I forget exactly where, I think it's in a few places, Plato describes being educated as primarily "desiring what is truly worthy/good and despising what is truly unworthy/bad." He says that a formally educated, wealthy person might be able to give more sophisticated answers as to why something is desirable or undesirable, but that this is ancillary to being truly "educated." If the more sophisticated person is nonetheless not properly oriented/cultivated such as to desire the good and abhor evil, then they are in an important sense uneducated (unformed); whereas the unsophisticated person is educated, although lacking in sophistication.

Now, Plato's point here sort of goes with what you each have said in different ways. In general, we do not love the good by default. While people might have more or less of a talent/inclination towards specific virtues and vices (e.g., tempers can "run in families"), in general they won't attain to a state of virtue without some cultivation. Indeed, without care and cultivation, at the limit, infants and children will die, so there always needs to be some cultivation (some "education"). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Good exegesis!
Cultivation is part of education. Cursory learning, as we often see in schools, could only scratch the surface. The depth of learning brings us closer to wisdom, I believe.

A bit out of scope for this conversation. — T Clark

Okay.

This is an interesting conversation between @Count Timothy von Icarus and @apokrisis. The difference seems to revolve around this:

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. — apokrisis

I guess I am questioning if they are generally understood to be the same thing. "Intelligence," as commonly used, tends to be viewed procedurally (i.e., as discursive ratio) or even computationally. Wisdom by contrast tends to deal with ultimate ends. An IQ test is supposed to measure intelligence, but it's unclear to me if it says much of anything about a grasp of ends (at least directly). So, I suppose my question is if "intelligence" covers the (ultimate) desirability of ends. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am going to use @apokrisis' word "cleverness" rather than intelligence, e.g.:

From a neurocognitive viewpoint, I would say the most useful definition is to oppose wisdom and cleverness. They relate to each other as the general and the specific. Or in brain terms, wisdom is accumulated useful habits and smartness is focused attention on a novel problem.

So wisdom comes with age and cleverness with youth. Being wise means hardly having to think about what is generally best while being smart is being able to leap to a particular answer. — apokrisis

I mostly think @Count Timothy von Icarus is right. I don't think wisdom and cleverness are the same thing, or are qualitatively similar, or are "two ends of some spectrum of possibilities," or are like the black-white spectrum. I think this post of Count's gets at the nub:

Right, so wisdom isn't equivalent with what appears to be wise or is said to be wise by others. In this case, the individuals, and perhaps the society, are unwise. So then wisdom isn't just any intellectual habit, but rather a certain type of intellectual habit.

...

The question is if those ends are truly (rather than merely apparently) desirable though. If one does not distinguish between good and bad ends (wise and unwise ends) then it would seem that wisdom is just "whatever habits just so happen to emerge," or "whatever is currently said to be wise." — Count Timothy von Icarus

@apokrisis' approach to wisdom is to contrast it with cleverness and to identify it with habit. It seems to me that Count has correctly identified the difference between cleverness and wisdom (i.e. means-based rationality vs ends-based living). I think the more central difficulty is the fact that wisdom is normative. As Count says, some things are wise and some things are not wise. More pointedly, some habits are wise and some habits are unwise, and therefore pointing to habit doesn't help us locate wisdom.

There was a curious statement that @apokrisis made that bears highlighting, and helps get at this point:

So how do you build a wise society? Allow the creation of social institutions to flourish. Allow wise habits to take up a permanent presence. — apokrisis

I'm not sure this says much at all, but it would be nice to know the answer to the question posed. A social institution is a kind of societal habit, and like individual habits, societal habits don't equate to wisdom. This is because some habits are wise and some habits are unwise, both individually and societally. Perhaps @apokrisis is implying that by allowing lots of social institutions to flourish the best ones will endure whereas the lesser ones will wither, and we will eventually inherit the best?

We might agree in saying that wisdom is the habit which allows us to flourish most completely, but this too differentiates it from cleverness. One can be clever at just about anything, but not so with wisdom. For example, one can be a clever chess player, but one cannot be a wise chess player. No one talks about someone who is wise qua chess. Similarly, one can be a clever pool player but not a wise pool player. I think there is an analogy between cleverness and wisdom, but I wouldn't say more than that.

These would be proper unities of opposites. Things that are the complementary bounds of what is possible in the way that the triadic structure of a hierarchy is formed by the scale difference which is to be divided as completely as possible by a local and global bound.

