I have been watching this list for a few days, wondering if
I have any place in it. Now it seems time to ask. My name is bob Macintosh and
I am an amateur of wisdom, which I think means the same as 'philosopher'.
However, by amateur, I also mean that I have no attachment to any academic
institution, and that I do not get paid for my thinking.
Over the last couple of centuries, knowledge has increased
exponentially, yet wisdom has increased not at all. I question whether wisdom
has any connection with knowledge? Knowledge can be taught
and , it can be
accumulated and passed on, it is capacity - to speak a language, or conduct
valid experiments, or pass exams, or whatever; but is wisdom like that?
Most of the conversation here has been about thinkers who
have been largely neglected by academia. The Laws of Form demonstrates
that even an enquiry into railway switches, if pursued in the right spirit can
lead to wisdom, but I suspect that it cannot be arrived at by following
another, not even a college professor, and not even George Spencer Brown.
Incidentally, can I reccomend as a complement to the above, The Ending of Time,
by J Krishnamurti & Dr David Bohm, which starts from the other end as it
were, and works backwards to the first distinction.
My own point of view is that wisdom is identical with love
and also rationality, which is the absence of self; it has nothing to do with
knowledge, and is not more widespread in academia than elsewhere. It would be
the height of folly to claim to have wisdom, to seek to set up any kind of
authority on it, or to try and promote it in anyone but oneself - but perhaps I
am in the wrong place, and talking about something completely different using
the same word.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Wednesday, May 17,
2006 2:18 PM
We have announced our existence to the world - or to the readers of the Times
Higher Education Supplement - and we have acquired new members. What do
we do now? We are in broad agreement, I take it, that universities ought
to seek and promote wisdom more actively and effectively than they do at
present. But what does this involve? What changes need to be made
to research and education if these are to seek and promote wisdom in an
adequate way? How do we go about helping to bring the
required changes about? What do we do?
As I see it, we have two different but related tasks before us.
(A) First, we need to continue to debate among ourselves
what kind of inquiry would adequately seek and help promote
wisdom. Is it primarily a question of teaching in such a way that,
whatever else is being learned - physics, history, anthropology, etc.
- the student also acquires wisdom, as the USA initiative
"teaching for wisdom" would seem to hold? Or is something more
radical required? Does there need to be a transformation in the overall
aims and methods of inquiry, a change in the nature of
disciplines, in the way they are related to one another, and a change in
the way academia is related to the rest of society, if inquiry is to seek
and promote wisdom adequately? Do we, perhaps, need an intellectual
and cultural transformation comparable in importance to the scientific
revolution of the 17th century, or the Enlightenment of the 18th century?
(B) Assuming we come to some sort of rough agreement
concerning (A), our task is then to try to get across to our academic
colleagues the need for change, and ideas about what needs to
change. It might be that what we need to do, here, is to stimulate
serious debate about what the aims and methods of academic inquiry should be
much more broadly, in and out of academic and educational contexts. Or
perhaps we do have specific changes in mind which we hold need to be made
to academia if it is to seek and promote wisdom adequately - our task being to
make out the case for these changes as publicly and effectively
as we can. Or perhaps we should ourselves begin to practise what we
preach (if we are not already doing just that), so that we devote at least some
of our own research, writing and teaching to the promotion of wisdom (as
best we can). Or are we primarily a sort of meta-organization,
facilitating communication between other people, groups, organizations and
societies who are engaged in the struggle to help create a wiser world,
and help create institutions of research and learning devoted to that end?
(A) and (B) need to be carried on simultaneously, of course. I don't wish
to imply that (A) has to be completed before we can begin with (B).
My own view, as I expect many of you know, is that we do need a radical
revolution in the aims and methods of academic inquiry, a revolution in its
structure and character, if it is to seek and promote wisdom effectively, and
in a genuinely rational way. I see ideal human inquiry as a sort of
rational development of animal inquiry - the essential thing about animal
inquiry being that it is learning how to live, learning how to act in the world
so as to survive and reproduce. Human inquiry, too, ideally, ought to be
(in my view) about learning how to live, learning how to act and be in the
world; problems of living ought to be at the heart of the academic enterprise,
and not, as at present, at the periphery. The big differences between
animal and human inquiry are, first, the elaborately social character of
the latter, and second that the basic aims of life and of
inquiry are, for us, not only survival and reproduction, but
rather the realization in life of what is genuinely of value (whatever
that may be). The basic aims of life, and of inquiry are, for
us, inherently problematic, and it ought to be a part of our task to try
to improve our aims as we live, as we learn and think.
This
radical interpretation of our task is reflected, to some extent, in our website
(www.knowledgetowisdom.org).
Is it too radical? Or not radical enough? What ought we to be
trying to achieve?
In pursuing (A) and (B) I hope this emailing group will try to exercise
some restraint, and will not send material or pursue discussion of
matters only tangentially related to our main concerns. I have
already received one or two complaints on this score. It has also
been suggested to me that we should not send attachments to the list: I am not
sure how people feel about that.
Mathew Iredale, who helps me manage this emailing group, has suggested to me
that Friends of Wisdom ought to have simple vision and mission statements,
as many charities do. He says "Although
our aims may be varied and complex, applying as they do to so many areas of
life throughout the world, we ought to try and provide a simple statement of
what they are". And he proposes the following, which seem to me
to be excellent:-
Our vision statement:- We wish to help
humanity learn how to create a better world.
Our mission statement:- Our mission is to
encourage academia to devote itself to seeking and promoting wisdom by rational means, wisdom being the capacity to
realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others.
And he also suggests that we put ourselves on a more formal basis and agree on
a constitution for Friends of Wisdom - perhaps a simplified version of the
constitution of Scientists for Global Responsibility (http://www.sgr.org.uk/Constitution.html).
My apologies for the length of this email, clearly violating my request
for restraint!