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.

You made no points that go to the central point. — apokrisis

Apparently we disagree on what the central point is, but @Count Timothy von Icarus' objections seem quite strong, and I don't see that they have been answered. I was trying to highlight those unanswered objections.

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. — apokrisis

I noticed that line in posts such as this one:

Sure. But the brain doing all this is the same brain with the same cognitive structure. So the only difference is that playing chess is a highly constrained and artificial task – thus good for extracting the story of what is going on in a controlled setting. And then cleverness~wisdom is this standard brain trajectory applied to our lives in their most general and uncontrolled settings – the lives we live as social creatures interacting with the perils and opportunities of a complex physical environment. — apokrisis

I think that once this manner of reasoning is explicated it will evidence significant weaknesses. For example, one inference you are relying on is, "X and Y are both cognitive processes, therefore the only difference [is one of degree]." On that sort of reasoning everything that the brain does is separated only by degree, including cleverness, wisdom, mathematics, love, dancing, sports, sleeping, etc. Then you add in the premise that you have some sort of exhaustive knowledge of the brain, and at that point most all of human existence is explained by recourse to this (highly exaggerated) account of the brain or neurology. Even beyond the problem of the reductive anthropology, the weaknesses and limitations of the premises are significant. The notions that one has exhaustive knowledge of the brain and that all human activity is reducible to the "cognitive" concept are implausible. Human life is complex and variegated, and unless one's understanding of the brain or of cognition is equally complex and variegated, the reduction of the former to the latter will be an artificial systematizing and pigeonholing. It looks like a classic conflation of part with whole (i.e. brain/cognition with human life).

This is why I claimed that wisdom requires acknowledging antinomies, and not collapsing everything into a single one-dimensional category. A simplistic theory must be sacrificed for the sake of the facts, and if a theory cannot acknowledge the fact that cleverness and wisdom are qualitatively different, then so much the worse for the theory. A "theory of everything" would be great if it actually saved the appearances.

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. — apokrisis

Sure, and there is a certain plausibility to your account. There are analogies and continuities between cleverness and wisdom, and also between other cognitive phenomena.

But I accord a high place to philology and linguistics, and I don't see that your account really reckons with the semantics of a word like wisdom. For example, you seem to think that wisdom is a kind of habitual and unconscious know-how that is embodied in aged and mature systems. Yet I would say that while the elderly person is wise, the elderly sage is wiser, where the sage is someone who understands the whole and its principles not only practically but also speculatively. They are the one who can explain why and how to act well rather than simply acting well out of habit. And if the one who has more than habit is wiser than the one who has only habit, then wisdom is not properly identified with habit. ...Neither do I think it is true that this "more than habit" is simple cleverness. But the key point here is that I begin with the question, "What does wisdom mean?," whereas you seem to begin with the question, "How does wisdom fit into my unified brain/cognitive system?" In the end I think you've basically written wisdom out of existence in favor of a somewhat different concept that is more acceptable to your system.

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. — apokrisis

Anthropology is almost certainly a central issue here. A physicalist, brain-centered anthropology will color one's conclusions, as will one's criteria. For example, if one thinks the relevant human phenomena are planning, motor control, sensory processing, focal processing, global background, habitual response, and analysis, then one simply decides what part of their Ur-explanation—in this case the brain—relates to each of these data points and they have arrived at their totalizing explanation. But the deduction is not from the brain; the deduction is from a set of "exhaustive" human activities. The brain is the intermediary for those activities deemed relevant.

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. — apokrisis

I see the two stories as one of a unified theory and one of "appearances," and I don't think the unified theory saves the appearances. In another sphere you would be the one positing that mind and matter are differentiated by degree and not by quality, and I would be the one positing that mind and matter are separated by quality and not by degree. You would achieve a "unifying perspective" and I would achieve a saving of the appearances. The irony here is that your totalizing approach is more Platonic and my antinomic approach is more Aristotelian (and that Peirce had rather significant affinities with Plato).

I'm not quite sure how God comes into it, except perhaps that I am more comfortable with antinomies given that an infinite and incomprehensible unifier is already in place. You perhaps require more explicit and comprehensible unification in your metaphysical theory. Put differently, I believe that reality is unified in a way that I know I cannot ultimately fully understand, whereas you must know how reality is unified. For you the human mind is at the top of the ontological and intellectual hierarchy, and because of this a totalizing (human) theory seems fitting to 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. — apokrisis

The other oddity here is that you keep assuming that Aristotle and Peirce had nothing to do with God. That seems untrue, even if the specifics become complicated.

