Delphic Maxim 48: Be a seeker of wisdom

I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day

48. Be a seeker of wisdom

A few weeks ago, a discussion broke out on one of these posts (at least, on my Facebook feed) about whether the examined life was really worth that much more than a life lived without introspection. But I think sometimes we mix up the idea of knowledge and wisdom, and in a sense all of our lives end up being an examined life as we get older. We tend to get wiser as we age — it finds us, even if we don’t seek it.

One of my favourite philosophers, Slavoj Žižek, tends to think that wisdom is a lot of bullshit. He thinks that people who reach out for those feel-good aphorisms that you find scattered around the internet aren’t seeking real wisdom, they’re looking for empty platitudes that often contradict each other. For example, ‘the early bird gets the worm’ directly contradicts ‘the second mouse gets the cheese’. How can we resolve this dilemma? Which aphorism is correct?

In part, we view people as wise retrospectively. Nassim Taleb notes that we only ever read about success stories — say, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs — rather than the far greater number of entrepreneurs and students and marketers and people who failed along the way. We are surprised and fascinated by the black swans, forgetting the fact that there were a whole lot of contingent circumstances that fell in their favour in order to achieve breakout success. Luck is a huge part of life, whether we like to admit it or not, and turning to success stories — while it can be helpful of course to learn about their decisions and choices in a given set of circumstances — is unlikely to give other people a template for success.

Here’s a piece of wisdom: the only thing in your control that can move you in the direction of success is how consistently you work at it. And that’s not, by the way, a guarantee. You still need to have luck on your side, you still need to land on your feet a few times, but you can at least increase the chances of that happening by being smart and working hard, and working hard over a long period of time.

Phillip Adams, the Radio National host, often uses a neat little saying (a piece of wisdom, if you will):

“Data are not facts, facts are not information, information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom.”

I really like this quote because it reminds us that layer upon layer of interpretation needs to be applied to the raw materials of the mind before we arrive at something useful. And wisdom is accrued over time and experience, it is knowledge applied to a thousand contexts, and expertly and automatically seated in the mind.

There’s a little bit of crossover in my understanding of wisdom with practical wisdom, or phronesis, which I’ve touched on in other posts. Aristotle conceived of this as another form of knowledge, separate to episteme (our scientific-theoretical knowledge of the world) and techne (our knowledge of arts crafts, professions and work). Phronesis is all about having practical, natural and expert wisdom — when to do the right thing at the right time. It’s a kind of instinct, or what Danny Kahneman might call ‘system one’ thinking — something we do automatically because our brain is conditioned to respond instinctively. But it goes a little further than automatic reactions, which can be unthinking: phronesis builds up over years of experience — it is the accrued knowledge of a thousand cases in which wisdom has been applied.

So when this maxim calls for us to be seekers of wisdom, I don’t think it’s necessarily inviting us to look for aphorisms (even Delphic maxims!) that give meaning to our lives. In fact it’s a reminder that we get wiser as we get older, we get more expert as we practice, and we should embrace this aspect of our characters.