“Defining Wisdom” is an interdisciplinary research program within the Arete Initiative at The University of Chicago. Twenty groups of researchers from a wide range of disciplines have been awarded two-year grants under the program to investigate the nature and benefits of wisdom. As a group, we have been wrestling with some fundamental issues related to wisdom, including how we might understand the many different ways that the word has been used—by ancient and modern philosophers, by researchers within our network, by laypeople in everyday conversation, and by others. As a part of our ongoing effort to understand what wisdom is, we have had a number of large- and small-group conversations focused on different conceptions or aspects of wisdom. One issue that has emerged as important to the research group, for example, is a distinction that Aristotle makes between theoretical wisdom (sophia) and practical wisdom (phronesis). We recently had a small-group discussion in which we revisited Aristotle’s original definitions of sophia and phronesis and discussed how he was actually defining each type, how they relate to each other at a deeper level, and whether each of our research projects seems more aligned with one or the other (we concluded that many of us seem to be focusing more on practical wisdom). We also read a paper by a modern philosopher who discussed how conceptions of wisdom have evolved through the ages, from Aristotle to the present day. What is written below came out of my reflections on the process of reading the two papers and discussing with my colleagues from different disciplines two main questions: 1) How have the meanings of “wisdom” evolved over the ages in response to different socio-historical trends and events? and 2) What kinds of distinctions between different types of wisdom seem most useful at present, especially in understanding how our interdisciplinary research projects relate to one another? The main idea that came out of this process for me is the thought that instead of trying to figure out how to define wisdom in terms of what “ingredients” are required for it to exist, perhaps we should begin with the desired “wise outcome”—greater happiness for more people more of the time—and work backwards to figure out what factors will help us drive more reliably toward that outcome.
What if we’ve all been trying to define wisdom from the wrong end? That is, what if the critical questions don’t have to do with the relationships between science and theology/morality/values or even wisdom and practical wisdom? Rather, what if all these considerations are merely derivative of the relationship between wisdom and happiness?
Consider this hypothetical scenario: We are in ancient times. There are no video games, no Sudoku, no movies, few manuscripts to read, almost no pleasure books (and few literate people to read them), and limited travel (which is more dangerous and arduous than exciting and fun). What do people do for fun? Possibly, they hang out with friends; play games, sports, and music; have sex; or do drugs. It is worth noting that the list would have probably been much shorter than it is today.
With happiness at a relative scarcity, it would have been natural to try to understand its causes, and this would have been a useful thing to do to get more of it for more people, more of the time. However, for the ancients there was little of what we would today recognize as science, and virtually no psychology—other than data gathered through introspection and interpreted through reflection. For this reason, the ancients started with what they had—they reflected on what seemed to make people happy. They recognized that some things made people happy temporarily (games, music), but didn’t have the same sort of cumulative or sustainable character as other sources of happiness (generating new knowledge, creating policies that make life better, etc.). Finally, some things actually led to a kind of “false” happiness (drugs, any addiction). We, too, make these distinctions because some things that make people happy are clearly more noble than others, owing to properties like the degree to which they are cumulative (can be shared with others and expand the playground of ideas for everyone) and their distributive scope (better the common good as opposed to looking out for one’s own self interest).
So it turns out that we can’t define the causes of happiness entirely in terms of observable behaviors, because some things like thinking and problem-solving, which make some people happy, are not observable, while other things might make the person who invented it happy but not the person who just executes it. Einstein, for example, probably had a great deal more fun coming up with and applying the theory of relativity than most physics students have while using the equations to solve canned homework problems. The problem is that the state of being happy is itself unobservable—there are behavioral correlates, but the correlation is imperfect and contingent on latent variables.
In an effort to make sense of our experience of happiness, we elaborate a category system to try to capture the kinds of distinctions just described. When we do this we end up with a theory of the causes of happiness in terms of certain kinds of activity (e.g., thinking, acting, producing) in relation to certain other traits or characteristics of the person (e.g., knowledge, experience, intellect, values, character) and with certain conditions on the subject matter (e.g., with respect to permanence of ideas and breadth of impact). That is, among all states of happiness we identify the “best” kinds of happiness and observe that they depend upon sets of external conditions (on the type of activity and its object) and internal conditions (knowledge, capabilities, values, motivations). But we recognize that there’s something else required—a characteristic of the individual that is basically their “capacity for happiness.” Imagine two people on twin worlds, identical in every respect except one: one twin has a much greater capacity for experiencing happiness than the other. It’s hard to imagine the unhappy one spending much time exercising these gifts if exercising them does not make that person happy. And it’s hard to think of the unhappy person as being as virtuous as the person who takes joy in doing such good. The special state in which these factors come together—the capacity to engage fully in happiness-producing activity as well as the capacity to experience the happiness that results from such activity—we call that state “wisdom.”
In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle wrote, “wisdom produces happiness the way health produces health.” Perhaps he meant that health is a state that supports the kinds of activities (e.g., exercise) that put people in a state of health, just as wisdom is a state that supports the kinds of activities (e.g., contemplation, judgment, problem solving) that put people in a state of happiness. Even here we have recognized at least two major divisions of happiness-producing activities—happiness that comes from thinking in a certain way and happiness that comes from acting in a certain way. The two seem to derive the happiness from different sources, so we might give them different names (sophia and phronesis). The implication of my analysis is that the concept linking these distinct instances of “wisdom” is not necessarily any particular relationship between the underlying networks of causes (scientific knowledge, values, skills, etc.), but the fact that both states reliably produce happiness, which, as I hypothesized at the outset, might well have been the goal of all this philosophical analysis in the first place.