This is a deep aspect of metaphysical argument that most never get. But you only have to consider the metaphysical dichotomies that have always seemed the most fundamental. Like chance~necessity, discrete~continuous, part~whole, integrated~differentiated, atom~void, matter~form, and so on. Each of these pairs seem to join two things that are as completely unalike as can be imagined in some basic way, and yet they then complement each other as they thus frame all the intermediate states that could arise in between.

Think of black and white as the complete lack of brightness and its equally total presence. Each is the other's negation. Black is zero white, and white is zero black. But then between these two bounding extremes arises any possible number of shades of grey. You can have a grey that is a 1% drip of black in a 99% pot of white. Or a 50/50 mix. Or whatever balance of the two extremes you care to put a number on.

So a useful metaphysical dichotomy comes with a hierarchy of scale in transparent fashion. Complementary limits on being are set. Then everything that actually exists is some gradation – a particular balance – in between. — apokrisis

This is interesting, but does any of it apply to your cleverness~wisdom "dichotomy"? I think the ideas you are laying out here are useful, but I don't see how it bears on this discussion. Maybe you did not mean to apply it to the cleverness~wisdom contrast, but I think it helps point up why that contrast has only limited mileage.

But note too that good~bad is just as fundamental a dichotomy as those you have identified, and yet you give it rather short shrift.

The categories that make sense are the ones that make sense of all the intermediate cases as being placed at some relative position inbetween the extremes.

...

Everything can be made relative in a pragmatically flexible fashion. — apokrisis

I would say that the coincidentia oppositorum is much more than two relativizing poles, both within the same tidy genus. The Platonic tradition of evil as privation was quite familiar with the age-old idea of dueling powers of Good and Evil, and it is odd to claim that, "Metaphysically, this level of discussion hasn't got us very far." The reason the step was made was because the dyadic level hadn't gotten us very far. Should we go back?

A true instance of the concidentia oppositorum would say, for example, that monism and dualism are both true in their own way, and both bound up one in the other. The privation theory is a deeper reckoning with that deeper coincidentia. Lesser oppositions seem less interesting (e.g. black-white, quantitative relativizing, totalizing spectrums, etc.). The coincidentia oppositorum really begins when we run up against an anomalous juxtaposition: an antinomy. I would say that the wise person is someone who acknowledges and lives with such paradox, and that this is qualitatively different from the clever person. Cleverness, being linear and one-dimensional, has nothing to do with such things.

Still, I think Count's point holds:

Wisdom always sounds like a good thing to have. But really, it is just some set of habits that have evolved within a society's own game of life. — apokrisis

If one does not distinguish between good and bad ends (wise and unwise ends) then it would seem that wisdom is just "whatever habits just so happen to emerge," or "whatever is currently said to be wise." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Wisdom doesn't just sound like a good thing to have. It is a good thing to have. Are you really saying otherwise? I think someone might say that wisdom does not exist, but I don't think an English speaker could say that wisdom is not necessarily a good thing to have. If someone's system prevented them from accepting anything as good or bad, then I suppose they would have to say that wisdom does not exist. And I don't think putting the word "relatively" in front of "good or bad" helps. Contrariwise, if one accepts the existence of wisdom, then they must be willing to say what sets it apart from other things (habits): they must be able to say why it is good.

You made no points that go to the central point. And that is if wisdom and cleverness are cognitive processes, then how does that relate to the evolved structure of brains and nervous systems? If one isn’t minded to treat these things as gifts given by God to humans, but instead naturally evolved traits, then how does one make sense of their evolutionary continuity with mammalian neurobiology?

Brains in general are good in the sense that they put animals in a functional relation with their worlds. And brains work generally by applying the structural logic of dichotomies and hierarchies - the Peircean triad that is the cycle of reasoning. Abduction-deduction-induction. This understanding of the world by dialectical analysis - dissolving it into some structure of generals and particulars - is just what we see in every aspect of neuroanatomy. Frontal lobes for planning and motor control, back of the brain for sensory processing. Left brain for focal processing, right brain for global background or contextual awareness. Mid brain for emitting habitual responses in quick learnt and automatic fashion, higher brain for taking time to pause and analyse and so develop answers when faced by novelty.

So I answer the question from my point of view - the one informed by the semiotic logic that accounts for organismic structure. Nature doing what it does when equipping life with a mind. Gifting it with Peirce’s cycle of pragmatic reasoning. Start with the risk of making a clever guess. Develop it into an inveterate habit of belief.

