Your View on Wisdom Is False

False Because Confused

I’ve noticed lots of Substack posts on what wisdom is. Some come from Stoicism, some originate in religious thought, and some others are from the self-improvement literature. They’re all mistaken.

The problem is not exactly that what they say is false. The primary problem is that at best, they focus on just one aspect of wisdom, and fail to address other, comparably important, aspects. Happens every time.

And it’s even worse than that: the semantics of “wise” preclude any illuminating conception of wisdom in its totality. Whenever someone tells you what wisdom is, offering their analysis, they’re wrong.

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For starters, think about what it is to “have a good date”. That phrase is relevantly ambiguous, since there are multiple common ways of understanding it that are significantly different from one another but easy to confuse with each other in such a way that it causes trouble in communication. For instance, Chris and Alex are dating. According to Chris, when they made plans for a nice, hour-long lunch, that lunch counted as a date. But Alex thinks it wasn’t a date; it was “just lunch”.

On another occasion it was obvious to both of them that they went on a date, but whereas Chris thinks it was great for both of them, Alex thinks it was awful for both of them. For him, a good date involves doing something exciting and fun. For Chris a good date means emotional bonding. Their date had only one of those.

In sum:

• They have different ideas as to what a “date” is, and neither of them is wrong.

• They have different ideas as to what a “good date” is, and neither of them is wrong.

This probably means that we cannot offer a precise definition of either “date” or “good date”: each term has multiple meanings (in one meaning of “meaning”), and a good definition typically captures just one of those meanings. The crucial terms are relevantly ambiguous.

As we are about to see, the term “wisdom” is relevantly ambiguous as well. So, we should not expect an illuminating definition of it. But we can offer illumination.

Baseball Wisdom. Joe Posnanski, Tommy Lasorda, and Greg Maddux each have a great deal of wisdom when it comes to baseball. Posnanski is a sports writer and baseball historian. His book The Baseball 100 is a delight to read, as are his other books about baseball. Lasorda was a baseball manager for decades, at the top of the profession. Maddux was a baseball pitcher with almost supernatural knowledge of the art of pitching and outwitting hitters. When it comes to baseball, each had wisdom.

As you may have noticed, their respective bodies of baseball knowledge are quite different. The sportswriter has never played a game beyond neighborhood baseball fields for children. For all I know, Maddux is quite ignorant of the history of baseball. This is enough to show that their baseball wisdom was wildly different. What the three men nevertheless have in common is extremely impressive knowledge of the subject. That’s what unites them and makes them have wisdom about baseball--in one sense of “wisdom”. What separates them is the fact that their extremely impressive knowledge targets three different aspects of that common subject, baseball.

Of course, wisdom isn’t limited to baseball. A person can have wisdom about singing, dancing, architecture, childcare, or road repair. Call this subject-specific wisdom. I suspect there is a common thread through them.

• A person has subject-specific wisdom on subject S = she has extremely impressive knowledge of S compared to others

That’s hardly a full-blown theory. It’s probably even false in some cases, although the slipperiness of “extremely impressive” makes the definition elastic. For one thing, sheer numbers of pieces of knowledge isn’t quite the point; the knowledge has to be “deep”, whatever that means. But in any case, the definition is a good start when trying to get a handle on what subject-specific wisdom is. I doubt that there is a precise meaning to any of the common ways of understanding “wisdom” anyway, so it is hopeless to offer a precise definition in full seriousness.

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Most people use “wise” and “wisdom” in another way: being wise means knowing how to live centrally important aspects of life extraordinarily well. Sure, there’s subject-specific wisdom, and it’s great to have. But most of us want the kind of wisdom that is possessed by the guy in the robe with the long beard who lives at the top of the mountain: wisdom regarding how to live extraordinarily well.

We will call it mountaintop wisdom. Let’s focus on that person on the mountain, regardless of their sexuality, gender, or beard length. (We could classify mountaintop wisdom as subject-specific, but only if the subject is “how to live centrally important aspects of life extraordinarily well”, which is a ridiculously enormous subject.)

The phrase “Knowing how to live centrally important aspects of life extraordinarily well” is relevantly ambiguous too, just like “wisdom”. I know how to live my life extraordinarily well when it comes to physical strength and intellectual conduct. But that hardly means I know how to live my life well when it comes to dealing with acquaintances or work colleagues. Similarly, a person might know how to live one’s life well when it comes to their relationships with adults but be incompetent when it comes to dealing with children, or physical health, or intellectual health, or emotional health. There are many quite different aspects to your life, and “knowing how to live centrally important aspects of life extraordinarily well” can cover some but not all of them.

