too wise. You can be very smart, but can you be very wise? You can be quite wise. The fragility of intensifiers indicates that wisdom is an absolute quantity.
We have folk wisdom, Divine Wisdom (complete with capitals), ancient wisdom, and conventional wisdom. Wisdom can be possessed, accumulated and passed down. And even occasionally applied.
Better to be wise than knowledgeable or intelligent, and we have artificial intelligence, not artificial wisdom. Wisdom is earned by suffering and experience, not so knowledge or intelligence. We say someone is intelligent when they demonstrate analytic capacity but wise when they show good judgement.
Is it more serious if I question your wisdom than if I question your judgement?
It then suggested on this basis that wisdom sits at the intersection of out epistemic and normative judgements. This last corresponds to my own intuition. To be wise is to achieve a good outcome.
Quoting Tom Storm
Sure. The Enlightement casts a shadow. I'm overall in agreement with Vervaeke's diagnosis, although bearing in mind it is presented via a series of 52 hour-long lectures, staring with the neolithic, so it's very hard to summarise. But I think his syncretic approach of trying to integrate insights from cognitive science, evolutionary theory, philosophy and spirituality is right on the mark.
Of all the personal qualities that a person can have - intelligence, character, integrity, experience, wisdom, temperament, maturity, personality, virtue - what wisdom and maturity have that set them apart from the others is distance, dispassion. Theyve seen everything before. I was thinking for a minute that maybe wisdom and maturity are the same thing, but thats not right. I guess its more that maturity is a prerequisite for wisdom. Wisdom stands back and sees everything at once, how everything fits together, whats going to come next.
Thats ridiculous. I think it shows, perhaps, a lack of wisdom.
Interesting observations, thanks.
Quoting apokrisis
That seems like a pertinent question.
Quoting L'éléphant
Youre seeing education as something quite different from traditional book-smart or university-style learning. I imagine it is possible to be wise in some areas and foolish in others.
Quoting Banno
Nice point. Hadn't thought about that but you're onto something,
Quoting Banno
A lot to ponder here. I like it. The notion of judgement is clearly important.
Cheers. Austin's idea is to lay out the use of the word, get the lay of the land, so to speak. As opposed to just picking a definition and defending it to the hilt, the usual approach of the armchair warrior.
So as a first approximation, wisdom differs from intelligence, cleverness, being smart and so on, in its ethical implications,
There may be some benefit in further considering why wisdom fails intensification. Dose this show that it is valuable for its own sake?
His initial interview with Alex O'Connor seems to be a good way to cut through to his primary focus.
I personally struggle to accept that todays people are intrinsically unhappier and/or more foolish than previous generations or eras, despite the popularity of this trope with everyone from New Age folk to MAGA supporters.
What about spiritual wisdom? A separate category?
Quoting T Clark
I think that's a nice formulation. I work with a lot of people just out of university, in their mid-20s. Every so often I meet someone who is simply wise, who shows a capacity for moral discernment and prudent decision making more typical of someone mature with a lot of experience. My suspicion is that some wisdom is innate, or at least can be cultivated early.
Quoting T Clark
My initial reaction was similar, but I think he needs to explain this further. He is construing a wider understanding of education, which would include people without degrees and fancy paperwork.
Quoting Banno
Yes, this corresponds to my intuition on the subject. My initial thinking about wisdom led me to words like skill, common sense, judgment, measured.
Is wisdom, when demonstrated, appreciated by others? Does it cut through? Is it truly valued? I imagine the answer is: it depends
Is there a known individual or individuals today whom we might call wise? Or is wisdom entirely in the eye of the beholder and shaped by their values?
I'm not sure what you mean by 'fails intensification'.
To my eye that's more an excuse for rejecting more recent ethical values. I spent yesterday at a Voluntary Assisted Dying conference, and came away with an overwhelming belief that VAD is a moral good; one that would have been impossible to implement until recently. Quite the opposite of what proposes?
Quoting Tom Storm
Not sure. - but it does seem that while one might recognise wisdom in another, supposing oneself to be wise is... problematic. It's something one attributes to another.
Agree. I recently had an acquaintance put this into practice. It was a good thing.
It's just that it seems odd to say someone is a little bit wise. You got it or you don't.
Do you agree?
Well, here's the thing. Aren't there folk who are wise in some areas and dunces in others? Or does 'proper' wisdom need to be all encompassing?
Yes, I think so. I've been attempting to get AI to find instances of reference to "degrees of wisdom", without much success - using terms such as "greater wisdom," "much wisdom," "little wisdom". I'm looking for some sort of evidence, rather than just making shit up. My hypothesis is that if one is wise in some area, that's an end to it; there's no more or less involved. So absence of evidence confirms my hypothesis... :grimace:
We say "much more intelligent" and "a lot of knowledge", but not so "much more wise" or "A lot of wisdom" See this Ngram.
:up: Intelligence decides among decidables, only wisdom among undecidables.
The apparent contradiction - deciding what is undecidable - cuts to the heart of what it is to be rational. My Masters thesis was on organisations making decisions despite their being undecidable. But only the good undecidable decisions are wise... :wink:
In Russian, this also finds its development. "??????" (videt') - that is, to See and "??????" (vedat') - that is, to Know.
Both words come from the Old Slavonic root ??????, which means "to know, to be familiar with something."
Oh, say some more about that - context perhaps. Are you saying that operational pragmatism means having to make decisions whether the matter is decidable or not? I've certainly been there.
It was about having to make a decision despite not having sufficient information, yes, but also about supposing that such decisions were the logical consequence of consideration of the available information - the conviction that one is choosing the best answer when in truth one is imposing one solution amongst many. That imposition is the ethical aspect.
As someone who came to whatever wisdom I have later in life, its possible my definition is tilted. Perhaps we should add character to my short list of the most important factors influencing wisdom. It mightve taken a while for maturity to counterbalance whatever weaknesses in character I have.
No, I'm seeing education as not just schooling and formal instruction.
Quoting T Clark
"Uneducated" to me means no formal schooling and/or no instruction from the wise people.
Well said. This is what I have in mind.
I still think youre clearly wrong.
I don't share your sentiment. One who does not work hard on learning at all is uneducated and could not be wise.
Got ya. Government in a nutshell.
Quoting L'éléphant
:up:
Quoting L'éléphant
I wonder if it is possible to become wise by learning from the foolish? After all, with discernment, watching a fool and what happens to them can be very instructive in learning what not to do.
Ah, you are forgetting one principle -- this is parallel to what you're saying "how do you know there's an error in a process?" You know there's an error when you've seen the correct result from that process and now another person using the same process did not arrive at the same result.
You could only learn from the foolish if you know the difference.
:up: :up:
I don't care how many upvotes that post gets.
I still don't understand what's the objection.
I think its more likely that the more education you have, the less likely it is that you will be wise. Of course thats an overstatement. This is from Gia-Fu Fengs translation of Verse 48 of the Tao Te Ching:
Wisdom comes from letting go of what youve learned, not adding more to it. Wisdom is a surrendering, not the result of an act of will.
Not always. If you watch someone follow a course of action and see the consequences, you also learn what works and what does not. In some cases you will gradually build up wisdom around conduct, goal setting and approaches. In fact, I have learned more from watching mistakes and making them than I ever have from success. And no one is tabula rasa. Most of us have a smattering of wisdom alongside our foolishness. The trick, perhaps is to fan it carefully, the way a spark can be nurtured into a roaring fire.
I disagree with the above passage. Sainthood comes to mind when I read that passage. If you surrender yourself to the way of the universe, you become Tao, a passive observer of the universe. But we are here on Earth -- living and interacting. If you want wisdom to mean a passive observer, then you should make that clear.
Quoting Tom Storm
Okay so you're just supporting what I said earlier. How do you know what mistakes are if not by knowing what success is. By knowing the difference.
One can recognize that events aren't meeting expectations and recognize that beliefs leading to those expectations were somehow mistaken. It's not obvious to me how "knowing what success is" is necessary to knowing what mistakes are.
My two bits from a 2021 thread ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/548880
:roll:
:up: :up:
I always think of wisdom as keeping things in proportion, weighting all the relevant considerations correctly. That means reacting appropriately to what's in front of you, taking it as neither a bigger nor a smaller deal than it is, but also holding constant the issues that aren't in front you. So it's the wise person who remembers what the whole point of doing something is, instead of focusing only on the procedure; it's the wise person who points out the desirable and undesirable consequences of some undertaking, because they don't forget the broader context in which it will occur; it's the wise person who balances what they know and what they don't know, their relative confidence in an outcome and the potential consequences (which might be big or small) of it not going according to expectations.
I don't know if a complete picture is coming through there, but it's for reasons along these lines that I think wisdom tends to come with age. Having seen a number of successes and a number of failures, you can have some sense of the shapes they take, and you've had the experience of not foreseeing how either would play out. I think when you're younger it's natural to get caught up in the immediacy of the problem to be solved, but after you've been through that a number of times, you're maybe a little less impressed by that feat alone and tend to take the wider view. ("Yes, we can do this, but do we need to?" or "Yes, we can do this, but should we?" and so on.) And if everything depends on solving this problem, or completing this task, the wise person remembers that and keeps the focus where it needs to be.
So, for me, it's keeping things in perspective, in the proper proportion, and that often means not being misled by something looming large because it's immediately in front of you, but remembering that it's still small compared to other things that aren't currently taking up so much of your field of vision.
(I think Thoreau was my first philosopher, and I've been reading Walden again for the first time since I was a teenager. He's always talking like this. You've got a fine house and you've completely forgotten what the point of a house is. You're working night and day to meet your material needs and completely neglecting your soul. It's always like this with Thoreau: you've allowed yourself to be caught up in something and in the process you've forgotten what's really important.)
Quoting Srap Tasmaner
I particularly like this insight.
Quoting 180 Proof
I forgot about that great response. Thanks!
Quoting L'éléphant
Because, in most situations, even a fool can see when something is a failure. You dont even need to know what success is. But as I already said, very few people are 100% foolish.
Quoting wonderer1
Agree.
Everyone has knowledge of some sort, but generally speaking wisdom comes with experience. There is a reason people say someone is 'wise beyond their years'.
An uneducated person can certainly be wise. Like many things in life people have more of something than others. If someone has more wisdom then they are better able to apply what they know (no matter how specific or broad) when and where it matters.
Quoting Tom Storm
I am. Took some years to get there though. I do not think it is something that came naturally to me though and generally think I am a late bloomer.
I have never met or heard of anyone below 30 who I would call 'wise' in the broader sense. I would say I reached a point where I could call myself in my early 40's. At that point I think people generally have a reasonable grip on life and the perhaps the hormonal changes play a significant role here. That said, I did have an experience that fundamentally shifted my appreciation for life in my early 30's and changed the trajectory of my life, but one fleeting moment of unified 'wisdom' was more or less the catalyst rather than the point where I really obtained something permanent.
I fully expect once I get even older I will look back and think 'I did not quite get it when I was 45,' but I will still see myself as hitting that point of 'wisdom' by that time. Maybe it is just nothing more than a feeling of balance or something? Hard to put into words.
Ah nice, I hadn't considered that angle. :cool:
You can learn calculus (intelligence) but not know how to apply it to the real world (wisdom). Just as you can read Nietzsche or Jung, but not know wtf they are talking about because there's a certain symbolic expression they use with metaphors that generally goes right over most people.
How well you can discern another philosopher's language game takes wisdom.
Key passages would be:
The praise of wisdom in the Wisdom of Solomon: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Wisdom%206%3A22-11%3A1&version=NABRE
The poetic interlude on wisdom in Job 28: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%2028&version=KJV
The opening of Proverbs: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%201&version=KJV
And then there are also the significantly more dour references throughout Ecclesiastes. A particularly relevant one for today is the attack on a "live for today" hedonism presented instead Wisdom 2.
