Dear Nick,
I do think that the distinction (but not absolute demarcation) that you make between 'knowledge-enquiry' and 'wisdom-enquiry' is very important, and fundamental to the aspirations of 'Friends of Wisdom'.
Now, at the great risk of appearing obsessively to 'beat my/our own drum' from my madhouse in Bath, I want to try to clarify how I think this distinction relates to and can be strengthened by/strengthen the work that I and a few others have been doing over the last several years on 'inclusionality'. I have tried on several occasions to clarify this relationship in correspondence with this forum and with yourself, but so far, it seems, failed rather miserably.
May I suggest that 'wisdom-enquiry' is to 'knowledge-enquiry' as 'inclusional enquiry' is to 'rationalistic enquiry'? 'Wisdom/inclusional-enquiry' encompasses whilst extending well beyond 'knowledge/rationalistic-enquiry'. Knowledge/rationalistic enquiry excludes wisdom enquiry and in that sense is profoundly 'unreasonable' (my preferred expression) or 'irrational' (your expression). This exclusion is indeed, I think, at the root of all kinds of social, psychological and environmental distress.
In essence, 'wisdom/inclusional' enquiry includes a vital (in all meanings of that word) aspect of reality (yes, really!) that 'knowledge/rationalistic' enquiry deliberately or unconsciously excludes.
You aptly identify what is missing from/excluded from knowledge enquiry as what is necessary to understand 'problems of living' in terms of feelings and values.
At a more physically explicit level, I identify what is missing from/excluded from rationalistic enquiry as what is necessary to understand the non-linear fluid dynamic of nature in terms of spatial/gravitational influence.
So, what does rationalistic/knowledge enquiry do in order to exclude feelings, values and spatial/gravitational influence?
It imposes discrete limits/boundaries (definitions) upon nature and human nature for the existence of which there is no contemporary scientific evidence. In other words, it excludes the indefinable implicit (invisible, intangible) aspect and so deals only with the seemingly explicit (visible, tangible) aspect of reality. In so doing, it produces the paradoxical, one-sided, adversarial view of nature that is at the heart of much human conflict between 'self' and 'other'. It is a stultifying, abstract re-presentation of nature, which inverts natural proportions.
So, how can wisdom/inclusional enquiry bring about the paradigmatic transformation that is needed? By including feelings, values and spatial/gravitational influence within its natural, dynamic framing, rather than imposing fixed Euclidean limits that exclude space from matter.
Correspondingly, I have included feelings, values and spatial/gravitational influence in my final year undergraduate course on 'life, environment and people'. The students nearly all 'get it' and express much delight and creativity in being liberated from the 'in the box' logic to which they have been subjected throughout their 'education'. Inclusionality has also now been incorporated into 3 successful PhDs in living educational theory, supervised by my colleague Jack Whitehead, at the University of Bath. My biological colleagues and external examiners of my undergraduate course have, on the other hand, so far not appreciated it (to put it mildly - indeed thay have wanted to close my course down, misrepresented my intentions and denigrated my assessments whilst keeping their distance from engaging either with me or the students), so dedicated are they to exclusive 'knowledge-enquiry' and uncomprehending of the meaning of 'wisdom-enquiry'.
I hope this may be clarifying and strengthening for you, me and others.
Apologies, in turn, for this long e mail.
Best wishes
Alan
----- Original Message -----
From: Nicholas Maxwell
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: 20 May 2006 14:22
Subject: Can wisdom be learned and taught?
Can wisdom be learned and taught? A serious question that deserves a serious answer.
In my book "From Knowledge to Wisdom" I distinguish two kinds of inquiry, two conceptions of rational inquiry, which we may call "knowledge-inquiry" and "wisdom-inquiry". Both take a basic aim of inquiry to be to help promote human welfare, help enhance the quality of human life.