But that alternative metaphysics does exist. And it sets the terms which would count as a critique of anything I’ve said. — apokrisis

Internal critiques are not the only critiques. The more interesting critique is one that does not accept all of your own premises.

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. — apokrisis

No, I don't think that is right. The God story may not be as well known to you as you suppose. For instance, Jesus commands us to be "as wise/shrewd/cunning/subtle as serpents," which is a clear reference to that "meretricious tool of the Devil." For another example, the Antichrist is seen as a kind of faux copy of the Christ, and one which will be exceedingly persuasive. If good and bad are right and left then it would be hard to imagine how bad could mimic good so effectively. Wisdom is that which can discern the subtle but significant difference.

-

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. — apokrisis

But what is the difference between the "adaptively optimal" and the "transcendently perfect"?

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. — apokrisis

I don't find your eschewing of an end convincing. himself seemed happy with the idea that his theory was teleological. Your account seems to be ordered to survival or homeostasis or thermodynamic equilibrium or something of the like. If that is the highest end and wisdom is the highest virtue, then wisdom is ordered to it. To be moved by prediction or failures thereof also implies an end. It hasn't been avoided. Prediction is not aimless, nor is the act of recognizing a prediction's failure.

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. — apokrisis

Again, you don't seem to understand the view you attempt to critique. For instance:

So if I turn left, I can fix that by turning right. Or if I turn away from the good towards the bad, then I can turn back towards the good again. — apokrisis

Good and bad are simply nothing like left and right, and this is because left is not the privation of right. The privation theory presupposes the win~win insofar as the privation presupposes goodness. It seems that all of us acknowledge that we do not find ourselves in a "win-win" scenario such that no movement towards an end is required. Again, how does the difference between an "adaptive" privation and a "transcendent" privation ultimately cash out? Both are asymmetric, both are hierarchical, etc. Both approaches are actually found in religious thought and even in Christian thought.

Beyond that, to use Platonic theism as the foil to Aristotelian Peircianism is odd, given that Aristotelianism was passed on to Peirce precisely by (scholastic) theists.

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. — apokrisis

This is a pretty standard view among all religions and developed traditions, namely the importance of balance. That which Peirce has synthesized should not be opposed to his thought.

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. — apokrisis

Throughout there seems to be a kind of equivocation, where you eschew the terms "good" and "bad" by claiming that an optimal mixture of both is what is needed, but then you don't seem to notice that what is actually good on that account is the optimal mixture. Don't you agree that the optimal mixture or balance is good, and that the ordering is bad to the extent that it deviates from this optimal balance? This is why I think @Count Timothy von Icarus' objection cuts deeper than you realize, for it applies also at this new level of good-as-balance. If I am right and you have your own conception of what is good and what is bad, then acknowledging this would help put us on the same page and would help us appreciate a common criterion.

For example, if balance is good, then cleverness is good because it achieves balance at a local and circumscribed level, whereas wisdom is good because it achieves balance at a global and less circumscribed level. Yet on my account, one reason wisdom is better is because it presupposes a knowledge and appreciation for the same local balance that cleverness cannot unfocus from.

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. — apokrisis

But at this point you're really not appealing to Peirce any more. You're disagreeing with him and hoping that he would agree with your disagreement in hindsight.

The idea here is that I am not convinced that your dichotomies between transcendent and adaptive, or between religious and scientific, really hold up.


Edit: It seems that a large part of what you are doing is disagreeing with some view that you find erroneous. I don't really understand the thing you are opposing. Perhaps it would be helpful if you set out that view clearly.

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. — apokrisis

Well, I wouldn't want to change the subject to something besides the point. As near as I can see, the only commitment of a "reality versus appearance distinction" vis-á-vis value is some sort of value realism, such that what is good, choice-worthy, adaptive (as opposed to maladaptive), etc. doesn't just amount to what appears or is said to be so. Or to put it negatively, that it is possible for us to be wrong about what is most desirable or choice-worthy, and that our being wrong in this respect doesn't just reduce to our experiencing regret at some later point, or people disagreeing with us.