Then, in the Greek tradition, sophia is related to a deeper knowledge of metaphysical truths; consider Plato's divided line. The way this often varies from episteme (sciencia) is that it relates finite phenomena to the whole of existence, the creature to all creation and Creator, or involves an understanding of things through a direct noetic grasp of their principles (as opposed to say, quia demonstrations from effects, e.g., inductive pattern recognition).
Aristotle makes a distinction between phronesis, a virtue of practical understanding (excellence in making choices), i.e. the application of reason to right action (with virtues sort of serving as the "universals" of practical reason) and sophia, a theoretical understanding of things through their principles.
These two become fused in the later Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions, where wisdom is often a participation in divine wisdom through which deeper knowledge is achieved. The knowledge the wise are said to possess of created things is almost more of an aesthetic sort, in that it is not instrumental knowledge, but rather a deeper understanding (hence the common pairing of pihilosophy with philokalia, "the love of beauty"). Wisdom tends to relate to the "big picture" and ultimate ends, which makes it distinct from any particular techne or science, which one might master without the perfection of the virtues. Wisdom is generally the crowning achievement of virtue (something like Plato's idea that the whole person must be unified and turned towards the Good for true knowledge of it to be possible).
Hence, praxis tends to be a focal point in that tradition, e.g., ascetic labors and particular "spiritual exercises." This is as true for the Pagan philosophers as the desert monastics. As Robert Finn and Pierre Hadot put it almost identically: "the (ancient) philosopher is a holy man or saint." For instance, when the philosophers go out to visit the desert monks in Saint Palladius' Sayings of the Desert Fathers, they remark on their similar practices, although the Christians tended to put a much greater focus on labor as a means of meditation, fostering humility (late-antique culture had a stigma against menial labor) and as a means of rendering hospitality and aid. This was partly practical; philosophers tended to be independently wealthy while Christian monks were often drawn from the lower class, and at any rate wealthy ones ideally parted with their wealth. This doesn't require that those possessing wisdom be monastics though; the Sayings for instance are full of examples of struggling monks being shown up and illumined by graceful ascetics who live in urban settings, or even within marriage, but are beyond the temptations of the world.
The Christian element adds a focus on "discernment," which can be seen in a lot the answers here.
A key idea is that wisdom (and thus virtue) is sought for its own sake, being not mainly about making "good choices" in a pragmatic sense (as the goal of wisdom anyhow), but about an intellectual joy that is achieved through contemplation that itself makes one a "good (just) person," but which also leads to a good (happy) life, to joyous action (as opposed to the suffering brought on by vice). Whereas if wisdom is primarily about making good pragmatic choices, then it really is more of a means than an end.
Hence, there is a way in which skepticism, particularly skepticism vis-á-vis ultimate ends, virtue, and "the big picture," seems to invert these notions of wisdom, while still appearing fairly similar on the surface. If wisdom is not an ultimate end, it becomes instrumental. If "wisdom is recognizing that one must take a pragmatic approach to everything, seeking a balanced (short versus long term) enjoyment, since one is always in the absence of (the older) 'wisdom,' (i.e., a grasp of ultimate ends in their principles)" that actually makes "wisdom" quite a bit different. If the wise are "wise" in virtue of making "good choices," we might ask then, in virtue of what are "good choices" themselves called "good?"
I would imagine this is a quite common sentiment amongst perennialists or fans of particular Eastern or historic Western wisdom traditions. And this makes a certain sort of sense since, if one considers them important (or the sort of classical liberal arts education) then the fact that they are not generally taught will be something in need of change.
For instance, looking at college syllabi it would seem that very little of the Eastern tradition gets taught, and pre-modern Western thinkers don't fair that much better. Aristotle and Plato are the key exceptions there. Yet if you look for the big Stoics, Neoplatonists, or basically anything from later antiquity to the end of the middle ages, it's very sparse. This holds for a good deal of the "literary canon" too, at least in comparison to contemporary social theorists (e.g. Virgil versus bell hooks or Adorno). The drive for diversity has not tended to mean teaching other historical traditions either (e.g., the big Islamic philosophers). For philosophy and broader social theory, the post-moderns, liberals, and to lesser extent the Marxists, really dominate. But, for most perrenialists (and I do think they are right here), these are in key respects much more similar to each other than they are to any of the older traditions. So, even for people not committed to any particular tradition, there appears to be a missing diversity element that allows for unchallenged assumptions or a sort of conceptual blindness. This need not even be in alarmist terms. It's simply "hard to get" without any sort of grounding, and that grounding is missing.
It's not uncommon in ancient and medieval thought to speak of greater or lesser wisdom. This is basically in line with any of the virtues, which could be more or less perfected.
For example: 29 And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure, and breadth of mind like the sand on the seashore, 30 so that Solomon's wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt. 31 For he was wiser than all other men, wiser than Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, Calcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol, and his fame was in all the surrounding nations. (I Kings 4)
Note, for this comparison to work, the "people of the East" and those named need to be wise of course. Hagiography is full of this sort of thing though.
In terms of contemporary usage, I don't see appeals to wisdom (as a specific concept) in general that often.
I know what instinct and logical thinking are. Intuition, in philosophy, is defined as the power of obtaining knowledge that cannot be acquired either by inference or observation, by reason or experience. From my own experience, sometimes my intuition was right and sometimes wrong, so to me, this definition of intuition is problematic. I have no idea what wisdom may refer to at all.
... as well as, maybe especially, how not to and when not to apply what one (thinks one) knows.
Your understanding of Taoism is different from mine.
That's an interesting point and I would agree.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
That's an element no one seems to have drawn out so far. Thanks.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
:up: :up: Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
There's an entire thread in this, isn't there?
I was wondering if anyone would bring some wisdom skepticism to the table. Is wisdom merely difficult to define, or does it, perhaps, not exist?
Given that we know what we mean by instinct and logical thinking, therefore, I think it is proper to say that intuition refers to the fact that our guesses are mostly right. That is a unique phenomenon by itself! It is difficult for me that understand how we could possibly intuit, but it is real, at least from my own personal observation. Having said all these, accepting that intuition also exists, maybe we can define wisdom as a state of mind when your guesses are always right. Other than that, I don't see any extra room for anything else at all.
I can bring some wisdom skepticism to the table, not necessarily about its existence, but about its value.
In wisdom traditions wisdom usually involves letting go of desire.
The basic intuition they generally start from is that world is a continuous changing and interconnected whole... the one.
Conceptualisation, dividing the one into parts with the mind, is thus not merely a neutral, but an active process, implying some force or desiring involved in the dividing.
But since the world is an interconnected whole, the conceptualisation is also an imposition and thus falsification of the one.
To be better attuned with the whole, one needs to let go of these conceptualisation that lead him astray, ... and letting go of these conceptualisation means letting go of desire.
And so you get the ascetic ideal, and taken to its ultimate conclusion, the will to nothing... nihilism.
But then the question becomes, as living beings, have we not thrown out the baby with the bathwater?
Oh surely. Just the names on that list is enough. "How did Michel Foucault become the most assigned person in all of academia and by such a huge margin?" could be its own thread (and what happened to poor Boethius and Virgil, the two most copied authors for a millennia! In general the Romans seem to have faired worse than the Greeks.)
One popular source for that was Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Enquiry into Values (and his subsequent Lila: An Enquiry into Morals.) Pirsig dissected the typical subject-object dualism that dominates Western thought, arguing that Qualitythe immediate, pre-intellectual recognition of value or excellenceexists prior to, and gives rise to, the division between observer and observed. This Quality is not merely aesthetic preference or subjective judgment, but rather the dynamic source from which both the mental and physical arise. Pirsig suggests that when we realise Quality directlywhether in a well-crafted piece of work, a moment of understanding, or the proper maintenance of a motorcyclewe encounter reality in its most fundamental form, before it gets carved up by analytical thinking into separate categories of self and world. This metaphysical position attempts to bridge the gap between classical rationality and romantic intuition by showing how both emerge from a more primary encounter with value itself.
It is precisely this 'axis of quality' which has tended to collapse in (post)Enlightenment thought. This is the 'flattening of ontology' that John Vervaeke often references in his talks. His concept of "leveling up" refers to his argument for restoring an hierarchy of value as a response to what he sees as the meaning crisis in contemporary culture. Vervaeke contends that reductive materialism has created a "flat ontology" where everything is reduced to the same fundamental leveltypically physical processesthereby collapsing meaningful distinctions between different orders or levels of reality. In contrast, an hierarchical approach recognizes genuinely emergent levels of being, where higher-order phenomena like consciousness, meaning, and wisdom represent real ontological categories that cannot be fully captured or described in terms of lower levels. "Leveling up" involves cultivating practices and perspectives that allow individuals to access and participate in these higher orders of reality through what he calls "religio" (reconnection), moving from mere propositional knowledge through procedural and perspectival knowing toward participatory knowledge that transforms the knower. This hierarchical framework doesn't reject scientific understanding but embeds it within a richer ontology reflecting the existential context of human beings, who are capable of grasping meaning in a way that other creatures are not.
But this is invariably met with the objection, what do you mean by 'higher'? Higher, according to whom? (Just wait!) This is because any such values are generally expected to be matters of individual conscience - the individual being the arbiter of value on modern culture.
Wisdom comes upon you quickly, and completely.
Wisdom gets lost in a book or a chapter, and is more easily found in a paragraph, or a sentence, or even in a nod, or in silence.
Wisdom stands up to the rigorous interrogation of a logical analytic, as well as the practical test of the physician. (Wisdom has a practical, applicability that fits one specific circumstance, and a universality and eternity that recasts all things.)
Wisdom can come from a child, who may not know it is wisdom, though they know what the particular wisdom is about.
Wisdom is perfection, meaning, it is not only exactly what is needed, but more than what could be expected, producing fruit.
If there is a reason to champion wisdom, it is because we are social creatures and wisdom is taken to be what should be the view of the largest human context. And intelligence is prized as the opposite the genius of the individual.
But again, they are just the dichotomous limits of the same thing the reasoning process. And that was neatly defined by Peirce as truth being what would be believed in the limit by a community of rational inquiry.
At least in the Western context, it's generally letting go of bad/evil/unworthy/less fulfilling desires, and thus being free and able to fulfill good/worthy/truly fulfilling desires. So the goal is ultimately the fulfillment of a greater desire, and the ascent to a greater freedom. Not a "will to nothing" but to will the Good, where with greater knowledge and conformity, comes ever greater love and satisfaction.
The Platonists have the erotic ascent, the Peripatetics have properly educated appetites, etc. Desire is normally central, and deepens with ascetic practice. For instance, we get this vision in the Symposium:
[I]And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.[/I]
Or St. Augustine in the Confessions:
[I]Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.[/I]
Dante at the climax of the Heaven of the Sun (wisdom) in the Paradiso is even more sensual:
[I]
Then, as the tower-clock calls us to come
at the hour when God's Bride is roused from bed
to woo with matin song her Bridegroom's love,
with one part pulling thrusting in the other,
chiming, ting-ting, music so sweet the soul,
ready for love, swells with anticipation [/I]
And in general, this does not lead to a denigration of the love of finite things, but rather its increase (as in Saint Bernard of Clairvaux's "Ladder of Love). Wisdom, by revealing creatures' ultimate context, reveals their true beauty. And so too for Rumi and the Sufi tradition:
[I]Always at night returns the Beloved: do not eat opium to-night;
Close your mouth against food, that you may taste the sweetness of the mouth.
Lo, the cup-bearer is no tyrant, and in his assembly there is a circle:
Come into the circle, be seated; how long will you regard the revolution of Time?
Why, when God's earth is so wide, have you fallen asleep in a prison?