Simply put, what if the only relationship between sophia and phronesis is that they both produce different varietals of the “best” kind of happiness but through completely different behavioral-cognitive-social pathways? Wisdom, in that case, in both its forms, would be defined roughly as “the capacity for engaging expertly in certain kinds of activities associated with the most noble kinds of happiness, combined with the capacity to experience happiness while so engaged.”
The world has changed quite a bit since Aristotle wrote about wisdom. Let’s consider the example of sophia (or theoretical wisdom). I would imagine that the physics research of Thales and Anaxagoras would have been great fun—building from first principles, making unexpected discoveries about hidden relationships under conditions where there’s lots of low-hanging fruit once you find your way in to the right conceptual terrain. Today, physicists are leaving physics in droves—I spoke to one physicist recently who described it as a domain in which the low-hanging fruit has all been picked-over. Today, perhaps it simply isn’t as easy to experience happiness doing the same kinds of things Thales and Anaxagoras would likely have been doing in the domain of physics.
Additionally, one could imagine that when wisdom was present in ancient times, it had to be more localized in one person than it does today. The ancient philosopher-scientist would presumably have had to carry out such activities as 1) deciding what line of inquiry to pursue, 2) discovering the knowledge, and 3) judging its quality. In modern science, much of the “judging” function has been absorbed into disciplinary knowledge (e.g., best practices for maximizing reliability and validity) and disciplinary structure (e.g., funding policies about what science is worth doing, organization of the research activity around stable paradigms where the next step is logically defined by what has come before, peer-reviewed journals that determine what is in and what is out, etc.). In this sense the scientific domain as a system might be just as wise as ever, even if many of the individual practitioners might seem to be quite a bit less wise than their ancient counterparts. The independent constitutive factors that used to coexist in the ancient philosopher-scientist are now distributed through the scientific system in a different way. The point is, if we try to compare the wisdom of individuals in antiquity with the wisdom of individuals in the 21st century, even though it seems like the most “obvious” comparison to make, we might nonetheless be comparing apples to oranges. A more appropriate comparison might be between the wisdom of the ancient and modern scientists in the context of their respective scientific systems. It just so happens that in antiquity we end up looking at the individual philosopher-scientist anyway because there wasn’t much of a system beyond the individual. But this shift of perspective would require us to think about the wisdom of modern scientists differently in relation to the ancients.
The space of happiness-producing activities has also grown tremendously in the intervening millennia. Today we do have video games, movies, candy, novels, iPods, global political challenges, and entirely new scientific domains opening up, among other things. This will require us to expand the original analysis to accommodate these instances and categories related to happiness that did not exist in ancient times.
To summarize: Under this hypothetical analysis, if we want to define wisdom for the modern day instead of trying to map an ancient network of conceptual, referential, and normative relationships onto a very different world from the one in which they were produced, perhaps we should return to first principles the way Aristotle did and ask:
• What activities make people happy?
• Which of these happiness-producing activities are the “best” or “most noble” ones?
• What are the characteristics of individuals that give them the capacity to both engage in these most noble activities at an expert level and to experience happiness while doing so?
The people who have all the necessary capacities and characteristics to engage at an expert level in these noble activities and who also experience happiness as a consequence of their activity would (applying the updated version of the original theory) be considered wise people. Such a “science of wisdom” would be fundamentally interdisciplinary—potentially drawing on any or all of ontology, philosophy of min, epistemology, education, positive psychology, affective science, cognitive science, organizational science, moral development, moral philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, cultural anthropology, etc. in order to map all the parts necessary to define wisdom for the modern age in this way.
I would like to stress that my collaborator, Seana Moran, and I consider the kind of analysis that centers on the individual “wise person” to be a special case of a more general analysis that focuses on the wisdom in the system, in which overall happiness at the systems level may increase or decrease as a result of collective or distributed action, even when no one wise person exists in the system. The contrast between ancient science and modern science above is a case in point. That is, it may well be true that the proportion of wise people (under Aristotle’s definition) in the world has gone down. But we would emphatically argue that that does not imply that the level of wisdom in the world has gone down. It seems obvious that there are ways in which the elements of wisdom that used to exist only in individuals in ancient times (and then only rarely all together) have been externalized and absorbed into some of our symbolic representations, institutions, etc. This “deconstruction” of the elements of wisdom at the individual level is not necessarily a bad thing, either—as long as there is a new synthesis of the constitutive factors at a higher level to compensate for it and perhaps even to provide additional benefits not available at the individual level.
-Michael Connell, Institute for Knowledge Design, Stanford University, co-PI with Seana Moran on Defining Wisdom Project "All the Wiser."
References
Aristotle; Crisp, Roger (Editor). Aristotle: Nichomachean Ethics. Port Chester, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000, Book VI.
Harrison, Peter. " Disjoining Wisdom and Knowledge: Science, Theology and the Making of Western Modernity," Wisdom or Knowledge? Science, Theology and Cultural Dynamics,
Meisinger, Hubert, Drees, Willem B., and Liana, Zbigniew (eds), T &
T Clark International, Continuum Imprint, London, 2006, Chapter 4, pp.
51-73.
Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.
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