Pragmatist philosophy arose out of a time when the first proper psychological research was being done. When science was exploring the relation between the processes of attention and habit in the brain. Peirce showed that what was the current new theory of cognition was also a theory of reasoning in general. If this dichotomy was good enough for the rise of life equipped with mind, then it was good enough for an account of rationality in toto.

Some might say that humans are special as God gifted them the possibility of being wise and doing good in the world. It is all part of that transcendent metaphysical package. A very deeply embedded social institution that was well adapted to the human way of life in the age of agricultural empires and then feudal states.

But Peirce stood at the transition to modern post-Darwin age of thought where it is Nature and not God that accounts for humanity. We are evolved organisms. And now the metaphysical thrill is to realise the evolution of the mind was a cracking of the problem of how to be an organism in a rational and pragmatic relation with its world.

Peirce developed this understanding of natural reason into an actual mathematical logic. He boiled down what it means into a Platonic strength architecture. The triad of vagueness, dichotomies and hierarchies.

The world as a whole”blooming, buzzing confusion” that is the fog to be symmetry broken by some clever guess. A shot that divides dialectically into some kind of figure and ground distinction. A difference that makes a difference as the semiotician would say. So the abductive guess splits the world into what we must pay attention to in terms of all that we can also be wise in ignoring.

This dichotomous symmetry-breaking then can be worked on so that it produces its particular deductive consequences. As scientists, we have a theory and derive its predictions. Then follows abductive confirmation. The clever theory either works or proves too shaky to count as a wise habitual basis for action.

What survives this test of time becomes the weight of mental habits that leaves us as well optimised as organisms as we can be. At least within whatever physical and social environment in which we must co-exist.

Anyway, my point here is that I’m not pulling positions out my arse. I have a metaphysics. I speak for a natural world that is organised by its natural rationality.

I could be mistaken but you and @Count Timothy von Icarus have your own metaphysical tradition. The one where we are all God’s special creation. Made imperfectly in His perfect image. Ect. You will view cleverness and wisdom within that mental framework.

And I instead have a different grounding point of view. The grand unifying perspective on Nature as a semiotic enterprise. The Universe as the growth of reason, material being as a structure of inveterate habit.

The problem becomes the God story is well known to me as it is just the general Western institution - impossible to avoid as part of collective culture. But my position seems to be poorly understood by you.

While science does appear to push the other story that is the natural philosophy viewpoint, it does this only in the watered down guise of Darwinian evolution and Newtonian mechanics. It is not the full-blooded response that is the holism of Aristotlean systems science and Peircean semiotics. Reductionist science still respects the boundary drawn up when it was forced to make its accomodation with the Catholic Church and cut the humanities out of its remit - at least in the big picture metaphysical sense.

But that alternative metaphysics does exist. And it sets the terms which would count as a critique of anything I’ve said. So far, you haven’t disputed the natural logic of what I say, backed up by its truth as psychological science.

Instead, this thread has generally lapsed back to transcendental metaphysics where wisdom is just some mystical notion of The Good. Or what God would will in his own perfect image. Cleverness then gets to sit at the elbow of evil. A meretricious tool of the Devil as we have been warned ever since Adam and Eve.

I don't think anyone has mentioned God except for you. It seems to me that you are trying to set up the following dichotomy:

"Either wisdom is just adaptation (cleverness) or else one must explain wisdom in terms of God."

But this seems to me to be a false dichotomy. Again, my objection was that any action can be seen as an "adaptation" towards some end, but wisdom generally consists precisely in knowing which ends are actually good to achieve. It is better to know what is worth doing than to be very clever about doing evil or feeding vices. You seem to be collapsing any distinction between apparent and real value however. Yet it seems obvious that people can be very clever in pursuing merely apparent goods, and that this is typically what we mean by "being unwise."

Such a collapse seems to indicate something like a "values anti-realism." What is good, beautiful, just, etc. is just whatever appears as such or is said to be such. However, realism here is not the exclusive domain of theists; far from it. Plus, I'm not really sure what you think an appeal to God is supposed to do here. Arguably, some appeals to God, such as divine command theory, have much more in common with anti-realism than realism; they just shift whose opinion matters. Meanwhile, even a realism grounded in God doesn't need to appeal to God to explain anything and everything about value.

