Can an uneducated person be wise?
— Tom Storm
No.
— L'éléphant

That’s ridiculous. I think it shows, perhaps, a lack of wisdom. — T Clark

:up: :up:

I don't care how many upvotes that post gets.
I still don't understand what's the objection.

I don't share your sentiment. One who does not work hard on learning at all is uneducated and could not be wise. — L'éléphant

I think it’s more likely that the more education you have, the less likely it is that you will be wise. Of course that’s an overstatement. This is from Gia-Fu Feng’s translation of Verse 48 of the Tao Te Ching:

In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired.
In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.

Less and less is done
Until non-action is achieved.
When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.

The world is ruled by letting things take their course.
It cannot be ruled by interfering.

Wisdom comes from letting go of what you’ve learned, not adding more to it. Wisdom is a surrendering, not the result of an act of will.

You could only learn from the foolish if you know the difference. — L'éléphant

Not always. If you watch someone follow a course of action and see the consequences, you also learn what works and what does not. In some cases you will gradually build up wisdom around conduct, goal setting and approaches. In fact, I have learned more from watching mistakes and making them than I ever have from success. And no one is tabula rasa. Most of us have a smattering of wisdom alongside our foolishness. The trick, perhaps is to fan it carefully, the way a spark can be nurtured into a roaring fire.

Wisdom comes from letting go of what you’ve learned, not adding more to it. Wisdom is a surrendering, not the result of an act of will. — T Clark

I disagree with the above passage. Sainthood comes to mind when I read that passage. If you surrender yourself to the way of the universe, you become Tao, a passive observer of the universe. But we are here on Earth -- living and interacting. If you want wisdom to mean a passive observer, then you should make that clear.

In fact, I have learned more from watching mistakes and making them than I ever have from success. — Tom Storm

Okay so you're just supporting what I said earlier. How do you know what mistakes are if not by knowing what success is. By knowing the difference.

Okay so you're just supporting what I said earlier. How do you know what mistakes are if not by knowing what success is. By knowing the difference. — L'éléphant

One can recognize that events aren't meeting expectations and recognize that beliefs leading to those expectations were somehow mistaken. It's not obvious to me how "knowing what success is" is necessary to knowing what mistakes are.

No one's utterly useless - at the worst they can serve as an example of what not to do.

Personally, I wouldn’t say I am wise, but I do have experience and competence in some areas. Do I actively cultivate wisdom? I rarely think about it. — Tom Storm

My two bits from a 2021 thread ...
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/548880

:roll:

:up: :up:

I always think of wisdom as keeping things in proportion, weighting all the relevant considerations correctly. That means reacting appropriately to what's in front of you, taking it as neither a bigger nor a smaller deal than it is, but also holding constant the issues that aren't in front you. So it's the wise person who remembers what the whole point of doing something is, instead of focusing only on the procedure; it's the wise person who points out the desirable and undesirable consequences of some undertaking, because they don't forget the broader context in which it will occur; it's the wise person who balances what they know and what they don't know, their relative confidence in an outcome and the potential consequences (which might be big or small) of it not going according to expectations.

I don't know if a complete picture is coming through there, but it's for reasons along these lines that I think wisdom tends to come with age. Having seen a number of successes and a number of failures, you can have some sense of the shapes they take, and you've had the experience of not foreseeing how either would play out. I think when you're younger it's natural to get caught up in the immediacy of the problem to be solved, but after you've been through that a number of times, you're maybe a little less impressed by that feat alone and tend to take the wider view. ("Yes, we can do this, but do we need to?" or "Yes, we can do this, but should we?" and so on.) And if everything depends on solving this problem, or completing this task, the wise person remembers that and keeps the focus where it needs to be.

So, for me, it's keeping things in perspective, in the proper proportion, and that often means not being misled by something looming large because it's immediately in front of you, but remembering that it's still small compared to other things that aren't currently taking up so much of your field of vision.

(I think Thoreau was my first philosopher, and I've been reading Walden again for the first time since I was a teenager. He's always talking like this. You've got a fine house and you've completely forgotten what the point of a house is. You're working night and day to meet your material needs and completely neglecting your soul. It's always like this with Thoreau: you've allowed yourself to be caught up in something and in the process you've forgotten what's really important.)