I am not sure if I would set the "adaptive" and the "perfect" against each other either. Your use of "transcendent" in these posts seems to suggest that you think that what is "transcendent" is somehow outside and absent from what is transcended. Yet that isn't "transcendent" in the sense the term is generally employed in terms of goodness. Nothing is being transcended in your usage. A better term would be "extra-worldly." But, suffice to say, few ethicists appeal to a "good that lies wholly outside our world," but rather one that is, to paraphrase Saint Augustine, "within everything yet contained by nothing."

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. — apokrisis

I'd like to unpack this because it seems to me like another unsupportable dichotomy. You seem to be saying that either:

"It must be impossible for us to distinguish between what appears good and what is actually good"
or
"There must exist "'transcendent truths that float above the real world' to measure what is truly good."

I am not sure if these are the only two options. You do say "know precisely," and I am curious what "precisely" is supposed to be doing there. Is it supposed to be indicating some sort of infallibility? If so, might that be lurching towards strawman territory? That is, that there is only your position or else "declaring yourself infallible due to your relation to a measuring stick 'outside the real word," seems a bit much. Surely, one might be a realist vis-a-vis values, and still a fallibilist, as the great majority of realists have been. Indeed, for all those thinkers you seem to have in mind for whom Goodness is ultimately the Divine Essence, Goodness itself is precisely unknowable.

Like I said earlier, I am very skeptical about uses of the term "transcendent" because it is regularly used equivocally on this forum and in professional philosophy. Which thinkers exactly appealed to "transcendent truths that float above the real world?" I will not deny that at least some thinkers may have advanced such a theory, but none of the main figures in the realist tradition do. Where it shows up, it seems to largely be a product of early analytic thought with its notions of abstract objects. This is, however, extremely far from something like the medieval Doctrine of Transcendental, where Good, True, One, etc. are merely conceptual distinctions that add nothing to Being (being as viewed in a particular aspect, e.g. vis-a-vis the appetites for Good).

This is the same mistake Sam Harris makes:

Harris rejects any “transcendent source of value,” as being irrelevant to well-being, since it must “bear [no] relationship to the actual or potential experiences of conscious beings.”1 Likewise, he describes “the Platonic Form of the Good” as existing “independent of the experiences of conscious beings.”2 Further, he argues that Christians cannot truly dedicate themselves to the pursuit of God “for its own sake,” since—ultimately—people are only following God because they desire the extrinsic rewards won through God’s favor, or fear the extrinsic punishments of God’s wrath.3

Clearly, Harris has not understood Plato, and his characterization of “Christianity” throughout The Moral Landscape bears little resemblance to the philosophies of St. Thomas, the Church Fathers, or many other influential Christian thinkers. Indeed, the very idea that “God’s good” could be arbitrarily related to what is “good for us,” only makes sense within the context of a very particular sort of voluntarist theology.

Much more could be said here, but it is sufficient to point out that Plato’s Good and the God of St. Thomas are not “independent” of the good experienced by creatures. Nor are they independent even of what merely appears to be good to creatures. For Plato, when we choose what merely appears good, as opposed to what is truly better, we are still choosing “that which appears good” in virtue of its participation in the Good. The Good is not absent from “good appearances.” This is brought out even more strongly in St. Thomas, who arguably elevates “the Beautiful”—alongside “the One,” “the True,” and “the Good”—as a transcendental property of being itself. Likewise, for Aristotle, God is the “First Cause” precisely because God is the end to which all things are oriented and striving.i By definition, this excludes God’s being wholly independent from the desires and well-being of creatures.

What appears to be deficient here is Harris’s understanding of the concepts of transcendence and the absolute. The transcendent is not absent from what it transcends. An infinite Good—one that is truly without limits—is not bracketed off by the finite and missing from it. Likewise, the absolute cannot be “reality as separated from all appearances or subjectivity.” The absolute—to be properly absolute—must include all of reality and appearances. Appearances are part of reality in that they really are appearances.ii Harris seems to be conflating something like the notion of “objectivity” (as in, “being as seen from ‘the view from nowhere’”) with the idea of a transcendent and absolute Good. Hence, he uses good reasons for dismissing the idea of an “objective good” (at least under this flawed definition of “objectivity”) as a way to dismiss any notion of transcendent good.

You can always use Peirce's religiosity against me. — apokrisis

I am not "using Peirce's religiosity" against you. I am pointing out how Peirce avoids the issue you've fallen into. Consider, if I don't currently find it good, or adaptive to agree with you, how could I possibly be wrong about this if proper adaptation is just defined in terms of current belief? The fact that you think that article can be dismissed as "religiosity" is itself telling though.

