“Wisdom is an understanding of what is important, where this understanding informs a (wise) person’s thought and action…Wisdom is not just one type of knowledge, but diverse. What a wise person needs to know and understand constitutes a varied list: the most important goals and values of life – the ultimate goal, if there is one; what means will reach these goals without too great a cost; what kinds of dangers threaten the achieving of these goals; how to recognize and avoid or minimize these dangers; what different types of human beings are like in their actions and motives (as this presents dangers or opportunities); what is not possible or feasible to achieve (or avoid); how to tell what is appropriate when; knowing when certain goals are sufficiently achieved; what limitations are unavoidable and how to accept them; how to improve oneself and one’s relationships with others or society; knowing what the true and unapparent value of various things is; when to take a long-term view; knowing the variety and obduracy of facts, institutions, and human nature; understanding what one’s real motives are; how to cope and deal with the major tragedies and dilemmas of life, and with the major good things too.” — Robert Nozick, The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, p. 267-9, Simon & Schuster, 1990.
“He who has little communication with people is seldom a misanthrope. True misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world. This is because it is practical experience of life, and certainly not philosophy, that makes people hate their fellows. And if someone who is a misanthrope withdraws from society, in his seclusion he loses his misanthropy.” — Giacomo Leopardi, Thoughts, 1837, section 89, Hesperus Press Limited, 2002.
(Source: anametheus)
Philosophy is not boring. It talks about the most important issues in life – and it doesn’t tell you which those are. It is not an order, it is a question. You are supposed to find the answer.
Philosophers who are boring are failing in life. A boring life cannot be a good one. “So what if a philosopher is boring? He may still be a good philosopher.” Yes – only if you subtract one of the main aims of philosophy: Living the good life. That contemporary philosophy is filled with boring professors of philosophy only accentuates Thoreau’s remark in Walden:
There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a noble race of men.
Someone who has been a philosopher for years should be discernibly different in the things that matter from most people. He has supposedly made it his life’s task to live the good life. If he isn’t living better than most who haven’t set such a conscious goal for themselves, he is evidently not a good philosopher. Philosophy is not just another profession. It is a calling. You cannot be a philosopher from 9 to 5 and be a layman at night. Being a philosopher means being an example of your own philosophy. Walking the talk and talking the walk.
Of course, being a philosopher is a process, as most things are. If someone has just created the ideal to which he wants to strive, it is unfair to expect that he’s going to match it overnight. The ideals of philosophy entail your whole way of life. Changing your whole way of life overnight is highly improbable if not completely impossible. But being only a shadow of the ideal you still believe yet have sketched 20 years ago, should raise doubts about your sincerity or strength of will. Doubts that you should at least have personally raised and examined. That is why philosophies have been called confessions. They are the sublimated confessions of personal struggles to live out ideals; the triumphs and tragedies of human actualization.
To restrict yourself to offering a little nugget of truth (which seems to be the rule among philosophers these days) while living alone in an ivory tower of inauthenticity can hardly be called noble. Let us not let “noble” remain an honorific term for people who don’t deserve it. Let us not cower from aspirations to greatness. Let us not always equate the will to greatness with arrogance and conceitedness. It is time to believe that there is something more than nihilistic humility. Sapere Aude!
Wisdom is more important than knowledge -
With the tremendous advancements in science human beings have reached the technological capacity to exterminate themselves and their world. In fact, at least one time we came pretty close to a nuclear war. Over the past decades, with the rise of the environmental movement, we’ve become ever more aware of the impact we have not only on the health and well-being of our own communities but on the planet as a whole.
It is, therefore, no secret that we currently have the know-how to radically change the world. The crucial question, therefore, is not whether we can change the world. It is whether we are wise enough to act towards making it better, given that scientific know-how does not in itself make us wiser.
Shall we be more precise? Science is analytical description, philosophy is synthetic interpretation. Science wishes to resolve the whole into parts,the organism into organs, the obscure into the known. It does not inquire into the values and ideal possibilities of things, nor into their total and final significance; it is content to show their present actuality and operation, it narrows its gaze resolutely to the nature and process of things as they are. The scientist is as impartial as Nature in Ivan Turgenev’s (1818-1883) poem; he is as interested in the leg of a flea as in the creative throes of a genius. But the philosopher is not content to describe the fact; he wishes to ascertain its relation to experience in general and thereby to get at its meaning and its worth; he combines things in a interpretive synthesis; he tries to put together, better than before, that great universe-watch which the inquisitive scientist has analytically taken a part. Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom – desire coordinated in the light of all experience – can tell us when to heal and when to kill. To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy: because in these days our means and instruments have been multiplied beyond our interpretation and synthesis of ideals and ends, our life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. For a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete except in relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.
- Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, p.2-3, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1961
“Philosophy?” someone may wonder in puzzlement. Could it be that such a seemingly outdated discipline may be required to play such an important role? Besides:
What is the task of philosophy today? We know the familiar answer: None –
for it is just the private business of a guild of specialists. These philosophers, we are told, occupy university chairs dating from the Middle Ages and meet in futility, at conventions which are the modern occasions for showing off. Their monologues are attested by a voluminous literature, scarcely read and rarely bought, except for a few fashionable publications with snob appeal.
If the press, as the organ of public opinion, takes note of these books and periodicals which gather dust in libraries, it does so without real interest. All in all, we hear, philosophy is superfluous, ossified, behind the times, waiting only for its disappearance. It no longer has a task.
Karl Jaspers, Basic Philosophical Writings, “The Present Task of Philosophy”, p.125, ed. and trans. by E. Ehrlich, L.H. Ehrlich and G. B. Pepper, Humanities Press, 1994.
But Jaspers did not end that thought on philosophy with that paragraph, but with this one:
Against such strictures we may point out, first of all, that not everything which goes by the name of philosophy should be confused with philosophy itself. Philosophy exists wherever thought brings men to an awareness of their existence. It is omni-present without being specifically identified. For no man thinks without philosophizing – truly or falsely, superficially or profoundly, hastily or slowly and thoroughly. In a world where standards prevail, where judgments are made, there is philosophy. There is as much of it in the cohesive faith of the Church as in a conscious, self-contained philosophical faith; there is philosophy even in the belief of the unbeliever, in nihilistic disintegration, in Marxism, psychoanalysis, in the many precepts for living that are not popular, such as anthroposophy and others [a contemporary example could be what may be roughly called ‘New Age’ philosophies]. The very rejection of philosophy goes back to a philosophy that is not aware of itself.
(ibid.)
It is time we become aware and do our best to recover and champion the traditional role of philosophy which is the development of wisdom, not just in our words and heads, but in our hearts and actions. It is time for the philosopher, as an ideal, to come out of his academic cave and return to the market (agora), where he was originally born, to help his fellow humans live a better life.