Avoid entangled thoughts, that you may see the explanation of Paradise.
Refrain from speaking, that you may win speech hereafter.
Abandon life and the world, that you may behold the Life of the world.
[/I]
Even the Stoics generally distinguish that it is irrational desire that must be overcome (although they come closer to fetishizing total dispassion). The Orthodox, while more focused on asceticism, speak of transfiguring, not removing the appetites (including those of the body; likewise, Dante has the appetites of the body educated, not destroyed in the Purgatorio). My exposure to Hindu thought has generally suggested something similar. There might be exceptions, but for the West at least I think Saint Maximus the Confessor's words generally hold:
[I]Nothing created by God is evil. It is not food that is evil but gluttony, not the begetting of children but unchastity, not material things but avarice, not glory but vainglory. It is only the misuse of things that is evil, not the things themselves.[/I]
Or for another pithy summary, Saint Isaac of Nineveh:
[I]The world" is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them the world. But when we wish to distinguish them by their special names, we call them passions. The passions are the following: love of riches, desire for possessions, bodily pleasure from which comes sexual passion, love of honor which gives rise to envy, lust for power, arrogance and pride of position, the craving to adorn oneself with luxurious clothes and vain ornaments, the itch for human glory which is a source of rancor and resentment, and physical fear.
Where these passions cease to be active, there the world is dead . Someone has said of the Saints that while alive they were dead; for though living in the flesh, they did not live for the flesh. See for which of these passions you are alive. Then you will know how far you are alive to the world, and how far you are dead to it.[/I]
The passions then are only unworthy desires. The goal is rather a perfection of freedom, to: "Turn my impulses into rigging for the ship of repentance, so that in it I may exult as I travel the world's sea to the haven of Thy hope."
Would intelligence be desirable in itself, i.e., worthy of love?
Intellectus is not so far from sapientia, but in common parlance it seems to me that "intelligence" has often drifted a good deal away from "wisdom." In that context, to say they are the same seems to me a bit like saying that "beauty is just a sort of pleasure" or that "awe and the numinous" is just the experience of danger. There is of course a similarity, but I would perhaps say they are analogous, one more "sensible" the other more "noetic" (I'd say "intellectual," but that word has run away with "intelligence.")
And I know that there I just related "intelligence" to the sensible, but this is only because "intelligence" sometimes seems to become wholly estimative and computational.
Doesn't society always attach that judgement on the individual while being equally convinced of its own inherent worth? Being worthy of love is something in the eye of the beholder. And the individual starts off already grossly out-numbered.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
But why would we use two words if we could do with just the one? My argument is that they are both basically the same thing, but then also completely different in terms of scale.
So the brain exists to do cognition (broadly speaking). And the primary functional division that then arises for the neuroscientist is between attention and habit. The intelligence of the ability to consciously focus and figure out something complicated, coupled to the wisdom of accumulated habit which allows you to react to everything else as if it were already completely familiar and reflexively understood.
This then maps to how we socially view the intelligence~wisdom distinction. We can see how an immature mind could be very smart but not very world-wise. And also how a mature mind cannot help to have become pretty experienced in dealing with the world, even if never having being the sharpest tool in the box.
So it becomes a scale issue. The young mind often seems a bit precociously sharp. The aging mind surprisingly full of a stock of sensible habits. The brain is the same brain. It has just gone from living in a world where all was surprising novelty to a world that can hardly surprise at all.
We say there is no fool like an old fool as almost nothing can dent the security of sedimented habit. While we equally find the kids to be as much smart-arse as witty.
So yes, we apply our social judgements. And we might have different criticisms of folk at the opposite ends of the lifetime that they have spent adapting themselves to the opportunities and viscitudes of the world.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Commonsense ought to matter more in everyday life. But society has changed. Work itself has become more computational than practical. Or perhaps more polarised into computational and emotional intelligence as the focus of what people do.
So talk of IQ assumes a generalised intelligence or G factor score that you can attach to an individual. But we know it isn't quite so simple. And what the labour market prizes is itself evolving in time.
This answer is neither here nor there. Fools by definition are people who act unwisely and get unwise results.
Here's a copy-pasted thought on wisdom:
[quote=Aristotle]
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. [/quote]
Here's another one from Albert Einstein:
Quoting T Clark
Okay, then educate me. How do you understand Taoist wisdom.
Perhaps. But value is also construed in postmodern theory through intersubjective agreement, which seems to be as close to objectivity as we can get. But agreement remains contingent and subject to linguistic and cultural practices.
Yeah, I suppose the way we think these days may indeed create problems, but maybe thats the price of debunking myths and sacred cows. It could be that a more pragmatic and justifiable orientation naturally brings instability, especially during transitional periods, which might last for centuries. How would we know?
Quoting L'éléphant
I shouldn't have written fool. My mistake. We aren't actually talking about fools as such. I've been careless in language. We are talking about recognising our foolishness and developing wisdom. As I said before no one (or very few) is a complete fool. Most of us have enough nous to tell the differnce between what works and what doesn't. If you disagree with that then we hold different views about people. Which means we can move on.
Count me in. That's why I'm here in this thread.
We have plenty of our own.
I was struck by the similarities for instance between Heraclitus notion of the wisdom and the Doaist. This notion of the one/doa/logos that is beyond conception, desire being the thing that leads us away from the one etc etc... Both are situated arround the same time, 500 BC. It is possible that they influenced eachother, or rather had older sources in common, but more likely is probably that they independantly came to similar conclusions because of the way things are.
A certain guy with a moustache would say the Western tradition, Christianity is still a young tradition, and that this ascetic path eventually leads to a kind of Buddhism where the will get negated (for instance Schopenhauer). Maybe that's overly reductive and determinist, I don't know. But it does seem to me like a 'logical' path a tradition would follow give the nature of world (changing, impermanent) and the nature of the human mind (fixating, grasping for permanence).
How does one reconcile with the ever changing impermanent without negating the will altogether? Some of your quotes seem to point to moderation, some of them to a more total renunciation of worldly desires, some seem to point to a kind of Amor Dei and some of them seem more like the Epicurian notion that abstinence ultimately intensifies pleasures.
So yes, maybe there are different ways to deal with the question.
Broadly, I think the perennialists have a very strong case. There are very strong similarities across disparate traditions, and in particular a sort of "virtue ethics" seems dominant across the pre-modern world. A lot of other ideas, such as the insufficiency of worldly goods, the need for freedom and self-determination to be cultivated, education as primarily the development of virtue, apophatic theology, the need to move beyond dependence on fortune for liberty, etc. show up in many places, as do similar metaphysical insights.
However, I think perennialists often bulldoze over crucial distinctions and misrepresent traditions to make them fit into the neat narrative they want to create. Different traditions share crucial elements, but then often diverge in crucial ways. For instance, Stoicism and even moreso the ancient skeptics tend to go, IMHO, too far in pursuing dispassion as opposed to "right passion." Speaking very broadly, "Pagan philosophy' tended to undervalue the body, and the metaphysical importance of embodiment in comparison to the early and medieval Christians.
Philosophy of history is a particular outlier here in that a great many traditions tend to flatten out the importance of human history (and so politics, and often individuality) due to their other commitments. This is a place where the modern tradition often gets more right in my view (although it often goes too far in this direction). This is certainly true of Christianity, although it has some of the standout counter examples in Dante and Solovyov. Attar of Nishapur's Conference of the Birds shares a lot with the Divine Comedy, but a key difference is the respect for individuality and the historical-politcal in Dante, because he is able to resolve the dialectic between the mutability of history and divine union in a more complete way (a synthesis versus a sheer negation), and the dialectic between individual freedom (as the openness of the rational appetites) and the observable fact that people exercise very real causal powers on the moral and intellectual development of others, and their freedom, for better or worse.
These differences are quite important though. Also, perennialists sometimes tend towards outright misrepresentations to make their subject matter more palatable to their key audiences (particularly in the New Age space) and we end up with weird things like "Meister Eckhart the Buddhist."
I forget exactly where, I think it's in a few places, Plato describes being educated as primarily "desiring what is truly worthy/good and despising what is truly unworthy/bad." He says that a formally educated, wealthy person might be able to give more sophisticated answers as to why something is desirable or undesirable, but that this is ancillary to being truly "educated." If the more sophisticated person is nonetheless not properly oriented/cultivated such as to desire the good and abhor evil, then they are in an important sense uneducated (unformed); whereas the unsophisticated person is educated, although lacking in sophistication.
Now, Plato's point here sort of goes with what you each have said in different ways. In general, we do not love the good by default. While people might have more or less of a talent/inclination towards specific virtues and vices (e.g., tempers can "run in families"), in general they won't attain to a state of virtue without some cultivation. Indeed, without care and cultivation, at the limit, infants and children will die, so there always needs to be some cultivation (some "education").
So, this is obviously a broad view on education, one a bit at odds with how we use the word today in English. It has some appeal though. But education wouldn't quite be the same thing as wisdom. It is rather, a sort of virtue and desire for virtue, which is itself prior to (although also comingled with) wisdom (for Plato anyhow).
Do you mean "modern society?" I think this doesn't hold for many societies. For instance, surely it didn't tend to hold for American slaveholders vis-á-vis their slaves, nor in the context of the violent tribalism of the Near East, or even within Roman culture. I would say this notion is a product of a convergent evolution between different philosophies, with it being most strongly rooted in the West in the context of Christianity (for instance, this sentiment motivating, if not quite the end, then a precipitous decline in slavery throughout Christendom in antiquity and the taboo on infanticide).
Modern liberalism takes this up and tends to justify it in a different, more procedural way (e.g., Rawls). I think this has always been aspirational though. Certain individuals are not particularly valued by society as ends, and then individuals are also excluded from "society" based on convenient criteria (the immigrant, the overseas laborer who produces for the society, etc.)
But even if we accepted that individuals possess inherit worth, I don't see how that carries over to wisdom. Under liberalism, questions of telos, etc., the traditional domain of "wisdom," are generally privatized and the opinions of the fool are in a sense as sacrosanct as that of the saint or sage (e.g., Rawls' individual who sees counting blades of grass as the highest good).
Ah, but this is precisely what most wisdom traditions explicitly deny. This is more of an assumption of the liberal/Anglo-empiricist paradigm, the placement of "value" on the subjective side of the "subjective/objective ledger" (generally paired with the denial of the rational appetites for Goodness, Beauty, and Truth per se). For example, see above with Plato on "education," which is all about loving and despising what is truly worthy of each.
But this is hardly a judgement unique to the wisdom traditions of the West. The East also tends towards a position of "proper" beneficence and "proper loves." This is one respect where I think the modern tradition (and it's more true of empiricism) is an outlier.
I guess I am questioning if they are generally understood to be the same thing. "Intelligence," as commonly used, tends to be viewed procedurally (i.e., as discursive ratio) or even computationally. Wisdom by contrast tends to deal with ultimate ends. An IQ test is supposed to measure intelligence, but it's unclear to me if it says much of anything about a grasp of ends (at least directly). So, I suppose my question is if "intelligence" covers the (ultimate) desirability of ends. If discovering what is truly worthy is "problem solving," it still seems like a particular sort of problem solving.
Certainly, intelligence as something like IQ doesn't seem to, even if we broaden it a good deal. But on a broader view of intelligence they do seem quite similar, and so I could seem them as perhaps largely being distinguished as a power versus a habit. Although, I think we can usefully distinguish between different intellectual virtues: practical wisdom versus science versus the traditional view of sophia, since they have different ends and ends define whether or not a habit/skill it being trained/developed well or poorly.
I don't really disagree with the idea of comparing wisdom (or virtue) with a habit or, more loosely, a skill.