That’s a very nicely written perspective.

You've got a fine house and you've completely forgotten what the point of a house is. — Srap Tasmaner

I particularly like this insight.

My two bits from a 2021 thread ...
https — 180 Proof

I forgot about that great response. Thanks!

Okay so you're just supporting what I said earlier. How do you know what mistakes are if not by knowing what success is. — L'éléphant

Because, in most situations, even a fool can see when something is a failure. You don’t even need to know what success is. But as I already said, very few people are 100% foolish.

One can recognize that events aren't meeting expectations and recognize that beliefs leading to those expectations were somehow mistaken. It's not obvious to me how "knowing what success is" is necessary to knowing what mistakes are. — wonderer1

Agree.

The distinction I use is fairly simple. Knowledge is stuff you know and wisdom is understanding how and when to apply such knowledge.

Everyone has knowledge of some sort, but generally speaking wisdom comes with experience. There is a reason people say someone is 'wise beyond their years'.

An uneducated person can certainly be wise. Like many things in life people have more of something than others. If someone has more wisdom then they are better able to apply what they know (no matter how specific or broad) when and where it matters.

Are you wise, or getting there? — Tom Storm

I am. Took some years to get there though. I do not think it is something that came naturally to me though and generally think I am a late bloomer.

I have never met or heard of anyone below 30 who I would call 'wise' in the broader sense. I would say I reached a point where I could call myself in my early 40's. At that point I think people generally have a reasonable grip on life and the perhaps the hormonal changes play a significant role here. That said, I did have an experience that fundamentally shifted my appreciation for life in my early 30's and changed the trajectory of my life, but one fleeting moment of unified 'wisdom' was more or less the catalyst rather than the point where I really obtained something permanent.

I fully expect once I get even older I will look back and think 'I did not quite get it when I was 45,' but I will still see myself as hitting that point of 'wisdom' by that time. Maybe it is just nothing more than a feeling of balance or something? Hard to put into words.

My Masters thesis was on organisations making decisions despite their being undecidable. But only the good undecidable decisions are wise... — Banno

Ah nice, I hadn't considered that angle. :cool:

Wisdom is a style of perceiving things. Self awareness, for example, takes wisdom not intelligence.

You can learn calculus (intelligence) but not know how to apply it to the real world (wisdom). Just as you can read Nietzsche or Jung, but not know wtf they are talking about because there's a certain symbolic expression they use with metaphors that generally goes right over most people.

How well you can discern another philosopher's language game takes wisdom.

I'll just mention two influential traditions. In the Jewish tradition, human wisdom (chokmah) is thought to be a participation in divine wisdom (e.g., in the divine Logos in Philo of Alexandria). It is, in that sense, a gift, although people can be more or less receptive to it. It has practical, ethical, and mystical elements (in part tied to the degree of possession).

Key passages would be:

The praise of wisdom in the Wisdom of Solomon: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Wisdom%206%3A22-11%3A1&version=NABRE

The poetic interlude on wisdom in Job 28: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Job%2028&version=KJV

The opening of Proverbs: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Proverbs%201&version=KJV

And then there are also the significantly more dour references throughout Ecclesiastes. A particularly relevant one for today is the attack on a "live for today" hedonism presented instead Wisdom 2.

Then, in the Greek tradition, sophia is related to a deeper knowledge of metaphysical truths; consider Plato's divided line. The way this often varies from episteme (sciencia) is that it relates finite phenomena to the whole of existence, the creature to all creation and Creator, or involves an understanding of things through a direct noetic grasp of their principles (as opposed to say, quia demonstrations from effects, e.g., inductive pattern recognition).


Aristotle makes a distinction between phronesis, a virtue of practical understanding (excellence in making choices), i.e. the application of reason to right action (with virtues sort of serving as the "universals" of practical reason) and sophia, a theoretical understanding of things through their principles.

