Dear Nicholas,

1. I don't really understand your request for people to write to you if they want to be kept on the list, since a) you say that not making a specific request doesn't mean you'll delete people and b) there's an unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email, which, one hopes, people know how to use, therefore

2. I suggest there's something else behind your request. And this something else is something to do with you wanting to be validated, and feeling that your project, which you have pursued rigorously and elucidated in books and in this list extensively, is being undermined by forces that would pervert or otherwise detract from its effectiveness. (I'm indebted to Marshall Rosenberg for the spirit of this approach). 

If you require validation, then I would like to suggest that you may rest assured that many people have, and will continue to, be grateful for and appreciative of your work, and I am one of them. 

This leads me to reflect on my own research which has been almost exclusively conducted outside academia, not by choice, but because I have never been in a position to accept an academic post, and which has led me to dwell on the intersection of topics such as free will, various dualisms, and the ecological emergency. The outcome of this has been to pursue philosophy as a practice, rather than an academic endeavour, by which I mean that my life is a philosophical endeavour, and the basis of that endeavour is to consider when I am acting from ego-driven motivations, and when I am able to attune to and allow myself to be directed by aims that are good for the systems that I am enmeshed in, from the local to the global, the latter being vastly more effective sources of action than the former. Of course, I shift back to ego-based action all the time, sometimes out of necessity (when paying the bar bill) and often without meaning to, or without realising what I'm doing. But realisation, or awareness of what is happening while it is happening, has two effects: it allows me to step back from the inevitability of action-reaction, cause-effect chains, for instance, penning an email in a state of agitation, or firing back a quick quip to satisfy my desire to defend my ego, because it lets me realise, make real, the possibility that the systems that are good for me, a slow, regular heartbeat, a steady even breathing rhythm, and all the feedback loops from hormonal regulation to cell repair, are linked to the systems that good for me, from the quality of the air I breathe, to the quality of the communication I engage in, to the treatment of the land that supports the food I eat. 

I don’t work in academia and I never have - I would have liked to, but it was never an option for me. It was that very fact - the lack of opportunity, of choice, of freedom - that led me to question the traditional notion of free will in my PhD thesis, in which I wrote about 'realisation as agency'. But I'll resist the urge to blow my own trumpet.

Two things, then:

1. I just wanted to suggest that if we want to practice wisdom, to befriend it, and to act wisely, and well, then perhaps we all need to consider whether we are being driven by egotistical, or whether we can step back and act from broader, what we might call ecological, or common good, motivations. And

2. I'm glad to remain on here, but I'm also interested in pursuing philosophy as a practice in response to the ecological emergency, a project that goes beyond academia, and therefore I have joined Lovers of Wisdom as an additional forum for discussion, and, I hope, wisdom-motivated action.   

With best thoughts, and thanks, 

Lucy Weir

Dear Friends of Wisdom,

 

                                            This is a request to email me if you wish to remain a member of Friends of Wisdom.  (Failure to email me will not mean you will be removed from FoW.)

 

                                            It seems to me that what Friends of Wisdom stands for, and seeks to do, becomes all the more urgent as the days, months, and years go by.  Humanity urgently needs to learn how to resolve conflicts and problems of living in more cooperatively rational ways than at present, so that all of us may achieve what is of value in life, insofar as that is possible, and humanity at last learns how to make progress towards a good, genuinely civilized, enlightened, wise world.  The crisis in Israel and Gaza, in Ukraine,  and elsewhere, the impending disasters of the climate and nature crises, just highlight how urgent, how vital, it is that humanity learns how to manage its local and global affairs more wisely, and how far away we are from a merely moderately sane way of managing the affairs of the planet.

 

Recently, there has been something of a rupture in Friends of Wisdom.  Some existing members, and an influx of new members, began to exchange a flood of emails that seemed to ignore the essential message of Friends of Wisdom: the urgent need to transform our institutions of learning, above all our universities, so that they become rationally devoted to helping people resolve conflicts and problems of living in more cooperatively rational ways.  My role was marginalized.  Some of the emails made highly unpleasant remarks about me – see the end of this email for some quotations.

 

It was decided that those more interested in discussing wisdom than in transforming our institutions of learning, above all our universities, should set up a separate Group.  But that leaves me uncertain as to how many Friends of Wisdom remain.  On the face of it, there are 338 members.  But some members may have departed without removing their email address from the Friends of Wisdom membership list.

 

I would be very grateful if members of Friends of Wisdom who do wish to continue to be members, and who hold the fundamental view that humanity needs transformed institutions of learning devoted to helping us achieve what is of value in life, and learn how to make progress towards a better world, would get in touch with me to express their desire to remain a member of Friends of Wisdom.

 

Below, I give some quotations from emails I have received recently, that do not strike me as exactly entering into the spirit of what Friends of Wisdom seeks to do.

 

                                              Best wishes,

 

                                                           Nick

Quotations from just one email I have received recently from one of the new influx of members of FoW.  Emails from others did not quite attain this level of unpleasantness.

 

We should build on that which is alive, and not your writings, which are dead, as you will be.

 

you yourself are the greatest challenge for us to overcome if we are to embrace your work fruitfully.  Speaking for myself, you stand in my way.

 

Most urgent, if Friends of Wisdom is to save the world, is that you promptly relinquish control in all manner of ways so that others like me could take initiative.

 

at that Zoom meeting, I was sickened to witness you - like a petulant, royal child - resist the gentle arguments of eight mature, servile adults, as to why it would be a step forward to have subgroups. (Is that British culture?) I almost quit then and there. 

 

  A few days went by and you showed that you exercise absolute control and there is no niche for me.

 

I read your intellectual autobiography and I suspect that your achievements stem from your heroic strength in clinging to your childhood outlook, with your tremendous anxiety, moral righteousness and absolute insistence. 

 

The urgent matter is to talk about how you, Nicholas, can let go so that other people have roles and niches by which they can take initiative, demonstrate leadership, and create a space for dialogue where people can speak freely and personally about their own interests and how that may contribute to one or more shared endeavors.  This is urgent all the more because your health keeps you from doing all that could be possibly done, and we know not when, you could simply die, with all in disarray.  I think it would be best for us if you could concentrate on expressing your vision and your values but otherwise let others take initiative in pursuing that alongside their own endeavors.

 

You wrote how you are learning about other groups that we could reach out to with your ideas.  But you don't explain how you will respect those groups' interests and meet them halfway.  You promote your own work, which is laudable, but you don't promote the work of other people.  It's all about you. You care for the whole world but, as far as I can tell, you don't know how to care about individual people.  In a word, you are a narcissist.  That is a recipe for failure.  And I imagine that is why your "urgent" work these many decades is stuck in the mud.

 

We should build on that which is alive, and not your writings, which are dead, as you will be.

 

 

Website: 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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