Wisdom
posted by Frank Pasquale
Can wisdom be taught? A growing field of “wisdom studies” in psychology suggests that it can. I was reminded of Anthony Kronman’s The Lost Lawyer when reading some of these findings:
Certain qualities associated with wisdom recur in the academic literature: a clear-eyed view of human nature and the human predicament; emotional resiliency and the ability to cope in the face of adversity; an openness to other possibilities; forgiveness; humility; and a knack for learning from lifetime experiences. And yet as psychologists have noted, there is a yin-yang to the idea that makes it difficult to pin down. Wisdom is founded upon knowledge, but part of the physics of wisdom is shaped by uncertainty. Action is important, but so is judicious inaction. Emotion is central to wisdom, yet detachment is essential.
Kronman similarly emphasizes a balance between “sympathy and detachment” in the ideal lawyer.
A recent essay by Michael Ignatieff on his mistakes as an academic reminded me of the importance (and elusiveness) of wisdom.
Ignatieff suggests that the “unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of . . . many [commentators] . . ., myself included, who . . . supported the invasion.” As Philip Tetlock argued in his scathing indictment of “expert political judgment,” self-styled authorities can be astonishingly myopic. Ignatieff claims that this is because they lack a “sense of reality:”
As a former denizen of Harvard, I’ve had to learn that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what’s what than Nobel Prize winners. The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn, mostly from our mistakes, what works and what doesn’t. Yet even lengthy experience can fail us in life and in politics. Experience can imprison decision-makers in worn-out solutions while blinding them to the untried remedy that does the trick.
More controversially, Ignatieff suggests that personal adversity may be the key to good judgment:
Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself. It was not merely that the president did not take the care to understand Iraq. He also did not take the care to understand himself. The sense of reality that might have saved him from catastrophe would have taken the form of some warning bell sounding inside, alerting him that he did not know what he was doing. But then, it is doubtful that warning bells had ever sounded in him before. He had led a charmed life, and in charmed lives warning bells do not sound.
I would not engage in armchair psychologizing of a president or any other political figure. It’s just too easy to project one’s own thoughts onto one’s subject–as Simon Apter notes in this critique of Maureen Dowd:
Dowd has made psycho-history her defining device. When it works, she’s humorous and entertaining. When it doesn’t, she’s amateurish and patronizing. . . . [Dowd] has neither the access to her subject’s innermost thoughts nor the credentials to analyze them.
Nevertheless, Ignatieff’s points do make me think that, sheerly as a matter of democratic representation, it would be good to see more people with direct experience of disadvantage at the highest levels of our government.
August 13, 2007 at 9:17 pm
Posted in: Current Events
Print This Post
Responses (3)
Patrick S. O'Donnell - August 14, 2007 at 2:30 am
Well, there’s wisdom and then there’s wisdom: and one sort is not so much found in the academic literature as in the sacred literature of world religions or embodied in the “therapies of desire” (after Nussbaum) of the Hellenistic philosophical schools, hence the wisdom of (some) Jewish rabbis, Confucian and Taoist sages, Stoic philosophers, Buddhist and Benedictine monks, Ibn al-Arabi and Rumi, Dorothy Day, Dogen and Nagarjuna. The pedagogical strategies found in these religious and classical philosophical traditions are often unconventional and intimate (in keeping with the Platonic notion of eros), and the exemplary figures who embody this wisdom frequently elicit, evoke, arouse, or awaken the latent capacity or potential for wisdom in others, in living a certain kind of life, one dedicated to and oriented around the Good (hence Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good, 1970). This involves what Nozick called the “perfectionist aspiration to self-development” (in the second half of Philosophical Explanations, 1981) but in a manner that exhibits the states of same without “willing what cannot be willed,” hence the indirect pedagogical strategies employed, say, by Taoists and Buddhists to empty our minds, to “dampen the passions,” to subvert our infatuation with instrumentalist rationality, to achieve the graceful spontaneity of wu-wei. If this is taught, it is certainly not found in contemporary and conventional methods of teaching insofar as they are but a pale imitation of Greek paideia. Furthermore, the wisdom attained is by most accounts nonpropositional in essence, however much words, images and propositions serve as rafts to the other shore. A commitment to eudaimonistic individualism might be seen as one necessary yet not sufficient condition for wisdom, entailing as it does the responsibility to actualize value(s) in the world through self-actualization, the progressive objectivizing of our true subjectivity in a way that brings benefits to others, not the least of which is the facilitation of their projects of self-directed living (based on what David Norton explained as a division of labor with respect to the realization of values or the complementarity of perfected differences). This is the practice of philosophy as a “way of life” (in Pierre Hadot’s sense). Another necessary yet not sufficient condition for wisdom entails spiritual exercises (or, loosely, ascetic practices) or rules of life such as those memorably enshrined in the words of Epictetus or the Meditations of his student, Marcus Aurelius. The elusiveness of wisdom indeed.
Reader - August 14, 2007 at 9:02 am
Read hilzoy at http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2007/08/a-few-teensy-mi.html#more on the Ignatieff article
Stephen M (Ethesis) - September 16, 2007 at 9:03 am
I finally decided to link tho this,though I’m still deciding how to blog about it. I like the idea that wisdom may, eventually, be resolved to a skill set, like integrity can be.
Leave a Reply