In his trichotomy of tychasticism, anancasticism, and agapasticism, we can see that what he calls love, a systems scientist would call constraint. — apokrisis

Only by doing violence to the original text I would say.

Peirce is railing against the tone of his times – the mindless competitiveness that the Victorian understanding of Darwinism was meant to condone. — apokrisis

He is surely doing this, but he is doing more. He is making a point he makes throughout his papers, that "reasonableness" is incoherent without an ordering to an end.

Well surely only because they lost the war? — apokrisis

The idea that "Nazism would be good if only they had won," is one of the absurdities of popular reductionist forms of anti-realism, yes.

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. — apokrisis

Why ought they be rebuilt? If whoever wins is justified, has properly adapted, I don't see how nihilism doesn't follow.

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? — apokrisis

Again, the dichotomy, either your narrative, or an appeal to God as the proximate cause. Does that not seem like a strawman?

Further, just because one needs a brain to be wise does not mean that wisdom is best explained in terms of brains. This is akin to claiming that we are best able to understand flight (the principles of lift, etc.), by looking at the individual cells making up the wings of all the animals that fly, or conducting a close examination of wings.

Yet this is demonstrably not the best way to understand flight or lift. We did not learn to build flying machines through an intensive study of the chemistry at work in insect or bird wings. Indeed, there is much we still do not know about how those cells work (and the same is true for brains). Rather, we mastered the more general, generating principles at work across all instances of heavier than air flight in nature. The fact that “the cells in insects' wings are necessary for flight” need not compel us to conclude that flight is best understood through a study of these cells, just as the fact that we need our brains to “know goodness” need not suggest that the goodness is itself something that can be best known through studying neurons.

Out of interest, if you had to provide some 17 year-old students with a brief definition of wisdom (and not one quoted from elsewhere), what might you say, in just a few sentences?

For example, one inference you are relying on is, "X and Y are both cognitive processes, therefore the only difference [is one of degree]." — Leontiskos

That misrepresents. I argued that the logic of dichotomies is the general logic of Nature and demonstrably the logic of brain architecture. So it is not surprising that we would find that lay language should also arrive at such distinctions itself - just not recognising the logic at work behind the scenes, whereas psychological science got going by noting attention-habit as a major dichotomy of cognitive organisation.

This is why I claimed that wisdom requires acknowledging antinomies, and not collapsing everything into a single one-dimensional category. A simplistic theory must be sacrificed for the sake of the facts, and if a theory cannot acknowledge the fact that cleverness and wisdom are qualitatively different, then so much the worse for the theory. A "theory of everything" would be great if it actually saved the appearances. — Leontiskos

This is a waffling attack on attack on a systems science argument you don’t yet understand. The theory of dichotomies says each side of the reciprocal equation is as different from the other as it is possible to be. And yet that difference connects them as it is the other that serves as a measure of the separation.

So we start with the generality that they are both forms of cognition. And then we can see how it makes sense that they map to the key cognitive dichotomy that is attention-habit. We can say that to the degree we are attending to some aspect of the world, we are not dealing with it habitually. And vice versa. When we are reacting on automatic pilot, we are not engaging all the higher brain capacities for holding something in the spotlight of working memory, pausing to treat it as a novel situation demanding our full self-aware narrative engagement.

So each does speak of its own qualities as a contrast to the qualities of the other. That is how each tightens its own definition. Every question about one is answered by finding some counterfactual to distinguish it from the other.

You could even call it a system of antimonies if you wanted to use the half-baked understanding of what is going on logically here.

Yet I would say that while the elderly person is wise, the elderly sage is wiser, where the sage is someone who understands the whole and its principles not only practically but also speculatively. — Leontiskos

Sure. Argue against dichotomies by employing dichotomies. Prove my point for me.

So if wisdom is the experience of age, then cleverness is the excitement of youth. And if it is possible to be sharp, it is because it is possible to be perfectly otherwise – to be blunt.

All knives might have an edge but that is itself going to break into some useful to mention polarity. So all knives are knives, however some are sharp, even perhaps at the limit of sharpening, while some are so blunt we might as well re-term them spatulas.

So dichotomies are Aristotelean essential distinctions. And you can walk language as far as you like to organise your world in a hierarchical cascade of such dichotomous divisions. It works as symmetry-breaking is also the logic of Nature itself. Evolution and development produce self-organised hierarchies even at the level of the Cosmos.

