Delphic Maxim 23: Long for wisdom
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
23. Long for wisdom
Once upon a time, the Pythia was asked who the wisest person in all the world was. She replied that it was Socrates: “wisest is he who knows that he does not know”. This phrase is repeated in Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World, where young Sophie begins her journey as a philosopher. Her teacher, Albert, tells her “wisest is she who knows she does not know”. To put it another way, the more you learn, the more you realise that there is more — much more — to learn.
I was having a conversation with my flatmate the other day about exactly this phenomenon. We started a ‘great books course’ about six months ago. We have a huge list of books starting from Homer and ranging right through the Western canon, as well as some texts that are more contemporary, and some that come from the East and the South. We took this up because we found a whole bunch of literature and ideas that we wanted to know more about — we longed for wisdom. (You can also add to that the fact that these kinds of books — Odyssey, Augustine’s Confessions, Marx, etc — are much more fun when you’re a little older and reading them on your own terms).
What we noticed, though, is that the further into a particular book or domain of knowledge you get, the more opens up to you. Paths diverge in a forest of knowledge, forks continue endlessly, an infinite, fractal regress — choose a starting point and watch how the walk through twists and turns and changes. There are so many side issues and afterthoughts, asterisks and footnotes, the more you learn, the more you realise there is more to learn. So in a sense it is easy to understand what made Socrates so wise — he knew so much and questioned so much because he knew that there was so much to know and question that he hadn’t already encountered before.
So wisdom is worth longing for, at least in this sense of knowledge as a type of wisdom. The ancients also used wisdom in the sense of phronesis, which I have discussed earlier. Practical wisdom means that you have a kind of embodied, situated, expert knowledge of a particular circumstance and context. If we think back to the last maxim, you might be particularly good in your social role (say, a checkout chick), and you have accrued a lot of practical wisdom in this domain (and accordingly, you’ve probably accrued honour in your relations with others). Phronesis is both your automatic and expert knowledge of context, but also your awareness of the moral and ethical dimensions of your behaviour: what is the good thing to do in this situation, and what is the right thing to do?
It doesn’t matter what it is we do in life, it is possible to incorporate a longing for wisdom, and a desire to become phronetic in our practices. Most of the time this is something we tend to do — the more we perform a task (we master our techne or craft), or the more we work with a particular domain of knowledge (episteme), we also learn tacit knowledge. We are able to take more for granted in a situation because we get a feel for the things we do. We become practically wise.
Today’s maxim is a good chance for you to reflect on your own life. In what ways do you show phronesis in your daily practice? What practical wisdom do you carry about with you — because your time on earth has given you that knowledge and capability, you have to work hard as a person not to learn. But more importantly, have you built deliberate longing for wisdom into your life?
I bet that you have, perhaps without realising it. We all want to be wise, and the wisest out there are those who realise that they don’t know, and who want to know more.