These two become fused in the later Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions, where wisdom is often a participation in divine wisdom through which deeper knowledge is achieved. The knowledge the wise are said to possess of created things is almost more of an aesthetic sort, in that it is not instrumental knowledge, but rather a deeper understanding (hence the common pairing of pihilosophy with philokalia, "the love of beauty"). Wisdom tends to relate to the "big picture" and ultimate ends, which makes it distinct from any particular techne or science, which one might master without the perfection of the virtues. Wisdom is generally the crowning achievement of virtue (something like Plato's idea that the whole person must be unified and turned towards the Good for true knowledge of it to be possible).

Hence, praxis tends to be a focal point in that tradition, e.g., ascetic labors and particular "spiritual exercises." This is as true for the Pagan philosophers as the desert monastics. As Robert Finn and Pierre Hadot put it almost identically: "the (ancient) philosopher is a holy man or saint." For instance, when the philosophers go out to visit the desert monks in Saint Palladius' Sayings of the Desert Fathers, they remark on their similar practices, although the Christians tended to put a much greater focus on labor as a means of meditation, fostering humility (late-antique culture had a stigma against menial labor) and as a means of rendering hospitality and aid. This was partly practical; philosophers tended to be independently wealthy while Christian monks were often drawn from the lower class, and at any rate wealthy ones ideally parted with their wealth. This doesn't require that those possessing wisdom be monastics though; the Sayings for instance are full of examples of struggling monks being shown up and illumined by graceful ascetics who live in urban settings, or even within marriage, but are beyond the temptations of the world.

The Christian element adds a focus on "discernment," which can be seen in a lot the answers here.

A key idea is that wisdom (and thus virtue) is sought for its own sake, being not mainly about making "good choices" in a pragmatic sense (as the goal of wisdom anyhow), but about an intellectual joy that is achieved through contemplation that itself makes one a "good (just) person," but which also leads to a good (happy) life, to joyous action (as opposed to the suffering brought on by vice). Whereas if wisdom is primarily about making good pragmatic choices, then it really is more of a means than an end.

Hence, there is a way in which skepticism, particularly skepticism vis-á-vis ultimate ends, virtue, and "the big picture," seems to invert these notions of wisdom, while still appearing fairly similar on the surface. If wisdom is not an ultimate end, it becomes instrumental. If "wisdom is recognizing that one must take a pragmatic approach to everything, seeking a balanced (short versus long term) enjoyment, since one is always in the absence of (the older) 'wisdom,' (i.e., a grasp of ultimate ends in their principles)" that actually makes "wisdom" quite a bit different. If the wise are "wise" in virtue of making "good choices," we might ask then, in virtue of what are "good choices" themselves called "good?"

How important do we think wisdom is in our lives, and do we agree with contemporary thinkers like John Vervaeke that we “suffer a wisdom famine in the West”?

I would imagine this is a quite common sentiment amongst perennialists or fans of particular Eastern or historic Western wisdom traditions. And this makes a certain sort of sense since, if one considers them important (or the sort of classical liberal arts education) then the fact that they are not generally taught will be something in need of change.

For instance, looking at college syllabi it would seem that very little of the Eastern tradition gets taught, and pre-modern Western thinkers don't fair that much better. Aristotle and Plato are the key exceptions there. Yet if you look for the big Stoics, Neoplatonists, or basically anything from later antiquity to the end of the middle ages, it's very sparse. This holds for a good deal of the "literary canon" too, at least in comparison to contemporary social theorists (e.g. Virgil versus bell hooks or Adorno). The drive for diversity has not tended to mean teaching other historical traditions either (e.g., the big Islamic philosophers). For philosophy and broader social theory, the post-moderns, liberals, and to lesser extent the Marxists, really dominate. But, for most perrenialists (and I do think they are right here), these are in key respects much more similar to each other than they are to any of the older traditions. So, even for people not committed to any particular tradition, there appears to be a missing diversity element that allows for unchallenged assumptions or a sort of conceptual blindness. This need not even be in alarmist terms. It's simply "hard to get" without any sort of grounding, and that grounding is missing.