And so it is with sages and dunces. We are not all created equal either in our degree of youthfull cleverness nor elderly wisdom. And if you want to turn the conversation to a discussion of sages, then as you say, this carries further qualitative contrasts we would want to mention so as to point to some hierarchy of the wise. Or even just the old. Or even just the experienced.

So the sage understands the whole – and not just fragments. The sage understands in terms of general principles and not just miscellanious examples. The sage is not just thinking practically but also engaged in the more socially-prestigious endeavour of thinking speculatively.

By appealing to a set of distinctions, you have constrained what one could mean by "sage" with quite a useful collections of dichotomies.

It seems a good definition to me. I just point to the manner in which you had to arrive at it.

And if the one who has more than habit is wiser than the one who has only habit, then wisdom is not properly identified with habit. — Leontiskos

But if a sage is most critically someone long experienced and generally acclaimed in the habit of speculating, then I'm afraid that sagacity is still a sub-class of the category of intellectuality we call wisdom.

At the level of distinctions you have moved the discussion to, the primary dichotomy becomes the question of whether this elderly person with a clear habit of speculative thought is indeed one of our community's sages or one of our community's crackpots.

A physicalist, brain-centered anthropology will color one's conclusions, as will one's criteria. For example, if one thinks the relevant human phenomena are planning, motor control, sensory processing, focal processing, global background, habitual response, and analysis, then one simply decides what part of their Ur-explanation—in this case the brain—relates to each of these data points and they have arrived at their totalizing explanation. But the deduction is not from the brain; the deduction is from a set of "exhaustive" human activities. The brain is the intermediary for those activities deemed relevant. — Leontiskos

You miss my point again. The bigger picture to what I argue is the systems view, the natural philosophy view, the pansemiotic view. Peirce's central insight was that the Cosmos is rationally structured. There is a general logic to self-organising systems that can stand both for how a Universe could come to be and how the life and mind that exists by successfully modelling the ways of this world would employ the same logic in organising its own cognitive structure.

So ontology and epistemology share the one logic. Or at least they clearly do once we become clear-eyed enough to see that this is what lies at the bottom of our philosophical confusions.

So yes. I make no apologies for looking to the natural world for its own explanation of itself and not casting my eyes heavenwards to some supernatural creator.

Science works as it is pragmatism made habit. The Church wanted to keep the humanities out of the reach of the pragmatic process of inquiry. But tough. Naturalism as a metaphysics now reaches into even sociology and history as fields of rational speculation.

And when you call the brain merely an intermediary for culture, I reply that my argument is that society is just as organismic as a level of self-organising nature. It is all the same thing happening at larger scales of semiotic order.

The other oddity here is that you keep assuming that Aristotle and Peirce had nothing to do with God. That seems untrue, even if the specifics become complicated. — Leontiskos

Both reflect the culture of their times as they must. And what I drew attention to was that despite that, they were laying the ground for a general logic of Nature. Nature could start to explain itself rather than having to be explained in Supernatural terms – the mysterious Big Daddy in the Sky in whose image we were for some nutty reason created as an imperfect version.

If good and bad are right and left then it would be hard to imagine how bad could mimic good so effectively. — Leontiskos

I didn't say good and bad were a convincing dichotomy to the naturalist. I instead said they were rather useless terms for understanding reality. Even as part of the cultural technology of a self-organising human social system they do more to confuse than to enlighten in exactly the way you describe.

As a natural philosopher, I would say that as members of a civilised society we ought to be organised consciously by the dichotomy of competition~cooperation. That is the dynamic which is actually at the centre of our collective lives. And both tendencies are "good" in their own ways. A system has to be that balanced mix of its global constraints and its local freedoms.

This applies to physics as much as human theories of Utopia. As a metaphysics, it is maximally general and minimally mysterious. We can see directly why it pragmatically works at every possible level of natural existence.

Whereas waffling on about good and bad just winds up in endless confused qualification. The terms end up meaning just the difference between what I think you should do versus what I think you shouldn't do. Or to give it some spurious metaphysical heft, what Big Daddy up in the Sky says you should and shouldn't do.

