This is an exciting time to be working on wisdom! This website attests to the emergence of a new network of interdisciplinary academic research on wisdom, and the excitement that has attended it reminds me, in my capacity as a student of the Enlightenment, of the excitement that animated the gens de lettres of the eighteenth century.
At the same time, the academic study of wisdom has its challenges. Two particular challenges seem especially pressing. The first is the very newness of wisdom research. It’s no secret that wisdom hardly registers on the radar screens of most of today’s academic disciplines. This very fact of course is what makes it exciting to many of us. But it also has its challenges – not least of which is the question of where exactly one ought to begin!
But wisdom’s newness is only one of its challenges; no less pressing is its oldness. The neglect that wisdom has suffered in modern academic discourse is equaled in degree only by the attention and indeed preeminence it enjoyed in the philosophical and religious traditions on which our own culture is founded. In these traditions, wisdom was not only celebrated, but shared adherence to such traditions ensured that wisdom could be defined and measured by generally-accepted standards. Today of course we lack such standards (or at least general acceptance of them), with the consequence that the wisdom of the ancients necessarily strikes some as distant.
So what’s a wisdom researcher to do? Three options present themselves. First, we might try to recover the ancient meaning of wisdom by returning directly to the philosophical and religious traditions of our past and asking what aspects of such traditions can be reintegrated in academic discourse today. Alternatively, we might choose to make a break with these traditions, and seek to redefine wisdom for a pluralistic world. Each of these options has its merits and excellent work is presently being done in both veins. Still, there might yet be room for a third line of inquiry, and it’s on this third option that I want to focus in this post.
This third option is predicated on the idea that ordinary language may contain much wisdom on the subject of wisdom. Personally, I tend to agree with C. S. Lewis that language, for all is shortcomings, contains “a good deal of shared insight and experience” – an observation that led Lewis to warn that “if you begin by flouting it, it has a way of avenging itself later on.” By starting with what we know, we thus build a salutary check into our new models of wisdom. Attending to ordinary understandings of wisdom also has the advantage of absolving us, at least at the outset, from having to either reconstruct or reject the comprehensive conceptions of wisdom to which earlier traditions were dedicated.
To test this hypothesis, I’m particularly interested in exploring a specific instantiation of ordinary language treatments of wisdom: pop music. As it happens, wisdom makes appearances in several of the songs likely to be on the iPod playlists of many, and in at least two cases its treatment seems sufficiently prescient to be well worth the attention of academic inquirers.
The first is Bill Withers’ hit, “Lean On Me.” The song has always struck me and many others as remarkable for its celebration of a particular type of love – not the needy erotic love of most pop music, but a much more generous neighbor love. But the song has much to say as well about wisdom, explicitly invoked in its memorable opening:
Sometimes in our life,
We all feel pain, we all feel sorrow.
But, if we are wise,
We know that there’s always tomorrow.
There’s a lot in this first verse, even if the song’s fame rests on the chorus that follows. At least two aspects are especially striking. The first is the context of wisdom’s emergence. The true field of wisdom is suffering – quite literally the “pain” and “sorrow” that “we all feel.” This is itself worth pausing on insofar as we may be inclined to associate wisdom with tranquility and happiness. Certainly there’s an intimate relationship between the two. But it’s more complex than merely saying that wisdom is what we have when we’re happy or at rest. Here the suggestion is rather that wisdom is the indispensible resource in our navigation of the inevitable trials and tribulations that we experience as human beings. Wisdom, that is, promotes human flourishing by helping us to bridge the gap between the suffering that we all necessarily experience and the happiness that we all naturally desire.
So the song has much to say about why we need wisdom. But it also may cast some light on what wisdom is. In the face of the challenges that beset us, our reaction so often is to wonder “what should I do?” Our inclination, that is, is to define wisdom as the process of good judgment that enables us to achieve a desired practical outcome – the maximization of our utility, the resolution of a dilemma, etc. But we get a somewhat different picture in Withers’ song. The wise person is less interested here in figuring out how to solve a problem and thereby banish pain and sorrow than in knowing something else – namely that “there’s always tomorrow.” But what exactly does that mean?
In one sense, it suggests a reconsidering of the relationship of wisdom to virtue, and especially the virtue of hope, to which wisdom seems particularly closely bound. In another sense, it suggests a reconsideration of the relationship of wisdom to knowledge. A brief glance at the history of philosophy helps us see how radical a claim is being made. In the eighteenth century, the philosopher David Hume took as the departure point for his influential defense of epistemological skepticism precisely the claim that it is impossible for us to know with certainty that the sun will rise tomorrow; simply because it rose in the past is no guarantee that it will do so in the future. But this is precisely what Withers’ wise person is said to “know.” Wisdom would thus seem to stand in a deep opposition to skepticism.
At this point one might be tempted to wonder whether this isn’t a lot for Withers’ song to have to bear! But as it happens, his definition isn’t alone, even in the world of popular music. In fact, when I mentioned Withers’ song to my wise colleague Judith Glück during a coffee break at the recent wisdom network meeting, she had at the ready a second song: Paul McCartney’s “Let It Be.” Its opening is similarly well worth considering:
When I find myself in times of trouble,
Mother Mary comes to me,
Speaking words of wisdom,
“Let it be.”
Those with greater credentials as Beatles scholars (or at least those who have at hand the original liner notes – a relic from a pre-mp3 age!) will correct me if I take too many liberties in putting in quotes the verse’s three final words. But the context (as well as McCartney’s own reflections on the song’s origins) seems to indicate that these are in fact Mother Mary’s substantive wise words. And if so, we might note a few parallels with our earlier text.
First, here again the context of the emergence of wisdom is suffering, or “times of trouble” (called in the line that follows “my hour of darkness”). Wisdom, that is, becomes again a resource for helping us as we navigate our challenges rather than the instrument or manifestation of our happiness. Second, McCartney’s lyric, like Withers’, emphasizes the intimate relationship of wisdom to the virtue of hope. Among the other lessons that Mother Mary’s wise words have afforded seems to be (as we learn in the final verse) the recognition that “when the night is cloudy, there is still a light that shines on me.”
But most importantly, McCartney’s wise Mother Mary knows something, and indeed something very specific. Here again that knowledge is not the knowledge of how to navigate a particular practical dilemma through either wise choices or acute prudential judgment. So far from adeptness at navigating circumstances in the hopes of mastering their challenges, wisdom, it is suggested, lies rather in the capacity to disassociate ourselves from such circumstances. Wisdom thus lies less in what we do than in what we choose not to do – less in our capacity to manipulate a situation than in our capacity to liberate ourselves from the compulsion to master those situations we cannot change.
Taken together, McCartney and Withers remind us of what many of us knew by lesson or by instinct about wisdom before: that wise people respond to suffering with hope and to critical dilemmas with perspectives that transcend the immediate context of such dilemmas. Surely this can’t be all that wisdom is, but the very popularity of such conceptions, together with the remarkable economy of their expression, make them well worth attending to as we begin our navigation of these uncharted waters.
-Ryan Patrick Hanley, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Marquette University
Photo from Flickr Creative Commons.
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