One of the early papers in the volume Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology (which you might find interesting @Tom Storm ) looks at how experienced chess players are better at reconstructing chess boards from memory. They are, however, not particularly better at reconstructing wholly random chess boards, only ones that would develop from normal, goal oriented play. And, when they narrate their construction, the experienced players tend to reconstructing games based on strategy, rather than blocks of pieces/color, as novices do. The experienced players vastly outperform novices despite not performing better on more general memory tasks.
Now obviously a good deal of this is explained in terms of chunking strategies, data compression, etc. Yet the goal-directedness of play also seems to be a crucial component of reasoning. Chess, is of course, easy to study, but also very far from virtue or wisdom. The goal of chess is fixed. But an element of virtue, and particularly wisdom, has to be discovering which goals are actually choiceworthy (the end is not fixed, or is at least much broader), and this is precisely where I see the biggest gulf between common uses of "intelligence" and "wisdom." Boethius' musings in the Consolation on the instability of worldly goods, and the lack of freedom dependence on them generates, is for instance, not so much "problem solving," as "ends finding/valuing."
Yes, but I think it's fair to say that the market is often foolish. Whereas wisdom is generally judged according to the wise, no? The market doesn't value wisdom for the same reason the fools tends to spurn wisdom... lack of wisdom.
A bit out of scope for this conversation.
Proves my point. Cleverness turns into wisdom over time as what was novel becomes the routine.
The novice player tries to be clever with elaborate ploys. The experienced player is seeking to mimimise errors and build pressure by position.
So cleverness and wisdom are both the same and different in being different stages of a nautural progression in skill acquisition. And the chess example applies to the game of life in this way. We have to start by making mistakes in a furious way to begin to learn. We need to invest in analysing the particular to discover what critically matters. But then we begin to master the situation and can instead operate with a weight of skilled and unthinking habit. We can shift our attention up the scale to the big picture where it is about minimising errors and building pressure by position.
It is a further question if some people are especially good at one and not the other. On the whole, the psychologist would say it is just catching people at different stages of this simple intellectual trajectory.
I'd say the two only seem similar because the ends pursued in chess are obvious and fixed. Indeed, I'd say being good at chess is a skill/techne, not wisdom. But consider people who are quite "clever" at navigating their life such that they can satisfy their appetites, amass wealth, win over romantic partners, etc., and find themselves at mid-life completely miserable. Surely, they have been "clever" and intelligent in some sense, but have they been wise?
For instance, was Jeffery Epstein wise? He certainly seems to have been clever. Had his fortunes not taken a turn and he remained out of prison and the public eye, would he then be wise because he was able to achieve the satisfaction of his appetites and to flourish according to most contemporary standards for "success?" Would he have been wise if he had simply been more inconspicuous about his crimes or kept strictly to the local age of consent?
Which is a reasonable point.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Intuitively that seems right too.
Certain understandings of wisdom, then, rest on the ability to know or intuit the Good, or on union with God, with the source of this wisdom rooted in a transcendent origin.
Sure. But the brain doing all this is the same brain with the same cognitive structure. So the only difference is that playing chess is a highly constrained and artificial task thus good for extracting the story of what is going on in a controlled setting. And then cleverness~wisdom is this standard brain trajectory applied to our lives in their most general and uncontrolled settings the lives we live as social creatures interacting with the perils and opportunities of a complex physical environment.
So wisdom and intelligence are of course socially-constructed as well as something innate to our evolved brains. What is wise or what is clever is framed by a collective social judgement.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
How does that contradict anything I said? Society would judge them as having being immature, or just unlucky perhaps, and now wise after the event. These miserable folk clearly developed their habits, but unwise ones. And society might even deserve the blame as its own "wisdom" might have set out the game of life in a fashion where being miserable was rather an inevitable outcome.
Wisdom always sounds like a good thing to have. But really, it is just some set of habits that have evolved within a society's own game of life. They only have to be pragmatically effective optimised enough to keep the whole social game going. There is nothing transcendent about either cleverness or wisdom.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You are conflating personal wisdom and collective wisdom. It is important to see how these are two different things and thus how they can also come together as the one thing. You can't really have the collective social view unless people can freely dissent from it and learn from the error of their ways.
So how do you build a wise society? Allow the creation of social institutions to flourish. Allow wise habits to take up a permanent presence. The standard pragmatic answer.
How do you build a wise person? Let them grow up in a wise social context where the wisdom is being institutionalised in this fashion over all scales from the wisdom appropriate in playing chess or planting out seedlings, to the wisdom in life choices that result in the win/wins for yourself and those around you.
Of course our societies are never perfect. But then who ever said that Nature even has a notion of the Good?
Well, theists of course. But I only speak for the pragmatist here. :wink:
Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung
Theres something a bit cheap and glib about mere cleverness, which seems to locate wisdom closer to nous and virtue. Perhaps theres moral cleverness?
That has a sort of Rorty-like feel to it. The contingency of wisdom as part of an evolving vocabulary.
Right, so wisdom isn't equivalent with what appears to be wise or is said to be wise by others. In this case, the individuals, and perhaps the society, are unwise. So then wisdom isn't just any intellectual habit, but rather a certain type of intellectual habit.
Leaving out sophia and looking only at practical wisdom, Plato's notion seems pretty appropriate here:
Cleverness [I]may[/I] turn into wisdom. It may also turn into adaptive habits aimed at unworthy ends.
Certainly not all habits are wise though. And yet all habits might be considered to be "pragmatic" as achieving some ends. The question is if those ends are truly (rather than merely apparently) desirable though. If one does not distinguish between good and bad ends (wise and unwise ends) then it would seem that wisdom is just "whatever habits just so happen to emerge," or "whatever is currently said to be wise."
Prima facie, while people or societies might not tend towards maximal vice, neither do they appear to naturally tend towards perfect virtue.
So it always has the same aim. Wisdom always aims to be wise?
Not sure this is a huge step forward. Thats the trouble with talk about value as something transcendent rather than an everyday story of evolving an adaptive fit between an organism and its environment.
Sure, in a broad sense. Practical wisdom aims at making the choices that are best, and at properly valuing ends and means to those ends.
There is nothing particularly "transcendent" about that, and at any rate I find the term "transcendent" to generally be unhelpful because it is often a source of equivocation. I guess the problem I see is that anything can be said to be "adaptive" if we are given free aim to choose the ends that we are supposedly adapting towards, but not all adaptations/actions appear to be wise.
In the Function of Reason, Alfred North Whitehead charts out the goals of life as: to live, to life well, and to live better (which is remarkably similar to St. Maximus' "being, well-being, eternal being"). Now, adaptation can be ordered to any of these. Whether or not something is "adaptive" as opposed to "maladaptive" depends on ends (i.e., what it means to "live better"), and that's exactly what practical wisdom is supposed to help with.
Society is always adapting, but it appears that societies can grow more or less wise or more or less virtuous. For instance, Nazism was an adaptation to the pressures of post-war economic and political circumstances in Germany, but in general we'd want to call it "maladaptive." Another example might be the tendency for people to fill spiritual needs, or the need for recognition, with radical manichean politics. As a "coping mechanism" this is in a sense adaptive, but we might think it is also deeply flawed (unwise). Wisdom would be prudent adaptation.
The problem lies in making a circular argument. If wisdom is defined as some single essence - such as the good, the worthy, or even the adaptive - then that ends up saying nothing. You find yourself getting confused by having to deal with an endless array of exceptions to the rule which is precisely what pushes the rule off into some unplaced and abstracted realm where no more can be said than well we all know true wisdom when we see it.
The only proper metaphysical way to pin down terms is dichotomously. We have to have to be able to say what wisdom is sensibly other to in a measurable fashion.
So rather than getting bogged down in all the exceptions to the rule which - folk who werent really acting wisely as they were merely being clever - I have attempted to reframe things in the more properly dichotomous terms of how cleverness and wisdom could each stand as the other to its others. How they could be both essentially the same and also then defined by what could make them different.
A temporal trajectory, a story of growth, does that. And I root it in the reality of the brains processing architecture. The brain as a cognitive organ is all about making sense of the world by dichotomising it. The principle dichotomy here is the one between attentional processing and habit-level processing. Between having to work something out and being able to rely on engrained experience.
So the choice is either to have an endless debate over the meaning of an unplaced abstraction or to ground the debate in a reality that metaphysics has always understood best in terms of a unity of opposites. A dialectic logic.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
This is an example of failing to discover the relevant dichotomy and simply thinking in terms of a monistic imperative and its absence. You only give yourself the options of adaptive vs maladaptive and so your argument goes in a loop. The Platonic ideal always eludes the sorry grasp of the real world. We can always aim higher and therefore always must be in need of aiming higher.
It is the standard bad metaphysical argument that folk torture themselves with. Or torture others with by shifting the goal posts deeper into Platonia.
So what is the proper other that grounds adaptive? Well the Darwinian story is that variety is what evolution requires. It is exceptions to the rule that feed the existence of that rule. Every individual must take the risk of being a mistake so that statistically the collective success emerges.
Bring this back to the wisdom issue and we can see that it would be unwise never to risk being unwise. We need to try to be clever as mistakes are how we would begin to learn to eliminate mistakes from our behavioural repertoire.
So the way to understand wisdom is how I describe. It is about learning to play the game of life as the game is presented to us. We have to risk mistakes to make progress. We then have to fix what works so that the successes accumulate.
And a biologist would even tack on a state of senescence or niche over-fit to this analysis. An organism can be so closely adapted to its given environment that it becomes fragile if that environment suddenly changes. One could become too wise if one has habitual answers for everything in their immediate sphere and then discovers the world is somehow much larger than they expected.
Pragmatically, the goal posts on what is good and worthy could get shifted by unpredicted changes in the world. Just another thought to throw into the mix here.
"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise" William Blake
Is this a paradoxical way of saying practice makes perfect?
I guess it's helpful for us to distinguish a fool from a 'simpleton'. In as much as a fool may learn and acquire knowledge by learning from mistakes, but a simpleton may have cognitive limitations. I think there's an innocence in foolishness.
Maybe it's more along the lines of not being afraid to make mistakes, being playful and learning to see your foolishness, what it consists in. If I become afraid of others seeing my foolishness and hide it, then I will have less of an opportunity to see it myself.
Wittgenstein said something similar: "Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense."
Simpletons are something else, but I agree there is innocence in foolishness, and simpletons are also, like animals and (some) children innocent.
:up: Nice.
Alan Watts used to quote that all the time.
Between drinks.
I'm confused, how is "good and bad" (or "beautiful and ugly," "true or false," or "one and many" for that matter) not "dichotomous?"
Is it impossible to "measure" what is better or worse? I'm quite ready to offer an explanation of why Nazism was bad and unwise. It seems that it is precisely the move towards a reduction to "adaptation" (without any clear idea of what is being adapted towards) that renders such an explanation impossible, from what I can see at least.
A reduction of goodness, beauty, truth, metaphysics, etc. to talk about brains and natural selection seems, dare I say, [I]unwise[/I].
Im confused. Isnt this supporting my point? Each of these are a pair of terms that are being dialectically opposed. Each is understood as what it is to the degree that it is not the other.
Ah, I see now, you meant:
...as a criticism. I took it as a recommendation; as in, we need to find dichotomies.
I don't think the bolded is true though. Dominant theories of goodness from Aristotle on (and one might even include Plato here) primarily think of bad/evil (and falsity) in terms of privation. The two are contrary opposites. But prima facie, this no more makes goodness (or beauty, truth, and unity) impossible understand than it is impossible to understand light because darkness is merely its absence, or heat because cold is its absence. Light and heat have a positive content, and so does goodness and truth. If one dispenses with these, then I'm not sure what inquiry would consist in; our goal could no longer be truth (knowledge/understanding), and such a goal could no longer be good to pursue.