I don't find your eschewing of an end convincing. ↪Darwin himself seemed happy with the idea that his theory was teleological. Your account seems to be ordered to survival or homeostasis or thermodynamic equilibrium or something of the like. — Leontiskos

Another misrepresentation. The systems science position is based on being holistic and thus including finality. But then it is naturalistic in placing teleology on a hierarchical scale of development.

So following Stan Salthe, we would distinguish the three grades of teleology – teleomaty, teleonomy and teleology. Or the purposefulness of physical tendency, of biological functionality and of neurocognitive reason.

My metaphysics doesn't just embrace finality as cause. It provides a theory of finality in natural terms.

For example, if balance is good, then cleverness is good because it achieves balance at a local and circumscribed level, whereas wisdom is good because it achieves balance at a global and less circumscribed level. Yet on my account, one reason wisdom is better is because it presupposes a knowledge and appreciation for the same local balance that cleverness cannot unfocus from. — Leontiskos

This would be my own argument too. And it is why I agree with Peirce in prizing habit.

Something basic to my story on neurocognition is that brains aren't striving to be conscious of the world but instead the opposite. The brain has the developmental task of learning how to predict the world so well that it no longer needs to pay it any particular attention.

So the normal lay understanding of cognition is that the desired goal is to be aware of absolutely every last detail of what is happening and not miss anything. But a pragmatic understanding of what brains are for says it is all about laying down reliable habits.

Of course, the more you habituate, the more you can then lift your level of focused attention to some next level beyond what you have made automatic. Once the baby has some mastery of walking, it can turn its mind to the creativity of dancing.

The wise baby doesn't even have to think how to place one foot in front of the other. It can now be the clever baby skipping with attention to some new rhythm.

The idea here is that I am not convinced that your dichotomies between transcendent and adaptive, or between religious and scientific, really hold up. — Leontiskos

Not sure those are dichotomies in any sense I defined. Remember that a successful dichotomy leaves you feeling that both sides of the equation are equally true even though they are both sides as mutually contradictory as possible.

The logical definition of a dichotomy is "mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive". In maths terms, a reciprocal or inverse relation.

Transcendence and immanence is the more usual go at that metaphysical dichotomy. Either cause comes from without or cause comes from within. This is why natural philosophy might call itself an internalist metaphysics to contrast itself with the "other kind".

So put in those terms, transcendence and immanence can at least be debated as cool rational terms. Maths has claim to transcendent existence just as much as religious notions of creating gods. And even the systems view would accept it needs transcendence in some strong sense if it is talking about Nature being entrained to fundamental logical structure.

So create a dichotomy that works and you can start a decent discussion. The systems thinker has to make sense of transcendence and immanence as the two side of their own rational position.

I could point to Ontic Structural Realism as a recent metaphysical enthusiasm that has just this kind of problem. It is all form and no matter. All downward constraint and no matching account of upward construction.

Again, Peirce was here with his triadic metaphysics that tried to fix this exact problem by adding the category of vagueness to the dichotomies and the hierarchies. A proper understanding of Aristotle's "prime matter", or physics' "quantum foam", also go to this issue.

What I am saying is that get your dichotomous terms properly formed and you are already unlocking the deeper thing that lies beneath. And that alignment is what I sought in opposing youthful cleverness to experienced wisdom. From these social descriptors we could descend to the deeper level of the biological symmetry-breaking that is attention~habit.

So if you are unconvinced, it is because you haven't got a sufficient mastery of the logic involved. You have the habit of antimonies rather than dichotomies. You get as far as the antisymmetric distinction and don't continue on to the fully asymmetric one.

What is the true other of religion? Is it science? And is science in reply the true other of religion? Or is this a lazy effort at defining a dichotomy that needs to reach the rigour of being "mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive"?

For a start, religion serves two general social functions. It should encode a "good" way to live. And it is meant to supply the authoritative narrative of why that way is the truth. So it encodes pragmatic wisdom. And it encodes a founding creation myth.

Science now aims to do both those things too. But it is largely stunted by its reductionist metaphysics. My systems science approach is waging its own holy war against that.

So religion~science is also not a proper dichotomy. As a distinction, neither term fully excludes its other, nor completely exhausts the field of possibilities.

You get nearer the truth of the situation with a distinction between faith-based and evidence-based. Or better yet – more Peircean – between the willingness to assert belief and the willingness to risk doubt.

Pragmatism boils down to just that fruitful balance. Jumping to some abductive hypothesis, drawing up its necessary deductions – its particular predictions – and then doubting the hypothesis as hard as possible by testing it with observation. Discovering whether there can be inductive confirmation.