I'm not sure what to make of the appeal to Peirce. I don't think his agapism runs into this problem because it has an end it is oriented to. His "reasonableness" is not merely procedural and instrumental. There is a summun bonum (indeed there must be one for rational action), and this is certainly the case for the Scholastics he was drawing on as well.

"Three modes of evolution have thus been brought before us: evolution by fortuitous variation, evolution by mechanical necessity, and evolution by creative love. We may term them tychastic evolution, or tychasm, anancastic evolution, or anancasm, and agapastic evolution, or agapasm. The doctrines which represent these as severally of principal importance we may term tychasticism, anancasticism, and agapasticism. On the other hand the mere propositions that absolute chance, mechanical necessity, and the law of love are severally operative in the cosmos may receive the names of tychism, anancism, and agapism."

C. S. Peirce, Evolutionary Love

More explicitly in terms of the "maladaptive:"

The gospel of Christ says that progress comes from every individual merging his individuality in sympathy with his neighbors. On the other side, the conviction of the nineteenth century is that progress takes place by virtue of every individual's striving for himself with all his might and trampling his neighbor under foot whenever he gets a chance to do so. This may accurately be called the Gospel of Greed...

Well, political economy has its formula of redemption, too. It is this: Intelligence in the service of greed ensures the justest prices, the fairest contracts, the most enlightened conduct of all the dealings between men, and leads to the summum bonum, food in plenty and perfect comfort. Food for whom? Why, for the greedy master of intelligence.

Ibid.

289. Everybody can see that the statement of St. John is the formula of an evolutionary philosophy, which teaches that growth comes only from love, from I will not say self-sacrifice, but from the ardent impulse to fulfill another's highest impulse. Suppose, for example, that I have an idea that interests me. It is my creation. It is my creature; for as shown in last July's Monist, it is a little person. I love it; and I will sink myself in perfecting it. It is not by dealing out cold justice to the circle of my ideas that I can make them grow, but by cherishing and tending them as I would the flowers in my garden. The philosophy we draw from John's gospel is that this is the way mind develops; and as for the cosmos, only so far as it yet is mind, and so has life, is it capable of further evolution. Love, recognizing germs of loveliness in the hateful, gradually warms it into life, and makes it lovely. That is the sort of evolution which every careful student of my essay "The Law of Mind" must see that synechism calls for.

My original qualm was that there seemed to be no distinction between the adaptive and maladaptive if wisdom is just adaptation and cleverness. But Peirce gives himself grounds for such a distinction. Something like the Nazis' rise to power could be described as a sort of anancasm because it worked largely through coercion. It was a maladaptive response to the post-war economic and political pressures the Weimar Republic faced.

Hence the earlier mention of Whitehead on this same point; there is something similar there (and too often missing in analytic thought). I think Aldous Huxley is intellectually in the same vein too. Although, the cosmic teleology here seems to me closer to St. Maximus the Confessor than anything else I can think of.

It seems to me that you are trying to set up the following dichotomy: "Either wisdom is just adaptation (cleverness) or else one must explain wisdom in terms of God." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am certainly interested in folk actually setting out their ontological commitments. And talk of "good and bad" could mean adaptively optimal and its privation, or transcendently perfect and its privation.

Even as a starting point for a properly worked up dichotomy or unity of opposites, these are clearly two different bases of argument.

If we don't differ at this fundamental level, then you can say so.

Again, my objection was that any action can be seen as an "adaptation" towards some end, but wisdom generally consists precisely in knowing which ends are actually good to achieve. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Or I could say that any action can be judged as an adaptive optimisation that is so generally effective it can be relied on as a regular unthinking habit, and so "having an end in mind" becomes not even some particular thing that is in mind, but is instead made the flesh and blood of what I am about.

So clever thinking is aimed at the novel. Wisdom has already assimilated what is generally "the good" as just its general orientation to the world.

And wisdom can't "know precisely which ends are actually good". That is an appeal to transcendent truths that float above the real world. It can only, in the usual fallible and pragmatic fashion, keep testing, keep exploring, by being alert to its own failings and getting out the clever thinking to figure a better world model out.

So again, I highlight the quick way you leap to a transcendent framing of what wisdom could even be as a psychological trait. There is a perfection out there waiting for the wise. Whereas I stay rooted in the pragmatic world where we are moved only by our failures of prediction.