We can focus on three important and partially overlapping aspects of life that are typically associated with mountaintop wisdom.

• Moral Wisdom. The person on the mountaintop knows how to treat others in an exceptionally fair, just, moral manner--and she actually lives their life that way too, as long as she is not prevented from doing so. Knowing how to live one’s moral life extraordinarily well involves knowing what the morally excellent choice is, even in confusing circumstances, and then making that very choice even when it’s exceedingly difficult to do.

• Psychological Wisdom. A person has this kind of wisdom if she can surprisingly often look into someone’s mind and see the hidden levers that govern their behavior, beliefs, desires, preferences, and choices in life. She understands the psychological levers of human behavior in general. Most of us are almost like preteens to her, with motives, fears, hopes, and the rest that are transparent to her view. This wise person often knows your soul better than you do. She can use this psychological knowledge in order to live life in such a way as to achieve a high level of well-being and fulfillment, for both herself and those individuals lucky enough to take her advice or merely be in her social circles.

• Intellectual Wisdom. This person knows how to conduct her intellectual life extraordinarily well. She is expert at regulating her thinking, judging, and believing activity, knowing how to reason extremely well, to think creatively, to adjust her confidence in a claim in accord with the strength of the evidence she knows about, to suspend judgment when the evidence is inconclusive, to take into account genuine expertise, to track the quality of her own evidential position, to spot the signs of irrationality in herself and others, and to be vividly aware of the varieties of ways a belief can be good or bad. She is humble but only appropriately so; she is tolerant of contrary ideas, but only appropriately so; she knows how to act with energy even when she knows that conviction is unwise but action must be taken anyway.

I don’t claim that these are the only aspects to mountaintop wisdom, intuitively understood. Sometimes people seem to consider knowing how to live a fulfilling life to be a form of wisdom, even though it seems a bit self-centered. That’s fine; it overlaps the aspects of wisdom I have already listed—especially the psychological one, since for many people “fulfilling” means “happy”, and the latter is usually construed psychologically.

I don’t claim that anything I’ve written can be used to construct anything like a rigorous analysis of the notion of wisdom. My hunch is that no such analysis exists, because “is wise” and “wisdom” are semantically incomplete in serious ways. Perhaps there are rigorous analyses of “is an electron”, “contains gold”, and “is made of water”. But I doubt there is any such analysis of “is wise”. Roughly put, there is a real category in nature that “electron” latches onto, but the same can’t be said of “is wise” or “wisdom”. If you read an author who claims to know what single thing wisdom is, well, they’re wrong. I could of course be wrong about that negative assessment, but thirty years of philosophy suggest otherwise. In any case, I am definitely claiming that the three notions above are important parts of wisdom, ones we care about deeply.

The three notions, MW, PW, and IW (moral, psychological, intellectual wisdom), are independent of one another. Let’s prove it.

Clearly, Albus Dumbledore had all three. But the evil villain often has a great deal of both intellectual and psychological wisdom, which he successfully uses to manipulate people. The villain has IW & PW & ~MW. A moral saint could be pretty awful at reasoning and clueless about large parts of human psychology. That’s MW & ~PW & ~IW. Similarly, someone with a great deal of intellectual wisdom might find large parts of human psychology baffling, and she may or may not be evil or a moral saint. That’s both (IW & ~PW & MW) and (IW & ~PW & ~MW). Finally, I’ve known a few elderly people who understood human psychology awfully well but who were pretty bad at reasoning and other intellectual matters. That’s PW & ~IW, with or without MW. The three notions are different from one another.

As I’ve mentioned before, these kinds of wisdom are possessed to certain degrees: you and I have some intellectual or moral or psychological wisdom, but you might have more than I do. When I argued above that one can have IW without PW, for instance, all I meant was that you can have a pretty high degree of IW without having a pretty high degree of PW. If you were utterly bereft of PW, I doubt you could have much IW. Hence, the notions are not completely independent from one another.

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When you read someone’s take on wisdom, it’s worth remembering that there’s no thing, wisdom, available to theorize about. There are multiple things that fall under the concept, those things are quite different from one another, and it’s best to separate from one another, so confusion is minimized.