Rationality in a nutshell. But grounded as the balancing act that pragmatism stands for. Neither all faith, nor all data, but the judicious blend of the two.

As the topic of wisdom is being discussed, it may be worth adding a note about Peirce’s philosophy of agapē, or selfless love. Peirce objected to the perceived selfishness implicit in Darwin’s account of the “struggle for existence.” While he accepted evolution, he argued that it could not be adequately explained by chance variation and competition alone. For Peirce, the larger cosmic order bore the mark of agapē—a creative, self-giving love that fosters growth and harmony. He drew this term from the Christian gospels, though he was not himself a denominational Christian, and recast it as a metaphysical principle. In his view, just as wisdom unites knowing with right action, so too does agapē unite being with a purposive direction—evolution not merely as struggle, but as participation in a love that brings novelty into being.

Evolutionary Love is that development of Mind which is the great business of the universe. It is not self-seeking; it is not law-bound; it is not fortuitous. It is the impulse toward perfect sympathy, toward the creation of continuity of feeling, toward the welding together of hearts.

The doctrine of evolution by the struggle for life seems to suppose a natural selection of selfishness. But evolution by love — by sympathy, by kindness, by the desire to make others happy — proves that growth comes by the self-giving of each to the other.

Your use of "transcendent" in these posts seems to suggest that you think that what is "transcendent" is somehow outside and absent from what is transcended. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I covered this in the post above. The systems view has to be able to say what it means by transcendent or immanent. They are patently different, yet how are they then also going to be the same in being two ends of the one spectrum?

So as an internalist perspective, the systems view says we are talking about the upper and lower boundaries of a hierarchical order. The global limit that is the structuring constraints of the system – the laws of nature or its holographic boundary in physical parlance. And then the local limit that the contrasting of the systems degrees of freedoms.

This framing puts both things on an equal footing as the limits. There is no outside to the Cosmos. But it does have an upper bound of hard habit. There is mathematical-strength restrictions – restrictions expressed by the maths of symmetry. And this is matched by a lower bound of free possibility – all the different things that can happen just "accidentally" as they are happenings that are not forbidden or suppressed by the global state of constraint.

So yes, I owe you a theory of what I mean by my metaphysics here. Which is why I felt you ought to be making the same kind of effort to spell out what ontology you might be committed to.

But, suffice to say, few ethicists appeal to a "good that lies wholly outside our world," but rather one that is, to paraphrase Saint Augustine, "within everything yet contained by nothing." — Count Timothy von Icarus

And how am I to understand this phrasing of Augustine then? Make it make sense as a logical claim. Structure it as a dichotomy rather than a paradox.

Much better would that the notion of the good is taken to be a global constraint on every kind of behaviour that is possible, but then that makes unconstrained all the particular actions that aren't being globally suppressed. These become the well defined degrees of freedom. The somethings we want to see freely happen on a regular enough basis.

So my way makes explicit the causal machinery involved. Augustine sort of could be saying the same thing. But speaking paradoxically rather than dichotomously is the kind of indirect mysticism that the keeps the flock in check. You don't want them actually thinking for themselves.

You do say "know precisely," and I am curious what "precisely" is supposed to be doing there. — Count Timothy von Icarus

You said it first. "...but wisdom generally consists precisely in knowing which ends are actually good to achieve." So your strawman I think.

Like I said earlier, I am very skeptical about uses of the term "transcendent" because it is regularly used equivocally on this forum and in professional philosophy. — Count Timothy von Icarus

At least you can't accuse me of equivocating. I agree it needs to be pinned down by tying it to a dichotomy that speaks directly to an underlying metaphysics. I've given my definition, or at least made that start.

Further, just because one needs a brain to be wise does not mean that wisdom is best explained in terms of brains. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Strawman. I was explicit that wisdom is a social construct. But that I would drop down a level to the neurobiology to account for how there was indeed something to build that socially-useful distinction around.

And that was in contrast to those who would instead rather cast their eyes upwards to some higher power at work. A social construct to be explained by yet another social construct.

Further, just because one needs a brain to be wise does not mean that wisdom is best explained in terms of brains. This is akin to claiming that we are best able to understand flight (the principles of lift, etc.), by looking at the individual cells making up the wings of all the animals that fly, or conducting a close examination of wings. — Count Timothy von Icarus

God-faring folk said if God meant humans to fly, he would have given them gossamer bodies and swan-sized wings. Hence angels definitely exist but powered-flight is a godforsaken pipedream.