Knowledge-inquiry, however, makes a sharp distinction between that basic humanitarian aim and the intellectual aim of inquiry of improving knowledge. According to knowledge-inquiry, knowledge must first be acquired; it can then be applied to help solve social problems, thus helping to promote human welfare. The proper, primary task of inquiry is thus to solve problems of knowledge: social problems, problems of living, are secondary, and the role of academic inquiry, there, is the provision of knowledge.
Knowledge-inquiry - I argued in 1984 (when "From Knowledge to Wisdom" was first published), and I still wish to argue today - is the current orthodox conception of rational inquiry, massively influencing what goes on in universities (and in schools). Other ideas are of course around, stemming from the Romantic movement, from what Isaiah Berlin has called the "counter-Enlightenment, and from postmodernism; such anti-rationalist views exercise some influence in the humanities. But it is knowledge-inquiry (characterized in much more detail in chapter 2 of my book) that prevails - especially as the orthodox ideal of rational inquiry.
Granted knowledge-inquiry as one's basic paradigm of inquiry and learning, one might well conclude that wisdom cannot be learned and taught - at least not in an institutional, academic context. Knowledge-inquiry is concerned with improving knowledge, not wisdom. According to knowledge-inquiry, it is vital to exclude from the intellectual domain of inquiry such things as values, feelings and desires. This needs to be done in order to ensure that genuine, objective knowledge is acquired, and inquiry is genuinely of value to humanity. Allow value-considerations to enter the intellectual domain of inquiry, and the search for truth will be subverted, knowledge will degenerate into ideology and propaganda, and academic inquiry will no longer be of value to humanity - so the orthodox argument goes.
But knowledge-inquiry, I argue in considerable detail, suffers from very serious structural irrationality. And this is no mere formal matter: this structural irrationality has a wide range of damaging social, cultural and even intellectual repercussions. In fact, I have argued, almost all our current global problems can be seen as having arisen because, for the last three centuries or so, we have pursued the harmfully irrational knowledge-inquiry, and have failed to develop a kind of inquiry both more rational and of greater human value.
I have two arguments designed to establish the harmful irrationality of knowledge-inquiry. (What follows is only the baldest summary: details can be found in my publications.)
The first argument amounts to this. Two elementary rules of rational problem-solving are:-
1. Articulate, and try to improve the articulation of, the problem to be solved;
2. Propose and critically assess possible solutions.
No problem-solving endeavour can hope to be rational which violates these two rules. But knowledge-inquiry - construed as seeking to help promote human welfare - does just that. In seeking human welfare - that which is genuinely of value in life - the problems we need to solve are, fundamentally, problems of living, not problems of knowledge. Even when new knowledge is required (medicine, agriculture), it is always what that knowledge enables us to do, or refrain from doing, that enables us to achieve what is of value (except where knowledge is itself of value).
Thus academic inquiry, in order to pursue the aim of helping to promote human welfare rationally, must, at the very least:-
1. Articulate our problems of living;
2. Propose and critically assess possible solutions, possible actions.
Knowledge-inquiry can, of course, articulate problems of knowledge, and can propose and criticize possible solutions, possible items of knowledge. What is can't do is (give priority to) articulating and trying to solve problems of living. The two most basic rules of rational problem-solving are violated. (And the more detailed development of this argument reveals that the actual situation is very much worse than this would indicate.) For a slightly more detailed version of the argument see www.knowledgetowisdom.org/basic_arg.htm
The second argument involves taking very seriously the 18th century Enlightenment idea of learning from scientific progress how to go about achieving social progress towards an enlightened world. The philosophes of the Enlightenment thought this meant developing social science alongside natural science. This was developed throughout the 19th century, and institutionalized in universities in the early 20th century, with the creation of departments of social science. The outcome is what we have, by and large, today: knowledge-inquiry.
In order to implement the Enlightenment idea properly, three things need to be got right.
1. The progress-achieving methods of science need to be correctly identified.
2. These methods need to be correctly generalized so that they become fruitfully applicable to any worthwhile, problematic human endeavour, whatever the aims may be, and not just applicable to the one endeavour of acquiring knowledge.
3. The correctly generalized progress-achieving methods then need to be exploited correctly in the great human endeavour of trying to make social progress towards an enlightened world.