What is "success" here? A difficulty is that natural selection and related theories have been philosophically interpreted in extremely disparate ways. You get articles to the effect that "reality is evil" or Tennyson's famous:
[i]Man, her last work, who seemd so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who rolld the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creations final law
Tho Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriekd against his creed [/i]
...right alongside the Lion King's "circle of life" (and more sophisticated versions). I've also seen thermodynamics used to justify a sort of Hegelian providential progress towards "being knowing itself as self, as the Absolute/God," a sort of twist on de Chardin's Omega Point. I don't think "empirical evidence" dictates that one be preferred over the other (although wisdom might).
Success is often interpreted simply as reproduction. In which case, chickens, pigs, sheep, and cattle have been the beneficiaries of a tremendous adaptational boon. And yet, one could hardly look at your standard poultry "factory farm" and not come away questioning if this is "success."
This is a problem with dichotomies. They don't become fully developed until they are turned into hierarchies. That is, it is easy enough to claim the opposite as simply a lack of the thing in question. A simple anti-symmetric state that can be reversed.
So if I turn left, I can fix that by turning right. Or if I turn away from the good towards the bad, then I can turn back towards the good again. The dichotomy only gets as far as privation, as you say. Badness is a lack of goodness. Goodness is complete in its goodness. Metaphysically, this level of discussion hasn't got us very far.
The tricky things is to form dichotomies that are asymmetric and not easily reversible because they have been moved far apart from each other in terms of hierarchical scale. These would be proper unities of opposites. Things that are the complementary bounds of what is possible in the way that the triadic structure of a hierarchy is formed by the scale difference which is to be divided as completely as possible by a local and global bound.
This is a deep aspect of metaphysical argument that most never get. But you only have to consider the metaphysical dichotomies that have always seemed the most fundamental. Like chance~necessity, discrete~continuous, part~whole, integrated~differentiated, atom~void, matter~form, and so on. Each of these pairs seem to join two things that are as completely unalike as can be imagined in some basic way, and yet they then complement each other as they thus frame all the intermediate states that could arise in between.
Think of black and white as the complete lack of brightness and its equally total presence. Each is the other's negation. Black is zero white, and white is zero black. But then between these two bounding extremes arises any possible number of shades of grey. You can have a grey that is a 1% drip of black in a 99% pot of white. Or a 50/50 mix. Or whatever balance of the two extremes you care to put a number on.
So a useful metaphysical dichotomy comes with a hierarchy of scale in transparent fashion. Complementary limits on being are set. Then everything that actually exists is some gradation a particular balance in between.
So instead of a monotonic argument good is good in some absolute fashion, and badness can only be positioned in some handwaving fashion as "a lack of complete good" you get a metaphysical story where there is no absolute good or bad, just the relatively good or bad. You can have each to the degree that it makes sense to claim some measured distance that separates the two.
The key is keep the relativity of all things in sight and not falling into the trap of trying to defend absolutes. So wisdom is not something that could be measured as simply a lack of wisdom. That says nothing of any interest about the wider world. But you are getting somewhere it feels if you start to argue that wisdom feels like a lack of maturity.
And then you really get some place if you can see that immaturity another anti-symmetric statement based on a quality and its privation is also its own good in that youth has its own complementary value when opposed to age. Youth demands risk and learning. It rewards attempts to be clever. You can see that wisdom and cleverness become joined as a natural continuum of intellectual capacity. Two ends of the one thing. As asymmetric as possible while also being as necessarily connected as possible. And each is good when each is balanced to match the stage of life.
We don't have to turn it into a drama a conflict of opposites. A dichotomy is the symmetry-breaking that then needs to keep developing until it becomes fully expressed as a hierarchy of "symmetry-stopping". A spectrum of balances where it is the appropriateness of the balance that is the measurable good of the situation. The optimal state for that particular life context and not some attempt to hold up "good" and "bad" as globally-transcendent absolutes. Instead the good and the bad get brought into the world as a practical issue of allowing fruitful variety. The balance that always adapts to the individual occasion. The confluence of opposites.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Again, if you are only talking about the something and the lack of that something, the work hasn't been done. Dialectics is about complementarity and synergy. Identifying the win/win story that is having two extreme bounds on Nature that then leave Nature as the everything that exists in-between.
It is very easy to talk monistically about stuff like truth, beauty, good and even unity when you don't have to really say anything about falsity, ugliness or evil except that they are privations of the ineffable absolutes. But once you accept the discipline of a dialectical logic, then you have to stop hand-waving and start defining the relation that properly connects the two ends of some spectrum of possibilities.
The categories that make sense are the ones that make sense of all the intermediate cases as being placed at some relative position inbetween the extremes.
That is how we can have a justice system. We can calibrate the spectrum between good and evil in terms of extenuating circumstances. We can both work within a global understanding and rigorously apply individually optimised judicial solutions. Everything can be made relative in a pragmatically flexible fashion. We can live in the real world with something like wisdom.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
There you go. You grab your monistic and transcendent banner word success and so now only see a world where everything becomes questionable in the light of its failure to live up to this mighty standard.
But sensible metaphysics has always kept focused on the relativity of the unity of opposites. The dialectic. The dichotomy developed until it forms the hierarchy with its balance that covers all scales of being.
The Platonist will always be disappointed with the actual real world. It is but a pale shadow of what it should be. The pragmatist instead can see that is not the game of existence at all. The world is a system that is optimising itself in hierarchical fashion over all its available scales. That is the image we should have of it when we speak about it.
Good exegesis!
Cultivation is part of education. Cursory learning, as we often see in schools, could only scratch the surface. The depth of learning brings us closer to wisdom, I believe.
Quoting T Clark
Okay.
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I am going to use @apokrisis' word "cleverness" rather than intelligence, e.g.:
Quoting apokrisis
I mostly think @Count Timothy von Icarus is right. I don't think wisdom and cleverness are the same thing, or are qualitatively similar, or are "two ends of some spectrum of possibilities," or are like the black-white spectrum. I think this post of Count's gets at the nub:
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
@apokrisis' approach to wisdom is to contrast it with cleverness and to identify it with habit. It seems to me that Count has correctly identified the difference between cleverness and wisdom (i.e. means-based rationality vs ends-based living). I think the more central difficulty is the fact that wisdom is normative. As Count says, some things are wise and some things are not wise. More pointedly, some habits are wise and some habits are unwise, and therefore pointing to habit doesn't help us locate wisdom.
There was a curious statement that @apokrisis made that bears highlighting, and helps get at this point:
Quoting apokrisis
I'm not sure this says much at all, but it would be nice to know the answer to the question posed. A social institution is a kind of societal habit, and like individual habits, societal habits don't equate to wisdom. This is because some habits are wise and some habits are unwise, both individually and societally. Perhaps @apokrisis is implying that by allowing lots of social institutions to flourish the best ones will endure whereas the lesser ones will wither, and we will eventually inherit the best?
We might agree in saying that wisdom is the habit which allows us to flourish most completely, but this too differentiates it from cleverness. One can be clever at just about anything, but not so with wisdom. For example, one can be a clever chess player, but one cannot be a wise chess player. No one talks about someone who is wise qua chess. Similarly, one can be a clever pool player but not a wise pool player. I think there is an analogy between cleverness and wisdom, but I wouldn't say more than that.
Quoting apokrisis
This is interesting, but does any of it apply to your cleverness~wisdom "dichotomy"? I think the ideas you are laying out here are useful, but I don't see how it bears on this discussion. Maybe you did not mean to apply it to the cleverness~wisdom contrast, but I think it helps point up why that contrast has only limited mileage.
But note too that good~bad is just as fundamental a dichotomy as those you have identified, and yet you give it rather short shrift.
Quoting apokrisis
I would say that the coincidentia oppositorum is much more than two relativizing poles, both within the same tidy genus. The Platonic tradition of evil as privation was quite familiar with the age-old idea of dueling powers of Good and Evil, and it is odd to claim that, "Metaphysically, this level of discussion hasn't got us very far." The reason the step was made was because the dyadic level hadn't gotten us very far. Should we go back?
A true instance of the concidentia oppositorum would say, for example, that monism and dualism are both true in their own way, and both bound up one in the other. The privation theory is a deeper reckoning with that deeper coincidentia. Lesser oppositions seem less interesting (e.g. black-white, quantitative relativizing, totalizing spectrums, etc.). The coincidentia oppositorum really begins when we run up against an anomalous juxtaposition: an antinomy. I would say that the wise person is someone who acknowledges and lives with such paradox, and that this is qualitatively different from the clever person. Cleverness, being linear and one-dimensional, has nothing to do with such things.
Still, I think Count's point holds:
Quoting apokrisis
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Wisdom doesn't just sound like a good thing to have. It is a good thing to have. Are you really saying otherwise? I think someone might say that wisdom does not exist, but I don't think an English speaker could say that wisdom is not necessarily a good thing to have. If someone's system prevented them from accepting anything as good or bad, then I suppose they would have to say that wisdom does not exist. And I don't think putting the word "relatively" in front of "good or bad" helps. Contrariwise, if one accepts the existence of wisdom, then they must be willing to say what sets it apart from other things (habits): they must be able to say why it is good.
Brains in general are good in the sense that they put animals in a functional relation with their worlds. And brains work generally by applying the structural logic of dichotomies and hierarchies - the Peircean triad that is the cycle of reasoning. Abduction-deduction-induction. This understanding of the world by dialectical analysis - dissolving it into some structure of generals and particulars - is just what we see in every aspect of neuroanatomy. Frontal lobes for planning and motor control, back of the brain for sensory processing. Left brain for focal processing, right brain for global background or contextual awareness. Mid brain for emitting habitual responses in quick learnt and automatic fashion, higher brain for taking time to pause and analyse and so develop answers when faced by novelty.
So I answer the question from my point of view - the one informed by the semiotic logic that accounts for organismic structure. Nature doing what it does when equipping life with a mind. Gifting it with Peirces cycle of pragmatic reasoning. Start with the risk of making a clever guess. Develop it into an inveterate habit of belief.
Pragmatist philosophy arose out of a time when the first proper psychological research was being done. When science was exploring the relation between the processes of attention and habit in the brain. Peirce showed that what was the current new theory of cognition was also a theory of reasoning in general. If this dichotomy was good enough for the rise of life equipped with mind, then it was good enough for an account of rationality in toto.
Some might say that humans are special as God gifted them the possibility of being wise and doing good in the world. It is all part of that transcendent metaphysical package. A very deeply embedded social institution that was well adapted to the human way of life in the age of agricultural empires and then feudal states.
But Peirce stood at the transition to modern post-Darwin age of thought where it is Nature and not God that accounts for humanity. We are evolved organisms. And now the metaphysical thrill is to realise the evolution of the mind was a cracking of the problem of how to be an organism in a rational and pragmatic relation with its world.
Peirce developed this understanding of natural reason into an actual mathematical logic. He boiled down what it means into a Platonic strength architecture. The triad of vagueness, dichotomies and hierarchies.
The world as a wholeblooming, buzzing confusion that is the fog to be symmetry broken by some clever guess. A shot that divides dialectically into some kind of figure and ground distinction. A difference that makes a difference as the semiotician would say. So the abductive guess splits the world into what we must pay attention to in terms of all that we can also be wise in ignoring.
This dichotomous symmetry-breaking then can be worked on so that it produces its particular deductive consequences. As scientists, we have a theory and derive its predictions. Then follows abductive confirmation. The clever theory either works or proves too shaky to count as a wise habitual basis for action.
What survives this test of time becomes the weight of mental habits that leaves us as well optimised as organisms as we can be. At least within whatever physical and social environment in which we must co-exist.
Anyway, my point here is that Im not pulling positions out my arse. I have a metaphysics. I speak for a natural world that is organised by its natural rationality.
