dear friends of wisdom,

here are some thoughts I want to share without any pretention

In schools and universities knowledge is acquired through a mentality of banking
education so well described by Freire.    Wisdom is not a result. It is a
process. Who is trained and be encouraged to think and even better, to think
critically?  May be wisdom cannot be learned because it is an experience.

Scientific method is conceived in terms of procedures but not processes. The
scientific knowledge is acquired through the necessity to separate the object of
research from the researcher.  Doing that with our world, we finally consider
that the world is in front of us, which is fundamentally false. We are not
separated from the world. We « are » it. Actually we don’t « have » a problem.
We « are » the problem! 
In the name of reason the paradigm of separation and dual thinking is still
dominant. The crisis we are facing reveals the complexity of our world and
exploring complexity requires transdisciplinarity : going between disciplines
and beyond disciplines. How can  we favour that posture when disciplines are
jealously  protected and budgeted in Universities?  The crisis is the
consequence of our way of thinking and I am still holding the question of
Foucault : can we think differently?  (I have an hypothesis but it too far from
the actual problem).

sharing preoccupations and reflections,


Céline Lemay

having wisdom in my professional identity:  sage-femme






> ---------- Message d origine ----------
> De : "Maxwell, Nicholas" <[log in to unmask]>
> Daté : 16 janvier 2019 à 11:32
>
>
> Dear Friends of Wisdom,
>
>                                            We face an unprecedented crisis -
> as I am sure almost all members of Friends of Wisdom recognize.  That this is
> the case becomes apparent when one considers the very serious global problems
> that confront us: population growth, destruction of natural habitats, loss of
> wild life and mass extinction of species, the lethal character of modern war,
> pollution of earth, sea and air, the menace of nuclear weapons, and perhaps
> most serious of all, the impending disasters of climate change.  These global
> problems interact with one another in various ways so that they become all the
> more serious.  Climate change may render vast tracts of land in Africa, Asia,
> and elsewhere uninhabitable; ocean levels may rise to drown heavily populated
> coastal regions and cities, prompting massive migration, in turn likely to
> provoke right wing governments and war.  As the population goes up, food
> production goes down.  And wild life will continue to suffer catastrophically.
>
>                                          Why do we face this crisis now?  As I
> see it, it can be put quite simply like this.  Humanity faces two great
> problems of learning: (1) learning about the universe, and about ourselves and
> other living things as a part of the universe; and (2) learning how to become
> civilized, enlightened or wise.  We have solved the first problem; we did that
> in the 17th century when we created modern science.  But we have not yet
> solved the second great problem of learning.  It is that combination of
> solving (1) and failing to solve (2) that is so dangerous, and has led to our
> current crisis.  For, as a result of solving the first problem of learning,
> and developing modern science and technology, some of us enormously increase
> our power to act.  This can have immensely beneficial consequences - as it
> has.  It has led to much that is good about the modern world.  But, in the
> absence of the solution to the second great problem of learning, vastly
> increased power to act, bequeathed to us by science, may do as much damage as
> good, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
>
>                                      And that is just what has happened.
>  Modern science and technology have led to modern industry and agriculture,
> modern hygiene and medicine, modern armaments, which have led to much that is
> good but also to population growth, destruction of natural habitats and mass
> extinction of species, lethal war, nuclear weapons, pollution, and climate
> change.
>
>                                    We urgently need sufficient wisdom to be
> able to anticipate the emergence of serious global problems due to new actions
> made possible by science and technology, and take action so as to stop such
> problems emerging before they become serious.  Failing that, we need
> sufficient wisdom to have the political muscle able to act so as to resolve
> global problems humanely, effectively, and intelligently.
>
>                                    But how is humanity to acquire the global
> wisdom that is required?  Political events of the last two years or so seem to
> indicate that we are getting more stupid, not wiser.  Most people, I think,
> would regard the idea that the world might learn how to become a bit wiser or
> more civilized somewhat absurd.  And so they tend to despair at anything
> serious being done about our global problems.