Unfortunately, the philosophes of the Enlightenment got all three points wrong. And as a result these blunders, undetected and uncorrected, are built into the intellectual-institutional structure of academia as it exists today. In order to implement step 1 properly, it is essential to make explicit the implicit, but highly problematic aims of science, and represent these in the form of a hierarchy of aims, aims becoming less and less problematic as one goes up the hierarchy, a framework of relatively unproblematic aims and associated methods thus being created within which much more problematic aims and associated methods can be critically assessed and, we may hope, improved. As a result, the aims and methods of science can be improved as scientific knowledge improves. There is something like positive feedback between improving knowledge, and improving knowledge about how to improve knowledge (for me, the nub of scientific rationality). Step 2 involves generalizing this to apply to any worthwhile human endeavour with problematic aims. Step 3 involves attempting to get this "hierarchical, aim-oriented" conception of rationality into the fabric of our lives - personal, institutional, social, global - so that we may begin to learn how to improve our aims, ideals, aspirations, values as we live. In so far as social inquiry has this task, it is social methodology, social philosophy, and not, primarily, social science. For more details see www.knowledgetowisdom.org/What_Wrong.htm
Wisdom-inquiry emerges - I argue - as a result of correcting the rationality blunders of knowledge-inquiry (in the way just indicated). Wisdom-inquiry is both more intellectually rigorous and, potentially, of greater value, than knowledge-inquiry. The transition from knowledge- to wisdom-inquiry involves a transformation (and improvement) in intellectual standards. Expressions of values, feelings and desires (aims and ideals), excluded from knowledge-inquiry, are vital aspects of rationality and rational inquiry, according to wisdom-inquiry. If we are to discover what is of value, we need of course to attend to our feelings and desires, what we value. But not everything that is valued and desired is genuinely of value and desirable; not everything that feels good is good. Values, desires and feelings need to be critically scrutinized. As I put it in my first book "What's Wrong With Science?" (1976) - and I quote from memory - "we need to put the mind and heart in touch with one another, so that we may develop mindful hearts and heartfelt minds". Fundamental to wisdom-inquiry is the idea that our desires, aims, ideals, values, aspirations (individual and social) almost always are, at some point, problematic (in that they conflict, or are unrealizable or undesirable or both), it being important that such problematic aims are represented as a hierarchy of aims, so that problematic aims may be improved as we act, as we live. The aim of creating a better world - an enlightened world - is of course notoriously problematic. Here, above all, the aim needs to be represented as a hierarchy of aims (which become less and less specific and problematic as one goes up the hierarchy).
What does all this have to do with learning and teaching wisdom? Well, wisdom-inquiry, unlike knowledge-inquiry, is specifically designed to help us realize what is of value in life, "realize" meaning both "apprehend" or "experience" on the one hand, and "make real" or create" on the other. So, if we take "wisdom" to be, roughly, "the capacity to realize what is of value in life", then it follows (if one accepts as valid the arguments hinted at above) that wisdom-inquiry is specifically designed to help us acquire "wisdom" (in that sense).
Transform schools and universities so that they put wisdom-inquiry, and not knowledge-inquiry (as at present) into practice, and wisdom will be seen to be both learnable and teachable.
One can have different ideas as to what one should take wisdom to be. Nevertheless, wisdom as "the capacity, the desire, and the active endeavour to realize what is of value in life for oneself and others" is clearly a pretty good thing to have, and I am not convinced that "wisdom" in any other sense is more worthwhile. One acquires the capacity, of course, not by seeking it, but by striving to realize what is of value in life. In any case, wisdom-inquiry (in my view) is rationally designed to help enhance wisdom in the sense I have indicated.
Apologies, again, for this very long email. I promise not to make a habit of sending off such lengthy missives. My only excuse, on this occasion, is that it did seem to me to be important that I try to set out the ideas behind the founding of Friends of Wisdom in the first place.
Best wishes,
Nick
www.nick-maxwell.demon.co.uk