I could be mistaken but you and @Count Timothy von Icarus have your own metaphysical tradition. The one where we are all Gods special creation. Made imperfectly in His perfect image. Ect. You will view cleverness and wisdom within that mental framework.
And I instead have a different grounding point of view. The grand unifying perspective on Nature as a semiotic enterprise. The Universe as the growth of reason, material being as a structure of inveterate habit.
The problem becomes the God story is well known to me as it is just the general Western institution - impossible to avoid as part of collective culture. But my position seems to be poorly understood by you.
While science does appear to push the other story that is the natural philosophy viewpoint, it does this only in the watered down guise of Darwinian evolution and Newtonian mechanics. It is not the full-blooded response that is the holism of Aristotlean systems science and Peircean semiotics. Reductionist science still respects the boundary drawn up when it was forced to make its accomodation with the Catholic Church and cut the humanities out of its remit - at least in the big picture metaphysical sense.
But that alternative metaphysics does exist. And it sets the terms which would count as a critique of anything Ive said. So far, you havent disputed the natural logic of what I say, backed up by its truth as psychological science.
Instead, this thread has generally lapsed back to transcendental metaphysics where wisdom is just some mystical notion of The Good. Or what God would will in his own perfect image. Cleverness then gets to sit at the elbow of evil. A meretricious tool of the Devil as we have been warned ever since Adam and Eve.
I don't think anyone has mentioned God except for you. It seems to me that you are trying to set up the following dichotomy:
"Either wisdom is just adaptation (cleverness) or else one must explain wisdom in terms of God."
But this seems to me to be a false dichotomy. Again, my objection was that any action can be seen as an "adaptation" towards [I]some end[/I], but wisdom generally consists precisely in knowing which ends are actually good to achieve. It is better to know what is worth doing than to be very clever about doing evil or feeding vices. You seem to be collapsing any distinction between apparent and real value however. Yet it seems obvious that people can be very clever in pursuing merely apparent goods, and that this is typically what we mean by "being unwise."
Such a collapse seems to indicate something like a "values anti-realism." What is good, beautiful, just, etc. is just whatever appears as such or is said to be such. However, realism here is not the exclusive domain of theists; far from it. Plus, I'm not really sure what you think an appeal to God is supposed to do here. Arguably, some appeals to God, such as divine command theory, have much more in common with anti-realism than realism; they just shift whose opinion matters. Meanwhile, even a realism grounded in God doesn't need to appeal to God to explain anything and everything about value.
I'm not sure what to make of the appeal to Peirce. I don't think his agapism runs into this problem because it has an end it is oriented to. His "reasonableness" is not merely procedural and instrumental. There is a summun bonum (indeed there must be one for rational action), and this is certainly the case for the Scholastics he was drawing on as well.
More explicitly in terms of the "maladaptive:"
My original qualm was that there seemed to be no distinction between the adaptive and maladaptive if wisdom is just adaptation and cleverness. But Peirce gives himself grounds for such a distinction. Something like the Nazis' rise to power could be described as a sort of anancasm because it worked largely through coercion. It was a maladaptive response to the post-war economic and political pressures the Weimar Republic faced.
Hence the earlier mention of Whitehead on this same point; there is something similar there (and too often missing in analytic thought). I think Aldous Huxley is intellectually in the same vein too. Although, the cosmic teleology here seems to me closer to St. Maximus the Confessor than anything else I can think of.
I am certainly interested in folk actually setting out their ontological commitments. And talk of "good and bad" could mean adaptively optimal and its privation, or transcendently perfect and its privation.
Even as a starting point for a properly worked up dichotomy or unity of opposites, these are clearly two different bases of argument.
If we don't differ at this fundamental level, then you can say so.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Or I could say that any action can be judged as an adaptive optimisation that is so generally effective it can be relied on as a regular unthinking habit, and so "having an end in mind" becomes not even some particular thing that is in mind, but is instead made the flesh and blood of what I am about.
So clever thinking is aimed at the novel. Wisdom has already assimilated what is generally "the good" as just its general orientation to the world.
And wisdom can't "know precisely which ends are actually good". That is an appeal to transcendent truths that float above the real world. It can only, in the usual fallible and pragmatic fashion, keep testing, keep exploring, by being alert to its own failings and getting out the clever thinking to figure a better world model out.
So again, I highlight the quick way you leap to a transcendent framing of what wisdom could even be as a psychological trait. There is a perfection out there waiting for the wise. Whereas I stay rooted in the pragmatic world where we are moved only by our failures of prediction.
We can propose general ends that we ought to try to achieve. Then see if they do lead us some place that seems better. And that in itself is the pursuit of an adaptive life balance rather than some idealised final perfection.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
I am doing the opposite of being real about the human situation. You can't critique the world that is shaping you unless you develop a metaphysics appropriate to that task.
So as soon as someone like yourself tries to frame things as a false dichotomy the type where there is the bad choice of being good or bad then I try to reframe it as a true systems dichotomy. One that sets up the win~win of a complementary pair of oppositions.
So at the level of social psychology, that cashes out as the general systems principle of stable social systems being organised as a functional balance between local competition and global cooperation. Another way of saying that any physical system is some fruitful or rational balance of its global constraints and its local degrees of freedom.
So from cosmology to social science, the causal model is the same. The pragmatic model, the dialectical model, where Nature self-organises to have a stable existence based on the very fact it is built on fundamental instability. In dynamic equilibrium fashion, the whole persists no matter how much the parts are exchanged.
And that is exactly how a "good" social system works. It balances the counter forces of general cooperation and individual striving so that the whole is dynamical and continuously adapting while also acting as the stabilising hand which tips the local competitive energy in a generally wise and productive direction.
Thus I am not collapsing anything. I am rescuing Nature from the kind of misunderstandings that you are expressing. I am turning weak dichotomies into useful ones. One can't be a sociologist and not understand how societies aren't about good and bad people. They are about the functional wholes that result from competitive freedoms being kept in reasonable check by cooperative wisdoms.
So again, a justification for the dichotomy of clever~wise. It is another way of saying the same thing about a society as a structure that needs one kind of energy at its local level and the different kind of energy of an enforceable boundary at its global level.
Neither energy is inherently good or bad. It is the matching of the dynamical balance to some context of possibilities. Any immature social endeavour needs to burn a lot of clever ideas. Any mature social endeavour need to preserve the balance of those ideas that made for the best collective habit.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You can always use Peirce's religiosity against me. But I already agree. He wasn't of a time or place where he could easily have escaped religious indoctrination. Agapism is widely agreed to be his least useful turn of thought.
In his trichotomy of tychasticism, anancasticism, and agapasticism, we can see that what he calls love, a systems scientist would call constraint. The wholeness that holds everything together in its collective self-embrace.
Peirce is railing against the tone of his times the mindless competitiveness that the Victorian understanding of Darwinism was meant to condone. But "true" Darwinism is exactly that balance between competition and cooperation that I've described. The ecological balance that is the way to properly understand Nature.
So you could call cooperation or global constraint "love" in the hope your audience finds that an aspirational rallying cry against crude Darwinism. Or you can drop the romantic anthropomorphism and argue from the deeper logical consistency that Peirce had provided in his own work.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Well surely only because they lost the war? The allies and the axis powers did understand where things had gone wrong after WW1 and did a decent job of setting up a win-win balance of competition and cooperation after WW2. Social engineering works if you can understand a system as a system.
It wasn't love that created the post-war prosperity the world enjoyed for a while. It was an incredible amount of devious self-interested thinking by a collection of nations that was then cemented by the formation of a set of international institutions.
A greater wisdom prevailed as the US navy took over from the British fleet to turn its old imperial empire into the new free-trade world. Germany and Japan were "lovingly" recapitalised to be manufacturing exporters dependent on happy customers. Great Britain was shuffled off the stage and the US could get paid by the dollar becoming the new world currency its fee for keeping the new peace.
So there was tremendous wisdom coupled to tremendous self-interest shown after WW2 in great contrast to WW1. And the pragmatic balance that was struck was already falling apart as soon as it started as the communist world and the third world had their own natural ideas of what the best deal should actually look like.
Thus this winds up as another real life tale that speaks to the very themes that I have outlined.
You can't escape the reality of systems logic when you look into how the world is really organised.
There might be a lot of talk about what is good, what is right, what is loving, what is true. But it is soft soaping the tough business of forging understandings of how competition and cooperation can be rebuilt in the new circumstances that human history keeps presenting.
Apparently we disagree on what the central point is, but @Count Timothy von Icarus' objections seem quite strong, and I don't see that they have been answered. I was trying to highlight those unanswered objections.
Quoting apokrisis
I noticed that line in posts such as this one:
Quoting apokrisis
I think that once this manner of reasoning is explicated it will evidence significant weaknesses. For example, one inference you are relying on is, "X and Y are both cognitive processes, therefore the only difference [is one of degree]." On that sort of reasoning everything that the brain does is separated only by degree, including cleverness, wisdom, mathematics, love, dancing, sports, sleeping, etc. Then you add in the premise that you have some sort of exhaustive knowledge of the brain, and at that point most all of human existence is explained by recourse to this (highly exaggerated) account of the brain or neurology. Even beyond the problem of the reductive anthropology, the weaknesses and limitations of the premises are significant. The notions that one has exhaustive knowledge of the brain and that all human activity is reducible to the "cognitive" concept are implausible. Human life is complex and variegated, and unless one's understanding of the brain or of cognition is equally complex and variegated, the reduction of the former to the latter will be an artificial systematizing and pigeonholing. It looks like a classic conflation of part with whole (i.e. brain/cognition with human life).
This is why I claimed that wisdom requires acknowledging antinomies, and not collapsing everything into a single one-dimensional category. A simplistic theory must be sacrificed for the sake of the facts, and if a theory cannot acknowledge the fact that cleverness and wisdom are qualitatively different, then so much the worse for the theory. A "theory of everything" would be great if it actually saved the appearances.
Quoting apokrisis
Sure, and there is a certain plausibility to your account. There are analogies and continuities between cleverness and wisdom, and also between other cognitive phenomena.
But I accord a high place to philology and linguistics, and I don't see that your account really reckons with the semantics of a word like wisdom. For example, you seem to think that wisdom is a kind of habitual and unconscious know-how that is embodied in aged and mature systems. Yet I would say that while the elderly person is wise, the elderly sage is wiser, where the sage is someone who understands the whole and its principles not only practically but also speculatively. They are the one who can explain why and how to act well rather than simply acting well out of habit. And if the one who has more than habit is wiser than the one who has only habit, then wisdom is not properly identified with habit. ...Neither do I think it is true that this "more than habit" is simple cleverness. But the key point here is that I begin with the question, "What does wisdom mean?," whereas you seem to begin with the question, "How does wisdom fit into my unified brain/cognitive system?" In the end I think you've basically written wisdom out of existence in favor of a somewhat different concept that is more acceptable to your system.
Quoting apokrisis
Anthropology is almost certainly a central issue here. A physicalist, brain-centered anthropology will color one's conclusions, as will one's criteria. For example, if one thinks the relevant human phenomena are planning, motor control, sensory processing, focal processing, global background, habitual response, and analysis, then one simply decides what part of their Ur-explanationin this case the brainrelates to each of these data points and they have arrived at their totalizing explanation. But the deduction is not from the brain; the deduction is from a set of "exhaustive" human activities. The brain is the intermediary for those activities deemed relevant.
Quoting apokrisis
I see the two stories as one of a unified theory and one of "appearances," and I don't think the unified theory saves the appearances. In another sphere you would be the one positing that mind and matter are differentiated by degree and not by quality, and I would be the one positing that mind and matter are separated by quality and not by degree. You would achieve a "unifying perspective" and I would achieve a saving of the appearances. The irony here is that your totalizing approach is more Platonic and my antinomic approach is more Aristotelian (and that Peirce had rather significant affinities with Plato).