Yes, I think so. I've been attempting to get AI to find instances of reference to "degrees of wisdom", without much success - using terms such as "greater wisdom," "much wisdom," "little wisdom". I'm looking for some sort of evidence, rather than just making shit up. My hypothesis is that if one is wise in some area, that's an end to it; there's no more or less involved. So absence of evidence confirms my hypothesis... :grimace:

It's not uncommon in ancient and medieval thought to speak of greater or lesser wisdom. This is basically in line with any of the virtues, which could be more or less perfected.

For example: 29 And God gave Solomon wisdom and understanding beyond measure, and breadth of mind like the sand on the seashore, 30 so that Solomon's wisdom surpassed the wisdom of all the people of the east and all the wisdom of Egypt. 31 For he was wiser than all other men, wiser than Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, Calcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol, and his fame was in all the surrounding nations. (I Kings 4)

Note, for this comparison to work, the "people of the East" and those named need to be wise of course. Hagiography is full of this sort of thing though.

In terms of contemporary usage, I don't see appeals to wisdom (as a specific concept) in general that often.

I know what instinct and logical thinking are. Intuition, in philosophy, is defined as the power of obtaining knowledge that cannot be acquired either by inference or observation, by reason or experience. From my own experience, sometimes my intuition was right and sometimes wrong, so to me, this definition of intuition is problematic. I have no idea what wisdom may refer to at all.

Knowledge is stuff you know and wisdom is understanding how and when to apply such knowledge. — I like sushi

... as well as, maybe especially, how not to and when not to apply what one (thinks one) knows.

I disagree with the above passage. Sainthood comes to mind when I read that passage. If you surrender yourself to the way of the universe, you become Tao, a passive observer of the universe. But we are here on Earth -- living and interacting. If you want wisdom to mean a passive observer, then you should make that clear. — L'éléphant

Your understanding of Taoism is different from mine.

In terms of contemporary usage, I don't see appeals to wisdom (as a specific concept) in general that often. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's an interesting point and I would agree.

A key idea is that wisdom (and thus virtue) is sought for its own sake, being not mainly about making "good choices" in a pragmatic sense (as the goal of wisdom anyhow), but about an intellectual joy that is achieved through contemplation that itself makes one a "good (just) person," but which also leads to a good (happy) life, to joyous action (as opposed to the suffering brought on by vice). Whereas if wisdom is primarily about making good pragmatic choices, then it really is more of a means than an end. — Count Timothy von Icarus

That's an element no one seems to have drawn out so far. Thanks.

How important do we think wisdom is in our lives, and do we agree with contemporary thinkers like John Vervaeke that we “suffer a wisdom famine in the West”?

I would imagine this is a quite common sentiment amongst perennialists or fans of particular Eastern or historic Western wisdom traditions. And this makes a certain sort of sense since, if one considers them important (or the sort of classical liberal arts education) then the fact that they are not generally taught will be something in need of change. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up: :up:

The drive for diversity has not tended to mean teaching other historical traditions either (e.g., the big Islamic philosophers). For philosophy and broader social theory, the post-moderns, liberals, and to lesser extent the Marxists, really dominate. But, for most perrenialists (and I do think they are right here), these are in key respects much more similar to each other than they are to any of the older traditions. So, even for people not committed to any particular tradition, there appears to be a missing diversity element that allows for unchallenged assumptions or a sort of conceptual blindness. This need not even be in alarmist terms. It's simply "hard to get" without any sort of grounding, and that grounding is missing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

There's an entire thread in this, isn't there?

From my own experience, sometimes my intuition was right and sometimes wrong, so to me, this definition of intuition is problematic. I have no idea what wisdom may refer to at all. — MoK

I was wondering if anyone would bring some wisdom skepticism to the table. Is wisdom merely difficult to define, or does it, perhaps, not exist?

I was wondering if anyone would bring some wisdom skepticism to the table. Is wisdom merely difficult to define, or does it, perhaps, not exist? — Tom Storm

Given that we know what we mean by instinct and logical thinking, therefore, I think it is proper to say that intuition refers to the fact that our guesses are mostly right. That is a unique phenomenon by itself! It is difficult for me that understand how we could possibly intuit, but it is real, at least from my own personal observation. Having said all these, accepting that intuition also exists, maybe we can define wisdom as a state of mind when your guesses are always right. Other than that, I don't see any extra room for anything else at all.