>
>                                  For decades, now, I have argued that there is
> a solution this problem of how we can solve the second great problem of
> learning - the problem of learning how to become more civilized, wiser.
>
>                                We can learn from our solution to the first
> great problem how to solve the second one.  We can learn from scientific
> progress how to make social progress towards a good, civilized, wise world.
>
>                                This is not a new idea.  It was the basic idea
> of the 18th century Enlightenment, especially the French Enlightenment.  But
> the idea was developed in a seriously defective form.  We still suffer from it
> today - and that is the source of our current incapacity to resolve our grave
> global problems.
>
>                              In order to implement the profound Enlightenment
> idea properly, three steps need to be got right. (i) the progress-achieving
> methods of science need to be correctly identified and characterized.  (ii)
> These then need to be generalized, so that progress-achieving methods become
> fruitfully applicable to all worthwhile problematic endeavours in life.  (iii)
> These generalized progress-achieving methods then need to be got into the
> fabric of the social world, so that we may make social progress towards
> civilization, enlightenment and wisdom in a way that is somewhat comparable to
> the astonishing intellectual progress of natural science.
>
>                              The Enlightenment got all three steps wrong.
>  Most disastrously, the philosophes got the third step wrong.  They thought
> the task was to develop the social sciences alongside the natural sciences.
>  This got developed throughout the 19the century by people like J.S. Mill,
> Karl Marx, Durkheim and Max Weber, and built into academia in the early 20th
> century with the creation of disciplines and departments of social science.
>  The outcome is what we still have today: academic inquiry devoted in the
> first instance, to the pursuit of knowledge.
> Our institutions of learning may be good at acquiring specialized knowledge;
> they are not good at helping humanity acquire wisdom.
>
>                              The big blunder was to concentrate on improving
> knowledge of the human world, rather than on helping the human world to
> resolve its conflicts and problems of living in increasingly cooperatively
> rational ways - in ways which enable people to achieve what is of value in
> life, and make progress towards a good, civilized, wise world.
>
>                            So here is the paradox.  Our universities today
> are the outcome of putting the great Enlightenment idea into practice: namely,
> learning from the solution to the first great problem of learning how to go
> about solving the second one.  Our universities are intended, as it were, to
> help humanity learn how to acquire wisdom.  But because we still have not
> acknowledged, and put right, the blunders of the 18th century Enlightenment,
> what we possess today is deeply flawed, in a wholesale, structural way.
>
>                          What we urgently need to do is correct the blunders
> of the Enlightenment.  My latest effort at spelling out what these blunders
> are, and what we need to do to correct them, can be found here: The Scandal of
> the Irrationality of
> Academia<https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325498502_The_Scandal_of_the_Irrationality_of_Academia>
> (2019).  It was first spelled out long ago in detail in my From Knowledge to
> Wisdom<http://www.pentirepress.plus.com/#wisdom> (1984; 2007).
>
>                        We have to learn how to resolve the grave global
> problems that confront us.  That in turn requires that our institutions of
> learning, our schools and universities, are rationally designed and devoted to
> the job.  At present they are not.  That is because we have failed to correct
> the 18th century blunders of the Enlightenment.  There is a clear prescription
> as to what we need to do.  It has been around for at least 40 years.  But few
> academics seem aware of what needs to be done.
>
>                        Somehow, we Friends of Wisdom need to get the message
> across, to our academic colleagues (if we have them) to politicians, to
> members of the public - to whoever will listen.  That is how I see the matter,
> in any case.
>
>                      What can we do?  What are we doing?  Is my diagnosis,
> and my prescription, correct?  If not, where does it go wrong?  I would be
> interested to hear what others think.
>
>                                                  All good wishes,
>
>                                                          Nick Maxwell
> Website:
> www.ucl.ac.uk/from-knowledge-to-wisdom<http://www.ucl.ac.uk/from-knowledge-to-wisdom>
> Publications online: http://philpapers.org/profile/17092
> http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/view/people/ANMAX22.date.html
>
>
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