By Valerie Tiberius
At end the of July, 2010, a small group of philosophers and
psychologists met at the Rosewood Inn in Hastings, Minnesota to talk
about wisdom. This series of blog posts highlights key questions that emerged from that discussion.
Please join our conversation by commenting on this discussion below.
Also, it should be noted that this workshop was funded by a grant from
the University of Chicago’s Defining Wisdom Project and the John
Templeton Foundation. Thanks are also due to the Minnesota Center for
Philosophy of Science for administrative assistance.
The fact that wisdom does seem to involve so many capacities (empathy,
self-knowledge, reflection, and so on) made some of us worry that wisdom is too
amorphous. If wisdom just colonizes every useful capacity we have, it doesn’t
really seem like a single virtue.
At our meeting, different answers to this worry were expressed. A first thought
was that since wisdom concerns judgment and decision making in particular, it
will not include every virtue. Generosity, for example, might seem unnecessary
for good decision making. But this way of thinking didn’t hold up for two
reasons. First, virtues that aren’t virtues of judgment can nevertheless
improve judgment by changing the inputs to the process. For example, generosity
can improve decision making when others’ needs are at stake by ensuring that
generous actions are presented as attractive and viable options. Second, we
agreed that practical wisdom involves not just good judgment but also acting
consistently with that judgment. If this is the case, then many virtues are
necessary for wisdom. As Tori pointed out, even courage seems like something
that could be cultivated as part of the project of becoming wiser, because
courage helps us to bring our actions in line with what we think is important.
Simine’s answer was to deny that there is really a problem here: why not just think that
wisdom is everything good that is in our control? One reason has to do with
problems that have come up for the unity of the virtues. The thesis of the
unity of the virtues says that you can’t have any virtue without having
practical wisdom and if you have practical wisdom, you have all the other
virtues. Plato held this view, but it is not a popular position now, because
there seems to be a lot of evidence that people can be virtuous in one
dimension without being virtuous in all. For example, some people are very kind
but not courageous, or temperate but not generous.
Our discussion led us to favor the view that there is a limited kind of unity, an
asymmetrical unity such that you can’t have wisdom without having the other
virtues, though you can have the other virtues (to some degree) without having
wisdom. One could interpret this view in one of two ways: First, one could hold
that wisdom is comprised of the other virtues such that any virtue is a part of
wisdom. Or, second, one could hold that wisdom only comprises those virtues
that have to do with deliberation, judgment, and decision making; virtues that
have to do with producing appropriate action may contribute to the same end as
wisdom but they are not a part of wisdom. It may not matter much which of these
interpretations one takes. One might even think that wisdom has a narrow and a
broad sense so that both views get something right. We can think of it in its
narrow sense when we want to distinguish it from other virtues that we want to
discuss separately, but we can also think of it in its broad sense when we are
thinking about who has wisdom and we find ourselves reluctant to ascribe real
wisdom to people who lack action-oriented virtues like courage.
What kind of reflection should we think of as
part of wisdom?
In your inquiry into whether Wisdom is just one thing, did any of the participants consider the following view of Wisdom?
As the human species is already an integral subsystem within the larger system that is the Cosmos, Wisdom could be the capability in individual humans where the local conceptual interpretive interface closely represents the integral dynamic relationships and interactions of the larger Cosmic system.
I think wisdom includes the courage to filter out what is not important.
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