I was wondering if anyone would bring some wisdom skepticism to the table. Is wisdom merely difficult to define, or does it, perhaps, not exist? — Tom Storm

I can bring some wisdom skepticism to the table, not necessarily about its existence, but about its value.

In wisdom traditions wisdom usually involves letting go of desire.

The basic intuition they generally start from is that world is a continuous changing and interconnected whole... the one.

Conceptualisation, dividing the one into parts with the mind, is thus not merely a neutral, but an active process, implying some force or desiring involved in the dividing.

But since the world is an interconnected whole, the conceptualisation is also an imposition and thus falsification of the one.

To be better attuned with the whole, one needs to let go of these conceptualisation that lead him astray, ... and letting go of these conceptualisation means letting go of desire.

And so you get the ascetic ideal, and taken to its ultimate conclusion, the will to nothing... nihilism.

But then the question becomes, as living beings, have we not thrown out the baby with the bathwater?

There's an entire thread in this, isn't there?

Oh surely. Just the names on that list is enough. "How did Michel Foucault become the most assigned person in all of academia and by such a huge margin?" could be its own thread (and what happened to poor Boethius and Virgil, the two most copied authors for a millennia! In general the Romans seem to have faired worse than the Greeks.)

There's a very simple metric which ought to be mentioned in this context. That is the idea of a 'metaphysics of quality'.

One popular source for that was Robert M. Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Enquiry into Values (and his subsequent Lila: An Enquiry into Morals.) Pirsig dissected the typical subject-object dualism that dominates Western thought, arguing that Quality—the immediate, pre-intellectual recognition of value or excellence—exists prior to, and gives rise to, the division between observer and observed. This Quality is not merely aesthetic preference or subjective judgment, but rather the dynamic source from which both the mental and physical arise. Pirsig suggests that when we realise Quality directly—whether in a well-crafted piece of work, a moment of understanding, or the proper maintenance of a motorcycle—we encounter reality in its most fundamental form, before it gets carved up by analytical thinking into separate categories of self and world. This metaphysical position attempts to bridge the gap between classical rationality and romantic intuition by showing how both emerge from a more primary encounter with value itself.

It is precisely this 'axis of quality' which has tended to collapse in (post)Enlightenment thought. This is the 'flattening of ontology' that John Vervaeke often references in his talks. His concept of "leveling up" refers to his argument for restoring an hierarchy of value as a response to what he sees as the meaning crisis in contemporary culture. Vervaeke contends that reductive materialism has created a "flat ontology" where everything is reduced to the same fundamental level—typically physical processes—thereby collapsing meaningful distinctions between different orders or levels of reality. In contrast, an hierarchical approach recognizes genuinely emergent levels of being, where higher-order phenomena like consciousness, meaning, and wisdom represent real ontological categories that cannot be fully captured or described in terms of lower levels. "Leveling up" involves cultivating practices and perspectives that allow individuals to access and participate in these higher orders of reality through what he calls "religio" (reconnection), moving from mere propositional knowledge through procedural and perspectival knowing toward participatory knowledge that transforms the knower. This hierarchical framework doesn't reject scientific understanding but embeds it within a richer ontology reflecting the existential context of human beings, who are capable of grasping meaning in a way that other creatures are not.

But this is invariably met with the objection, what do you mean by 'higher'? Higher, according to whom? (Just wait!) This is because any such values are generally expected to be matters of individual conscience - the individual being the arbiter of value on modern culture.

Wisdom is always contained in a few words.
Wisdom comes upon you quickly, and completely.
Wisdom gets lost in a book or a chapter, and is more easily found in a paragraph, or a sentence, or even in a nod, or in silence.

Wisdom stands up to the rigorous interrogation of a logical analytic, as well as the practical test of the physician. (Wisdom has a practical, applicability that fits one specific circumstance, and a universality and eternity that recasts all things.)

Wisdom can come from a child, who may not know it is wisdom, though they know what the particular wisdom is about.

Wisdom is perfection, meaning, it is not only exactly what is needed, but more than what could be expected, producing fruit.

