By W. Clark Gilpin
A major “hallmark of wisdom,” according to Paul Baltes, “is knowing how, where, and when to take risks and to deal with uncertainty” (Baltes & Smith, 2008). Sometimes this risk-taking entails detective work that resolves the uncertainties of a past event. But, most often, wisdom requires taking the risk of dealing with an uncertain future. We may have reasons to hope that our present decisions will lead to the future we desire, but any significant decision knowingly risks itself on a future that will hold unanticipated events and unintended consequences.
In dealing with the uncertainty of the future, language makes a difference. Rhetoric, forms of argument, and figurative language shape how individuals and societies understand the connection between present decision and uncertain future. Hence, the exercise of wisdom requires self-awareness about the tacit implications of the language we use.
This is especially true in the case of metaphor. Different metaphors tacitly orient a person’s or a society’s stance toward the future in quite different ways. With this feature of metaphor in mind, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1984) have argued that a metaphorical concept focuses attention on one aspect of the relationship between different objects or experiences and, in so doing, draws attention away from other aspects. By “partially structuring one experience in terms of another,” metaphors can thus act to “hide an aspect of our experience.”
Two contrasting examples will illustrate this capacity of metaphor to divert our attention from one possibility and focus it on another.
- “Here is life,” declared Henry David Thoreau, “an experiment to a great extent untried by me; but it does not avail me” that others “have tried it.” This metaphor—my life is an experiment—had many parallels in the writings of Thoreau’s older friend Ralph Waldo Emerson: “I am only an experimenter…. I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.” Individual lives should become experiments, both believed, not simply for personal reasons but to disclose possibilities for the society as a whole. Thoreau thus represented himself in Walden as an intellectual pioneer, declaring that “the philosopher is in advance of his age even in the outward form of his life” (Canby, 1937; Porte, 1983).
- In a recent New York Times commentary Thomas L. Friedman (2012) called for both domestic and foreign policy “resiliency” on the part of the United States during the next four years. Domestically, this meant investing in infrastructure, education, and research: “We need to weatherproof our house so we can control our destiny and play the vital stabilizing role the world needs us to play.”
As these two illustrations suggest, the metaphorical structuring of experience includes both an image of the future and an orientation toward the future. Thoreau’s metaphor of the experimental life had reveled in the unknown dimensions of the future and implied its boundless possibilities. By contrast, Friedman’s metaphor depicts the future as a threatening storm and counsels “weatherproofing” that will give the national house the resilience to survive. But beyond the different moods evoked by these contrasting metaphors, they share two features that are instructive for thinking about wisdom.
- Both metaphors reciprocally link personal life and societal life, the domestic and the public. In Mr. Friedman’s metaphor, the nation is a house. This linkage of the futures (or fates) of individuals and nations is capable of exerting tremendous rhetorical and ideological power.
- Taken together, the two metaphors illustrate the wide spectrum of future-oriented images that circulate through a culture. Why does an individual or a social group find one metaphor persuasive while ignoring others?
Returning to the definition of wisdom by Paul Baltes, I would add that “knowing how, where, and when to take risks and to deal with uncertainty” in large measure requires making a discriminating choice about language. Perhaps no small part of the wisdom that resides in metaphorical thinking is the capacity to allow diverse metaphors to contest one another, in the process of reaching a judgment about an always-uncertain future. Wisdom, it would seem, requires a capacity not only to imagine a possible future through an evocative metaphor but also to establish some critical distance from that metaphor, in order to identify the aspects of the situation that it may be hiding from our attention.
Baltes, P.B. & Smith, J. (2008). The fascination of wisdom. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, 56-64.
Canby, H.S. (Ed.). (1937). The Works of Thoreau. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Friedman, T.L. (2012, October 23). Our secret sauce. New York Times, A25.
Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1984). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Porte, J. (Ed.). (1983). Essays and Lectures. New York, NY: Literary Classics of the United States.
Photo courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.
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