I'm not quite sure how God comes into it, except perhaps that I am more comfortable with antinomies given that an infinite and incomprehensible unifier is already in place. You perhaps require more explicit and comprehensible unification in your metaphysical theory. Put differently, I believe that reality is unified in a way that I know I cannot ultimately fully understand, whereas you must know how reality is unified. For you the human mind is at the top of the ontological and intellectual hierarchy, and because of this a totalizing (human) theory seems fitting to you.
Quoting apokrisis
The other oddity here is that you keep assuming that Aristotle and Peirce had nothing to do with God. That seems untrue, even if the specifics become complicated.
Quoting apokrisis
Internal critiques are not the only critiques. The more interesting critique is one that does not accept all of your own premises.
Quoting apokrisis
No, I don't think that is right. The God story may not be as well known to you as you suppose. For instance, Jesus commands us to be "as wise/shrewd/cunning/subtle as serpents," which is a clear reference to that "meretricious tool of the Devil." For another example, the Antichrist is seen as a kind of faux copy of the Christ, and one which will be exceedingly persuasive. If good and bad are right and left then it would be hard to imagine how bad could mimic good so effectively. Wisdom is that which can discern the subtle but significant difference.
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Quoting apokrisis
But what is the difference between the "adaptively optimal" and the "transcendently perfect"?
Quoting apokrisis
I don't find your eschewing of an end convincing. himself seemed happy with the idea that his theory was teleological. Your account seems to be ordered to survival or homeostasis or thermodynamic equilibrium or something of the like. If that is the highest end and wisdom is the highest virtue, then wisdom is ordered to it. To be moved by prediction or failures thereof also implies an end. It hasn't been avoided. Prediction is not aimless, nor is the act of recognizing a prediction's failure.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, you don't seem to understand the view you attempt to critique. For instance:
Quoting apokrisis
Good and bad are simply nothing like left and right, and this is because left is not the privation of right. The privation theory presupposes the win~win insofar as the privation presupposes goodness. It seems that all of us acknowledge that we do not find ourselves in a "win-win" scenario such that no movement towards an end is required. Again, how does the difference between an "adaptive" privation and a "transcendent" privation ultimately cash out? Both are asymmetric, both are hierarchical, etc. Both approaches are actually found in religious thought and even in Christian thought.
Beyond that, to use Platonic theism as the foil to Aristotelian Peircianism is odd, given that Aristotelianism was passed on to Peirce precisely by (scholastic) theists.
Quoting apokrisis
This is a pretty standard view among all religions and developed traditions, namely the importance of balance. That which Peirce has synthesized should not be opposed to his thought.
Quoting apokrisis
Throughout there seems to be a kind of equivocation, where you eschew the terms "good" and "bad" by claiming that an optimal mixture of both is what is needed, but then you don't seem to notice that what is actually good on that account is the optimal mixture. Don't you agree that the optimal mixture or balance is good, and that the ordering is bad to the extent that it deviates from this optimal balance? This is why I think @Count Timothy von Icarus' objection cuts deeper than you realize, for it applies also at this new level of good-as-balance. If I am right and you have your own conception of what is good and what is bad, then acknowledging this would help put us on the same page and would help us appreciate a common criterion.
For example, if balance is good, then cleverness is good because it achieves balance at a local and circumscribed level, whereas wisdom is good because it achieves balance at a global and less circumscribed level. Yet on my account, one reason wisdom is better is because it presupposes a knowledge and appreciation for the same local balance that cleverness cannot unfocus from.
Quoting apokrisis
But at this point you're really not appealing to Peirce any more. You're disagreeing with him and hoping that he would agree with your disagreement in hindsight.
The idea here is that I am not convinced that your dichotomies between transcendent and adaptive, or between religious and scientific, really hold up.
Edit: It seems that a large part of what you are doing is disagreeing with some view that you find erroneous. I don't really understand the thing you are opposing. Perhaps it would be helpful if you set out that view clearly.
Quoting apokrisis
Well, I wouldn't want to change the subject to something besides the point. As near as I can see, the only commitment of a "reality versus appearance distinction" vis-á-vis value is some sort of value realism, such that what is good, choice-worthy, adaptive (as opposed to maladaptive), etc. doesn't just amount to what appears or is said to be so. Or to put it negatively, that it is possible for us to be wrong about what is most desirable or choice-worthy, and that our being wrong in this respect doesn't just reduce to our experiencing regret at some later point, or people disagreeing with us.
I am not sure if I would set the "adaptive" and the "perfect" against each other either. Your use of "transcendent" in these posts seems to suggest that you think that what is "transcendent" is somehow outside and absent from what is transcended. Yet that isn't "transcendent" in the sense the term is generally employed in terms of goodness. Nothing is being transcended in your usage. A better term would be "extra-worldly." But, suffice to say, few ethicists appeal to a "good that lies wholly outside our world," but rather one that is, to paraphrase Saint Augustine, "within everything yet contained by nothing."
Quoting apokrisis
I'd like to unpack this because it seems to me like another unsupportable dichotomy. You seem to be saying that either:
"It must be impossible for us to distinguish between what appears good and what is actually good"
or
"There must exist "'transcendent truths that float above the real world' to measure what is truly good."
I am not sure if these are the only two options. You do say "know precisely," and I am curious what "precisely" is supposed to be doing there. Is it supposed to be indicating some sort of infallibility? If so, might that be lurching towards strawman territory? That is, that there is only your position or else "declaring yourself infallible due to your relation to a measuring stick 'outside the real word," seems a bit much. Surely, one might be a realist vis-a-vis values, and still a fallibilist, as the great majority of realists have been. Indeed, for all those thinkers you seem to have in mind for whom Goodness is ultimately the Divine Essence, Goodness itself is precisely unknowable.
Like I said earlier, I am very skeptical about uses of the term "transcendent" because it is regularly used equivocally on this forum and in professional philosophy. Which thinkers exactly appealed to "transcendent truths that float above the real world?" I will not deny that at least some thinkers may have advanced such a theory, but none of the main figures in the realist tradition do. Where it shows up, it seems to largely be a product of early analytic thought with its notions of abstract objects. This is, however, extremely far from something like the medieval Doctrine of Transcendental, where Good, True, One, etc. are merely conceptual distinctions that add nothing to Being (being as viewed in a particular aspect, e.g. vis-a-vis the appetites for Good).
This is the same mistake Sam Harris makes:
Quoting apokrisis
I am not "using Peirce's religiosity" against you. I am pointing out how Peirce avoids the issue you've fallen into. Consider, if I don't currently find it good, or adaptive to agree with you, how could I possibly be wrong about this if proper adaptation is just defined in terms of current belief? The fact that you think that article can be dismissed as "religiosity" is itself telling though.
Quoting apokrisis
Only by doing violence to the original text I would say.
Quoting apokrisis
He is surely doing this, but he is doing more. He is making a point he makes throughout his papers, that "reasonableness" is incoherent without an ordering to an end.
Quoting apokrisis
The idea that "Nazism would be good if only they had won," is one of the absurdities of popular reductionist forms of anti-realism, yes. Quoting apokrisis
Why ought they be rebuilt? If whoever wins is justified, has properly adapted, I don't see how nihilism doesn't follow.
Quoting apokrisis
Again, the dichotomy, either your narrative, or an appeal to God as the proximate cause. Does that not seem like a strawman?
Further, just because one needs a brain to be wise does not mean that wisdom is best explained in terms of brains. This is akin to claiming that we are best able to understand flight (the principles of lift, etc.), by looking at the individual cells making up the wings of all the animals that fly, or conducting a close examination of wings.
Yet this is demonstrably not the best way to understand flight or lift. We did not learn to build flying machines through an intensive study of the chemistry at work in insect or bird wings. Indeed, there is much we still do not know about how those cells work (and the same is true for brains). Rather, we mastered the more general, generating principles at work across all instances of heavier than air flight in nature. The fact that the cells in insects' wings are necessary for flight need not compel us to conclude that flight is best understood through a study of these cells, just as the fact that we need our brains to know goodness need not suggest that the goodness is itself something that can be best known through studying neurons.
That misrepresents. I argued that the logic of dichotomies is the general logic of Nature and demonstrably the logic of brain architecture. So it is not surprising that we would find that lay language should also arrive at such distinctions itself - just not recognising the logic at work behind the scenes, whereas psychological science got going by noting attention-habit as a major dichotomy of cognitive organisation.
Quoting Leontiskos
This is a waffling attack on attack on a systems science argument you dont yet understand. The theory of dichotomies says each side of the reciprocal equation is as different from the other as it is possible to be. And yet that difference connects them as it is the other that serves as a measure of the separation.
So we start with the generality that they are both forms of cognition. And then we can see how it makes sense that they map to the key cognitive dichotomy that is attention-habit. We can say that to the degree we are attending to some aspect of the world, we are not dealing with it habitually. And vice versa. When we are reacting on automatic pilot, we are not engaging all the higher brain capacities for holding something in the spotlight of working memory, pausing to treat it as a novel situation demanding our full self-aware narrative engagement.
So each does speak of its own qualities as a contrast to the qualities of the other. That is how each tightens its own definition. Every question about one is answered by finding some counterfactual to distinguish it from the other.
You could even call it a system of antimonies if you wanted to use the half-baked understanding of what is going on logically here.
Quoting Leontiskos
Sure. Argue against dichotomies by employing dichotomies. Prove my point for me.
So if wisdom is the experience of age, then cleverness is the excitement of youth. And if it is possible to be sharp, it is because it is possible to be perfectly otherwise to be blunt.
All knives might have an edge but that is itself going to break into some useful to mention polarity. So all knives are knives, however some are sharp, even perhaps at the limit of sharpening, while some are so blunt we might as well re-term them spatulas.
So dichotomies are Aristotelean essential distinctions. And you can walk language as far as you like to organise your world in a hierarchical cascade of such dichotomous divisions. It works as symmetry-breaking is also the logic of Nature itself. Evolution and development produce self-organised hierarchies even at the level of the Cosmos.
And so it is with sages and dunces. We are not all created equal either in our degree of youthfull cleverness nor elderly wisdom. And if you want to turn the conversation to a discussion of sages, then as you say, this carries further qualitative contrasts we would want to mention so as to point to some hierarchy of the wise. Or even just the old. Or even just the experienced.
So the sage understands the whole and not just fragments. The sage understands in terms of general principles and not just miscellanious examples. The sage is not just thinking practically but also engaged in the more socially-prestigious endeavour of thinking speculatively.
By appealing to a set of distinctions, you have constrained what one could mean by "sage" with quite a useful collections of dichotomies.
It seems a good definition to me. I just point to the manner in which you had to arrive at it.
Quoting Leontiskos
But if a sage is most critically someone long experienced and generally acclaimed in the habit of speculating, then I'm afraid that sagacity is still a sub-class of the category of intellectuality we call wisdom.
At the level of distinctions you have moved the discussion to, the primary dichotomy becomes the question of whether this elderly person with a clear habit of speculative thought is indeed one of our community's sages or one of our community's crackpots.
Quoting Leontiskos
You miss my point again. The bigger picture to what I argue is the systems view, the natural philosophy view, the pansemiotic view. Peirce's central insight was that the Cosmos is rationally structured. There is a general logic to self-organising systems that can stand both for how a Universe could come to be and how the life and mind that exists by successfully modelling the ways of this world would employ the same logic in organising its own cognitive structure.
So ontology and epistemology share the one logic. Or at least they clearly do once we become clear-eyed enough to see that this is what lies at the bottom of our philosophical confusions.