Wisdom seems to provoke a lot of wistfulness around here. But prosaically, it is only the habituation of intelligence. The construction of a generalised system of thought which comes itself to be so widely applicable that it takes hardly any effort in the thinking.

If there is a reason to champion wisdom, it is because we are social creatures and wisdom is taken to be what should be the view of the largest human context. And intelligence is prized as the opposite – the genius of the individual.

But again, they are just the dichotomous limits of the same thing – the reasoning process. And that was neatly defined by Peirce as truth being what would be believed in the limit by a community of rational inquiry.

In wisdom traditions wisdom usually involves letting go of desire.

At least in the Western context, it's generally letting go of bad/evil/unworthy/less fulfilling desires, and thus being free and able to fulfill good/worthy/truly fulfilling desires. So the goal is ultimately the fulfillment of a greater desire, and the ascent to a greater freedom. Not a "will to nothing" but to will the Good, where with greater knowledge and conformity, comes ever greater love and satisfaction.

The Platonists have the erotic ascent, the Peripatetics have properly educated appetites, etc. Desire is normally central, and deepens with ascetic practice. For instance, we get this vision in the Symposium:

And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.

Or St. Augustine in the Confessions:

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours.

Dante at the climax of the Heaven of the Sun (wisdom) in the Paradiso is even more sensual:


Then, as the tower-clock calls us to come
at the hour when God's Bride is roused from bed
to woo with matin song her Bridegroom's love,

with one part pulling thrusting in the other,
chiming, ting-ting, music so sweet the soul,
ready for love, swells with anticipation

And in general, this does not lead to a denigration of the love of finite things, but rather its increase (as in Saint Bernard of Clairvaux's "Ladder of Love). Wisdom, by revealing creatures' ultimate context, reveals their true beauty. And so too for Rumi and the Sufi tradition:

Always at night returns the Beloved: do not eat opium to-night;
Close your mouth against food, that you may taste the sweetness of the mouth.
Lo, the cup-bearer is no tyrant, and in his assembly there is a circle:
Come into the circle, be seated; how long will you regard the revolution of Time?

Why, when God's earth is so wide, have you fallen asleep in a prison?
Avoid entangled thoughts, that you may see the explanation of Paradise.
Refrain from speaking, that you may win speech hereafter.
Abandon life and the world, that you may behold the Life of the world.



Even the Stoics generally distinguish that it is irrational desire that must be overcome (although they come closer to fetishizing total dispassion). The Orthodox, while more focused on asceticism, speak of transfiguring, not removing the appetites (including those of the body; likewise, Dante has the appetites of the body educated, not destroyed in the Purgatorio). My exposure to Hindu thought has generally suggested something similar. There might be exceptions, but for the West at least I think Saint Maximus the Confessor's words generally hold:

Nothing created by God is evil. It is not food that is evil but gluttony, not the begetting of children but unchastity, not material things but avarice, not glory but vainglory. It is only the misuse of things that is evil, not the things themselves.

Or for another pithy summary, Saint Isaac of Nineveh:

The world" is the general name for all the passions. When we wish to call the passions by a common name, we call them the world. But when we wish to distinguish them by their special names, we call them passions. The passions are the following: love of riches, desire for possessions, bodily pleasure from which comes sexual passion, love of honor which gives rise to envy, lust for power, arrogance and pride of position, the craving to adorn oneself with luxurious clothes and vain ornaments, the itch for human glory which is a source of rancor and resentment, and physical fear.

Where these passions cease to be active, there the world is dead…. Someone has said of the Saints that while alive they were dead; for though living in the flesh, they did not live for the flesh. See for which of these passions you are alive. Then you will know how far you are alive to the world, and how far you are dead to it.

The passions then are only unworthy desires. The goal is rather a perfection of freedom, to: "Turn my impulses into rigging for the ship of repentance, so that in it I may exult as I travel the world's sea to the haven of Thy hope."

Would intelligence be desirable in itself, i.e., worthy of love?

