The surge in academic interest regarding wisdom since the
end of the 20th century has the potential to accelerate the moral
and intellectual development of individuals and societies alike. In the same
way that having a map of unfamiliar terrain simplifies navigation and speeds
travelers toward their goals, a clearer understanding of wisdom and its
acquisition can help people hasten their approach toward the better person they
are striving to become.
It is important to note, however, that the path to wisdom is
steep. The same kind of self-reflection that makes the cultivation of wisdom an
extraordinarily powerful transformative tool also makes it agonizingly
intimate. To become wiser requires a person to become acutely aware of his or
her deepest flaws and shortcomings, and then to break away from the mental
shackles of habits and biases that have grown more powerful and automatic
through frequent, unconscious repetition. Both aspects of this maturation
toward excellence – one grounded in refining attentional faculties and
dispelling illusion, the other in practicing and strengthening mental
activities like planning, rational deliberation, and emotional regulation – can
be more painful and tiring than strenuous physical exercise.
Here’s one way to understand why this might be the case. Described
roughly, physical exercise strengthens muscles by first producing micro-tears
in them, and then reconstituting them into more powerful, more tightly woven
configurations. Similarly, developing a more powerful mental apparatus requires
the trainee to identify weaknesses in functionality by testing the limits of his
or her mental faculties.
If the goal of a particular exercise is to correct
relatively minor or fine-grained discrepancies in cognitive or emotional
ability, it is accompanied by relatively minor discomfort. Maybe the person
just needed to revise some rather specific false beliefs, or had to unlearn bad
habits that were somewhat narrow in scope. These kinds of improvements can be
thought of as relatively simple optimizations of one degree or another, since
they leave the existing structures of one’s mental faculties mostly intact.
However, if the person finds out that some of his or her
fundamental presuppositions about the way the world works (or ways to work in
the world) are incorrect, then major pillars of those cognitive and behavioral
structures will need to be torn down. It also means that other beliefs, desires
and learned patterns of activity that used those erroneous pillars for support
are also reduced to rubble, and have to be rebuilt, to continue with the
metaphor, from the ground up. This kind of reconfiguration can be thought of as
the mental equivalent of elite, military-grade physical training, so you can
imagine the sort of mental anguish that it induces. However, since many people identify
“who they are” with their minds more so than their bodies, this sort of mental
transformation can dismantle them in ways that no amount of physical
gerrymandering could ever achieve.
This also means that people who attempt such feats with
neither an understanding of these risks nor a mentor to guide them through the
ordeal can fall apart before re-emerging from this developmental crucible. If
the quest for wisdom is cut short, a person can be left with a shattered
psyche, no longer able to believe in the illusions of the past, and not yet
capable of assimilating the truths and achieving the enhanced mental
equilibrium that the future had offered tantalizing glimpses of.
Such a lack of understanding is one of many ways that can
lead seekers of wisdom astray. Some find themselves in more or less the same
state of being that they embarked from, despite years of effort. Others lose
themselves entirely, and cease to be functional individuals. Does this mean
that questing for wisdom is a paradoxical act of folly?
I think it can be,
but doesn’t have to be. As I
mentioned above, there’s a good chance that a naïve or ill-prepared psyche might
either achieve relatively modest developmental gains, or even suffer heavily
for its efforts. Similarly, even the most prepared caterpillar faces
obliteration, should its chrysalis be cracked open prematurely. Just like the
self-liquefaction that necessarily precedes the emergence of a butterfly, the
period of mental chaos that a person must endure before realizing the
qualitative shift associated with sagacity is an unsustainable state fraught
with vulnerability. Some fools are just half-baked sages.
Another concept that deserves clarification is what we might
mean by “pursuing wisdom”. After all, ancient traditions differ in their
approaches to wisdom, and modern research is nowhere near a standard, formulaic
consensus on how wisdom might be nurtured. From Socratic reasoning and precise
logic to Buddhist contemplation and attentional enhancement, humanity has
developed many practices and technologies that in turn facilitate the development
of humanity.
While it is probable that humanity and technology will
continue to spiral upwards in mutual, symbiotic transcendence, it is unclear
whether individual methods and traditions will converge or multiply. It isn’t
unreasonable to believe that there are as many roads to wisdom as there are
travelers who have reached that lofty destination. Most of the wisest people
that you know personally have probably never cracked open a book that
explicitly discusses the cultivation of wisdom, but have instead accrued a
profound understanding of the world, the human condition, and appropriate modes
of action through a multiplicity of life events and seemingly mundane, everyday
habits.
It sometimes appears that many of these “everyday” wise people
begin their journey toward wisdom by achieving relatively domain-specific (declarative)
expertise and (procedural) mastery. While honing skills and accumulating vast
swaths of knowledge by no means guarantees that a person becomes wise (and there
is no shortage of talented yet foolish experts), a select few among these domain-specific
experts and masters take one step further than the rest, and unconsciously generate
abstract generalizations from their primary discipline that can be applied to a
much broader range of human experience and action. Sometimes these wise people
do offer domain-neutral advice whose general applicability is rather
self-evident, but they often state profound truths about the world couched in
language of the vocations and hobbies they understand in intimate detail. In a
sense, they see the world through their expertise, and model advice upon their
mastery. The athlete’s world becomes an arena, while the fisherman’s life takes
the form of a river. It’s not surprising that for Shakespeare, “all the world’s
a stage”, while for Ella Fitzgerald, "life is like a song”.
So if the seeds of wisdom are everywhere, is there any
utility in the deliberate pursuit of wisdom? Sure there is. One thing that
experimental psychology has revealed is that we’re not as good as we think we
are when it comes to using metaphors in one domain as guiding principles in a
completely different one, even when the similarities are uncanny. Needham and
Begg (1991) showed that priming people with stories that serve as very tight
analogies does not help them solve problems that require the kind of insight
that wise people excel at. Perhaps lessons learned from a deliberate study of
wisdom itself might produce more general, obvious, and readily applicable
principles that succeed in improving people’s performance in situations where
implicit analogies have failed. Perhaps the study of the more abstract class of
“all paths to wisdom” might make a specific person’s preferred route easier to
plot and traverse.
This brings me to one last potential hazard that seekers of
wisdom would do well to avoid. Studying wisdom as an academic pursuit is not
the same thing as cultivating wisdom. Where a large part of cultivating wisdom
is a bottom-up process, involving the gradual accrual and synthesis of
micro-skills into more general meta-skills, studying wisdom is very much a
top-down endeavor. While useful, this kind of top-down study is difficult to
implement practically, and it is therefore probably impossible to use it as a
substitute for the more organic acquisition and integration of excellence that
is found in wise athletes, fishermen, playwrights, singers, and all other
everyday sages. It is certainly possible to be a wise academic in the same way,
but that requires a similar accumulation of expertise and mastery in the
science and art of scholarship, and is not the same thing as hoping to take a
shortcut by reading a few books that discuss wisdom, which a novice seeker of
wisdom might be foolish enough to attempt.
Wisdom is as much an attitude as it is a state of being. A
fool that has resolved to pursue wisdom has, in a sense, already acted wisely
by doing so. Reading about wisdom can enhance its acquisition, but since every
domain of expertise and mastery harbors the seeds of wisdom, facts in a book
can never replace paying attention to the world and practicing excellence in
action. So as long as you remain attentive and active, your ever-improving
abilities will help you crawl, then walk, and then sprint towards becoming the
sage that sleeps within us all.
Bibliography
Needham, D. R., & Begg, I. M. (1991). Problem-oriented
training promotes spontaneous analogical transfer: Memory-oriented training
promotes memory for training. Memory & Cognition 19,
543–557.