So yes. I make no apologies for looking to the natural world for its own explanation of itself and not casting my eyes heavenwards to some supernatural creator.
Science works as it is pragmatism made habit. The Church wanted to keep the humanities out of the reach of the pragmatic process of inquiry. But tough. Naturalism as a metaphysics now reaches into even sociology and history as fields of rational speculation.
And when you call the brain merely an intermediary for culture, I reply that my argument is that society is just as organismic as a level of self-organising nature. It is all the same thing happening at larger scales of semiotic order.
Quoting Leontiskos
Both reflect the culture of their times as they must. And what I drew attention to was that despite that, they were laying the ground for a general logic of Nature. Nature could start to explain itself rather than having to be explained in Supernatural terms the mysterious Big Daddy in the Sky in whose image we were for some nutty reason created as an imperfect version.
Quoting Leontiskos
I didn't say good and bad were a convincing dichotomy to the naturalist. I instead said they were rather useless terms for understanding reality. Even as part of the cultural technology of a self-organising human social system they do more to confuse than to enlighten in exactly the way you describe.
As a natural philosopher, I would say that as members of a civilised society we ought to be organised consciously by the dichotomy of competition~cooperation. That is the dynamic which is actually at the centre of our collective lives. And both tendencies are "good" in their own ways. A system has to be that balanced mix of its global constraints and its local freedoms.
This applies to physics as much as human theories of Utopia. As a metaphysics, it is maximally general and minimally mysterious. We can see directly why it pragmatically works at every possible level of natural existence.
Whereas waffling on about good and bad just winds up in endless confused qualification. The terms end up meaning just the difference between what I think you should do versus what I think you shouldn't do. Or to give it some spurious metaphysical heft, what Big Daddy up in the Sky says you should and shouldn't do.
Quoting Leontiskos
Another misrepresentation. The systems science position is based on being holistic and thus including finality. But then it is naturalistic in placing teleology on a hierarchical scale of development.
So following Stan Salthe, we would distinguish the three grades of teleology teleomaty, teleonomy and teleology. Or the purposefulness of physical tendency, of biological functionality and of neurocognitive reason.
My metaphysics doesn't just embrace finality as cause. It provides a theory of finality in natural terms.
Quoting Leontiskos
This would be my own argument too. And it is why I agree with Peirce in prizing habit.
Something basic to my story on neurocognition is that brains aren't striving to be conscious of the world but instead the opposite. The brain has the developmental task of learning how to predict the world so well that it no longer needs to pay it any particular attention.
So the normal lay understanding of cognition is that the desired goal is to be aware of absolutely every last detail of what is happening and not miss anything. But a pragmatic understanding of what brains are for says it is all about laying down reliable habits.
Of course, the more you habituate, the more you can then lift your level of focused attention to some next level beyond what you have made automatic. Once the baby has some mastery of walking, it can turn its mind to the creativity of dancing.
The wise baby doesn't even have to think how to place one foot in front of the other. It can now be the clever baby skipping with attention to some new rhythm.
Quoting Leontiskos
Not sure those are dichotomies in any sense I defined. Remember that a successful dichotomy leaves you feeling that both sides of the equation are equally true even though they are both sides as mutually contradictory as possible.
The logical definition of a dichotomy is "mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive". In maths terms, a reciprocal or inverse relation.
Transcendence and immanence is the more usual go at that metaphysical dichotomy. Either cause comes from without or cause comes from within. This is why natural philosophy might call itself an internalist metaphysics to contrast itself with the "other kind".
So put in those terms, transcendence and immanence can at least be debated as cool rational terms. Maths has claim to transcendent existence just as much as religious notions of creating gods. And even the systems view would accept it needs transcendence in some strong sense if it is talking about Nature being entrained to fundamental logical structure.
So create a dichotomy that works and you can start a decent discussion. The systems thinker has to make sense of transcendence and immanence as the two side of their own rational position.
I could point to Ontic Structural Realism as a recent metaphysical enthusiasm that has just this kind of problem. It is all form and no matter. All downward constraint and no matching account of upward construction.
Again, Peirce was here with his triadic metaphysics that tried to fix this exact problem by adding the category of vagueness to the dichotomies and the hierarchies. A proper understanding of Aristotle's "prime matter", or physics' "quantum foam", also go to this issue.
What I am saying is that get your dichotomous terms properly formed and you are already unlocking the deeper thing that lies beneath. And that alignment is what I sought in opposing youthful cleverness to experienced wisdom. From these social descriptors we could descend to the deeper level of the biological symmetry-breaking that is attention~habit.
So if you are unconvinced, it is because you haven't got a sufficient mastery of the logic involved. You have the habit of antimonies rather than dichotomies. You get as far as the antisymmetric distinction and don't continue on to the fully asymmetric one.
What is the true other of religion? Is it science? And is science in reply the true other of religion? Or is this a lazy effort at defining a dichotomy that needs to reach the rigour of being "mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive"?
For a start, religion serves two general social functions. It should encode a "good" way to live. And it is meant to supply the authoritative narrative of why that way is the truth. So it encodes pragmatic wisdom. And it encodes a founding creation myth.
Science now aims to do both those things too. But it is largely stunted by its reductionist metaphysics. My systems science approach is waging its own holy war against that.
So religion~science is also not a proper dichotomy. As a distinction, neither term fully excludes its other, nor completely exhausts the field of possibilities.
You get nearer the truth of the situation with a distinction between faith-based and evidence-based. Or better yet more Peircean between the willingness to assert belief and the willingness to risk doubt.
Pragmatism boils down to just that fruitful balance. Jumping to some abductive hypothesis, drawing up its necessary deductions its particular predictions and then doubting the hypothesis as hard as possible by testing it with observation. Discovering whether there can be inductive confirmation.
Rationality in a nutshell. But grounded as the balancing act that pragmatism stands for. Neither all faith, nor all data, but the judicious blend of the two.
I covered this in the post above. The systems view has to be able to say what it means by transcendent or immanent. They are patently different, yet how are they then also going to be the same in being two ends of the one spectrum?
So as an internalist perspective, the systems view says we are talking about the upper and lower boundaries of a hierarchical order. The global limit that is the structuring constraints of the system the laws of nature or its holographic boundary in physical parlance. And then the local limit that the contrasting of the systems degrees of freedoms.
This framing puts both things on an equal footing as the limits. There is no outside to the Cosmos. But it does have an upper bound of hard habit. There is mathematical-strength restrictions restrictions expressed by the maths of symmetry. And this is matched by a lower bound of free possibility all the different things that can happen just "accidentally" as they are happenings that are not forbidden or suppressed by the global state of constraint.
So yes, I owe you a theory of what I mean by my metaphysics here. Which is why I felt you ought to be making the same kind of effort to spell out what ontology you might be committed to.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
And how am I to understand this phrasing of Augustine then? Make it make sense as a logical claim. Structure it as a dichotomy rather than a paradox.
Much better would that the notion of the good is taken to be a global constraint on every kind of behaviour that is possible, but then that makes unconstrained all the particular actions that aren't being globally suppressed. These become the well defined degrees of freedom. The somethings we want to see freely happen on a regular enough basis.
So my way makes explicit the causal machinery involved. Augustine sort of could be saying the same thing. But speaking paradoxically rather than dichotomously is the kind of indirect mysticism that the keeps the flock in check. You don't want them actually thinking for themselves.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
You said it first. "...but wisdom generally consists precisely in knowing which ends are actually good to achieve." So your strawman I think.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
At least you can't accuse me of equivocating. I agree it needs to be pinned down by tying it to a dichotomy that speaks directly to an underlying metaphysics. I've given my definition, or at least made that start.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Strawman. I was explicit that wisdom is a social construct. But that I would drop down a level to the neurobiology to account for how there was indeed something to build that socially-useful distinction around.
And that was in contrast to those who would instead rather cast their eyes upwards to some higher power at work. A social construct to be explained by yet another social construct.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
God-faring folk said if God meant humans to fly, he would have given them gossamer bodies and swan-sized wings. Hence angels definitely exist but powered-flight is a godforsaken pipedream.
I'm not sure how you think powered flight got invented. But it definitely started by seeing how birds did what they did and going from there. Fixed wings, but with a curve to give lift. A motorised propellor as something that worked for a ship on water and so ought to work for a plane in the air. Just needed to crack the power to weight ratio.
Your argument at this point sounds nuts. It has lost any coherence it might have had.
You've been beaten to it. :roll:
Gee, that's tough. I would say that wisdom is like a skill, in that you can develop it through practice and habit. But unlike a skill (like medicine, or woodworking) it doesn't have a particular end it produces (like health, or a table). Rather, it involves knowing which ends are actually worth pursuing. Teens know about celebrities who gets everything they want and then become miserable. That's a great example; the wrong end has sought.
That's practical wisdom. Theoretical wisdom is more like science, but involves understanding how everything fits together. It's not unrelated to practical wisdom. If you know how the world fits together, presumably you also know what is worth pursuing. If you know how life fits together, you can be "at home in the world."
Or something like that. I think it's maybe easier if you know some famous scientists to differentiate between the brilliant, and those who were also brilliant and seem wise. But it's hard to put one's finger on the difference easily.
OK. So is your case that wisdom is indeed being skilled in a practiced habitual way? That defines it cognitively in distinction to ... other things.
And then you would want to sub-divide this rather too generalised notion of wisdom more carefully. So there is practical skill, theoretical skill and ... life skill? You define this as cognitively distinctive as it is being wise about the goals to set if you want to pursue a good life.
So a carpenter could also have ends in mind. A handsome table. The scientist may have ends in mind. A theory of everything, or at least some Nobel-scale chunk of it. And then "real wisdom" in the widest sense is how to be a success as a human in a human-made world.
It is solving the riddle of living in society. Social interaction is the skill in question, the practical problem to be mastered to the level that you recognise the best paths at the first glance.
If this is the scheme you have in mind, none of that is contrary to my way of thinking. I have emphasised that in evolutionary terms, we are social creatures first, carpenters and scientists second. We have to be that kind of generalist before becoming those kinds of specialists.
At a genetic level, we are more tuned for assimilating that kind of wisdom than the technical or intellectual forms. The importance of life experience to early humans gets credited for the fact that we added on both a prolonged adolescence and an extended post-reproductive period just so we could spend more time taking clever risks and then for those who survived stick around to pass on our hard-won wisdom.
But I guess putting ourselves back in the heads of our hunter-gatherer ancestors also shows that worrying about life choices and big picture life goals was perhaps not that much of a thing when it came to our evolutionary shaping. The hunter-gatherer lived in a world of not a lot of alternatives. Being wise was just sticking close to tradition when it came to tool-making or creation myths.
The meaning of life and the ends that ought to be pursued would hardly be the stuff of campfire conversation. Individualism was not yet a social good, anthropology tells us.
So maybe there is a surprise. Your favoured definition of wisdom is perhaps the most recent of them all. It was the modern world of open life choice that created this particular existential quandary and the need to find the wise balance to strike.
Now that we are all made personally responsible for any conceivable choice impacting on the collective good, this has become a new way we have to be clever, and thus in the end be judged of having lived wisely.
It is still wisdom of the low level general kind learning to be socially skilled. But now turned into the individualistic drama of being held responsible for your own particular mistakes, and in the end, responsible for the whole damn life saga you attempted to create.
The story of yourself that you wrote, and it turned out a bit plotless, or too hectic, or whatever other literary judgement a good critic of the narrative arts might pass on your efforts. :grin:
Yes, it is difficult. And, as we both know, sometimes the quality of wisdom means different things to different people. It's a bit like the elusive quality of being 'cool'. On the subject of scientists, I once had it pointed out to me that Richard Dawkins is wise, while Francis Collins is foolish - which obviously reflected a bias that secularism was a wiser choice than theism.