I'm not sure how you think powered flight got invented. But it definitely started by seeing how birds did what they did and going from there. Fixed wings, but with a curve to give lift. A motorised propellor as something that worked for a ship on water and so ought to work for a plane in the air. Just needed to crack the power to weight ratio.

Your argument at this point sounds nuts. It has lost any coherence it might have had.

it may be worth adding a note about Peirce’s philosophy of agapē, or selfless love. — Wayfarer

You've been beaten to it. :roll:

Gee, that's tough. I would say that wisdom is like a skill, in that you can develop it through practice and habit. But unlike a skill (like medicine, or woodworking) it doesn't have a particular end it produces (like health, or a table). Rather, it involves knowing which ends are actually worth pursuing. Teens know about celebrities who gets everything they want and then become miserable. That's a great example; the wrong end has sought.

That's practical wisdom. Theoretical wisdom is more like science, but involves understanding how everything fits together. It's not unrelated to practical wisdom. If you know how the world fits together, presumably you also know what is worth pursuing. If you know how life fits together, you can be "at home in the world."

Or something like that. I think it's maybe easier if you know some famous scientists to differentiate between the brilliant, and those who were also brilliant and seem wise. But it's hard to put one's finger on the difference easily.

it involves knowing which ends are actually worth pursuing. — Count Timothy von Icarus

OK. So is your case that wisdom is indeed being skilled in a practiced habitual way? That defines it cognitively in distinction to ... other things.

And then you would want to sub-divide this rather too generalised notion of wisdom more carefully. So there is practical skill, theoretical skill and ... life skill? You define this as cognitively distinctive as it is being wise about the goals to set if you want to pursue a good life.

So a carpenter could also have ends in mind. A handsome table. The scientist may have ends in mind. A theory of everything, or at least some Nobel-scale chunk of it. And then "real wisdom" in the widest sense is how to be a success as a human in a human-made world.

It is solving the riddle of living in society. Social interaction is the skill in question, the practical problem to be mastered to the level that you recognise the best paths at the first glance.

If this is the scheme you have in mind, none of that is contrary to my way of thinking. I have emphasised that in evolutionary terms, we are social creatures first, carpenters and scientists second. We have to be that kind of generalist before becoming those kinds of specialists.

At a genetic level, we are more tuned for assimilating that kind of wisdom than the technical or intellectual forms. The importance of life experience to early humans gets credited for the fact that we added on both a prolonged adolescence and an extended post-reproductive period just so we could spend more time taking clever risks and then – for those who survived – stick around to pass on our hard-won wisdom.

But I guess putting ourselves back in the heads of our hunter-gatherer ancestors also shows that worrying about life choices and big picture life goals was perhaps not that much of a thing when it came to our evolutionary shaping. The hunter-gatherer lived in a world of not a lot of alternatives. Being wise was just sticking close to tradition when it came to tool-making or creation myths.

The meaning of life and the ends that ought to be pursued would hardly be the stuff of campfire conversation. Individualism was not yet a social good, anthropology tells us.

So maybe there is a surprise. Your favoured definition of wisdom is perhaps the most recent of them all. It was the modern world of open life choice that created this particular existential quandary and the need to find the wise balance to strike.

Now that we are all made personally responsible for any conceivable choice impacting on the collective good, this has become a new way we have to be clever, and thus in the end be judged of having lived wisely.

It is still wisdom of the low level general kind – learning to be socially skilled. But now turned into the individualistic drama of being held responsible for your own particular mistakes, and in the end, responsible for the whole damn life saga you attempted to create.

The story of yourself that you wrote, and it turned out a bit plotless, or too hectic, or whatever other literary judgement a good critic of the narrative arts might pass on your efforts. :grin:

Or something like that. I think it's maybe easier if you know some famous scientists to differentiate between the brilliant, and those who were also brilliant and seem wise. But it's hard to put one's finger on the difference easily. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, it is difficult. And, as we both know, sometimes the quality of wisdom means different things to different people. It's a bit like the elusive quality of being 'cool'. On the subject of scientists, I once had it pointed out to me that Richard Dawkins is wise, while Francis Collins is foolish - which obviously reflected a bias that secularism was a wiser choice than theism.