Intellectus is not so far from sapientia, but in common parlance it seems to me that "intelligence" has often drifted a good deal away from "wisdom." In that context, to say they are the same seems to me a bit like saying that "beauty is just a sort of pleasure" or that "awe and the numinous" is just the experience of danger. There is of course a similarity, but I would perhaps say they are analogous, one more "sensible" the other more "noetic" (I'd say "intellectual," but that word has run away with "intelligence.")

And I know that there I just related "intelligence" to the sensible, but this is only because "intelligence" sometimes seems to become wholly estimative and computational.

Would intelligence be desirable in itself, i.e., worthy of love? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Doesn't society always attach that judgement on the individual while being equally convinced of its own inherent worth? Being worthy of love is something in the eye of the beholder. And the individual starts off already grossly out-numbered.

n common parlance it seems to me that "intelligence" has drifted a good deal away from "wisdom." — Count Timothy von Icarus

But why would we use two words if we could do with just the one? My argument is that they are both basically the same thing, but then also completely different in terms of scale.

So the brain exists to do cognition (broadly speaking). And the primary functional division that then arises for the neuroscientist is between attention and habit. The intelligence of the ability to consciously focus and figure out something complicated, coupled to the wisdom of accumulated habit which allows you to react to everything else as if it were already completely familiar and reflexively understood.

This then maps to how we socially view the intelligence~wisdom distinction. We can see how an immature mind could be very smart but not very world-wise. And also how a mature mind cannot help to have become pretty experienced in dealing with the world, even if never having being the sharpest tool in the box.

So it becomes a scale issue. The young mind often seems a bit precociously sharp. The aging mind surprisingly full of a stock of sensible habits. The brain is the same brain. It has just gone from living in a world where all was surprising novelty to a world that can hardly surprise at all.

We say there is no fool like an old fool as almost nothing can dent the security of sedimented habit. While we equally find the kids to be as much smart-arse as witty.

So yes, we apply our social judgements. And we might have different criticisms of folk at the opposite ends of the lifetime that they have spent adapting themselves to the opportunities and viscitudes of the world.

And I know that there I just related "intelligence" to the sensible, but this is only because "intelligence" sometimes seems to become wholly estimative and computational. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Commonsense ought to matter more in everyday life. But society has changed. Work itself has become more computational than practical. Or perhaps more polarised into computational and emotional intelligence as the focus of what people do.

So talk of IQ assumes a generalised intelligence or G factor score that you can attach to an individual. But we know it isn't quite so simple. And what the labour market prizes is itself evolving in time.

Because, in most situations, even a fool can see when something is a failure. You don’t even need to know what success is. But as I already said, very few people are 100% foolish. — Tom Storm

This answer is neither here nor there. Fools by definition are people who act unwisely and get unwise results.

Here's a copy-pasted thought on wisdom:

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” — Aristotle

Here's another one from Albert Einstein:

“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”

Your understanding of Taoism is different from mine. — T Clark

Okay, then educate me. How do you understand Taoist wisdom.

But this is invariably met with the objection, what do you mean by 'higher'? Higher, according to whom? (Just wait!) This is because any such values are generally expected to be matters of individual conscience - the individual being the arbiter of value on modern culture. — Wayfarer

Perhaps. But value is also construed in postmodern theory through intersubjective agreement, which seems to be as close to objectivity as we can get. But agreement remains contingent and subject to linguistic and cultural practices.

Yeah, I suppose the way we think these days may indeed create problems, but maybe that’s the price of debunking myths and sacred cows. It could be that a more pragmatic and justifiable orientation naturally brings instability, especially during transitional periods, which might last for centuries. How would we know?

Because, in most situations, even a fool can see when something is a failure. You don’t even need to know what success is. But as I already said, very few people are 100% foolish.
— Tom Storm
This answer is neither here nor there. Fools by definition is someone who acts unwisely and gets unwise results. — L'éléphant

I shouldn't have written fool. My mistake. We aren't actually talking about fools as such. I've been careless in language. We are talking about recognising our foolishness and developing wisdom. As I said before no one (or very few) is a complete fool. Most of us have enough nous to tell the differnce between what works and what doesn't. If you disagree with that then we hold different views about people. Which means we can move on.