We can propose general ends that we ought to try to achieve. Then see if they do lead us some place that seems better. And that in itself is the pursuit of an adaptive life balance rather than some idealised final perfection.

You seem to be collapsing any distinction between apparent and real value however. Yet it seems obvious that people can be very clever in pursuing merely apparent goods, and that this is typically what we mean by "being unwise." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I am doing the opposite of being real about the human situation. You can't critique the world that is shaping you unless you develop a metaphysics appropriate to that task.

So as soon as someone like yourself tries to frame things as a false dichotomy – the type where there is the bad choice of being good or bad – then I try to reframe it as a true systems dichotomy. One that sets up the win~win of a complementary pair of oppositions.

So at the level of social psychology, that cashes out as the general systems principle of stable social systems being organised as a functional balance between local competition and global cooperation. Another way of saying that any physical system is some fruitful or rational balance of its global constraints and its local degrees of freedom.

So from cosmology to social science, the causal model is the same. The pragmatic model, the dialectical model, where Nature self-organises to have a stable existence based on the very fact it is built on fundamental instability. In dynamic equilibrium fashion, the whole persists no matter how much the parts are exchanged.

And that is exactly how a "good" social system works. It balances the counter forces of general cooperation and individual striving so that the whole is dynamical and continuously adapting while also acting as the stabilising hand which tips the local competitive energy in a generally wise and productive direction.

Thus I am not collapsing anything. I am rescuing Nature from the kind of misunderstandings that you are expressing. I am turning weak dichotomies into useful ones. One can't be a sociologist and not understand how societies aren't about good and bad people. They are about the functional wholes that result from competitive freedoms being kept in reasonable check by cooperative wisdoms.

So again, a justification for the dichotomy of clever~wise. It is another way of saying the same thing about a society as a structure that needs one kind of energy at its local level and the different kind of energy of an enforceable boundary at its global level.

Neither energy is inherently good or bad. It is the matching of the dynamical balance to some context of possibilities. Any immature social endeavour needs to burn a lot of clever ideas. Any mature social endeavour need to preserve the balance of those ideas that made for the best collective habit.

I'm not sure what to make of the appeal to Peirce. I don't think his agapism runs into this problem because it has an end it is oriented to. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You can always use Peirce's religiosity against me. But I already agree. He wasn't of a time or place where he could easily have escaped religious indoctrination. Agapism is widely agreed to be his least useful turn of thought.

In his trichotomy of tychasticism, anancasticism, and agapasticism, we can see that what he calls love, a systems scientist would call constraint. The wholeness that holds everything together in its collective self-embrace.

Peirce is railing against the tone of his times – the mindless competitiveness that the Victorian understanding of Darwinism was meant to condone. But "true" Darwinism is exactly that balance between competition and cooperation that I've described. The ecological balance that is the way to properly understand Nature.

So you could call cooperation or global constraint "love" in the hope your audience finds that an aspirational rallying cry against crude Darwinism. Or you can drop the romantic anthropomorphism and argue from the deeper logical consistency that Peirce had provided in his own work.

It was a maladaptive response to the post-war economic and political pressures the Weimar Republic faced. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well surely only because they lost the war? The allies and the axis powers did understand where things had gone wrong after WW1 and did a decent job of setting up a win-win balance of competition and cooperation after WW2. Social engineering works if you can understand a system as a system.

It wasn't love that created the post-war prosperity the world enjoyed for a while. It was an incredible amount of devious self-interested thinking by a collection of nations that was then cemented by the formation of a set of international institutions.

A greater wisdom prevailed as the US navy took over from the British fleet to turn its old imperial empire into the new free-trade world. Germany and Japan were "lovingly" recapitalised to be manufacturing exporters dependent on happy customers. Great Britain was shuffled off the stage and the US could get paid by the dollar becoming the new world currency – its fee for keeping the new peace.

So there was tremendous wisdom coupled to tremendous self-interest shown after WW2 – in great contrast to WW1. And the pragmatic balance that was struck was already falling apart as soon as it started as the communist world and the third world had their own natural ideas of what the best deal should actually look like.

Thus this winds up as another real life tale that speaks to the very themes that I have outlined.

You can't escape the reality of systems logic when you look into how the world is really organised.

There might be a lot of talk about what is good, what is right, what is loving, what is true. But it is soft soaping the tough business of forging understandings of how competition and cooperation can be rebuilt in the new circumstances that human history keeps presenting.