"We Don’t Receive Wisdom; We Must Discover It For Ourselves After A Journey That No One Can Take For Us Or Spare Us."
Marcel Proust (1871-1922)
A philosopher, in the original sense of the word is a lover of wisdom. It is an alarming reflection that in the west, wisdom is no longer a concept or category in common use. People are admired for being skillful, or rich, or famous (or in the case of athletes all three). No one is admired for being wise, or even described as being wise. The reason for that I suspect is that wisdom was to be found, it was among the old that it would be found. These days it is unfashionable to be old, and if the old are capable of being wise, who cares?
I am reading 2 incredible books by some of the wisest men who I believe ever lived on Earth, The Analects of Confucius and Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. In their books, wisdom gets mixed emotions.
In the Tao for example:
Banish wisdom, discard knowledge, and the people will be benefited a hundredfold.
(T19)
And The Analects:
The good man rests content with Goodness; he that is merely wise pursues Goodness in the belief that it pays to do so.
(A4.2)
They can be a little more enthusiastic than this don’t you think:
True wisdom is different from much learning; much learning means little wisdom.
(T81)
What is true wisdom, and did Confucius and Lao Tzu themselves posses it? I would argue that they did. If we call people wise, we generally mean two things.
That they know which things in life are important.
That they know (or have a good idea) how best to go about achieving those great things.
The questions Confucius and Lao Tzu constantly come back to are very simple. How can people be good? How can they be happy or in another book I am reading by Ben Stein How to Ruin Your Life suggests how to avoid making themselves unhappy? And for rulers, how can they best maintain order and keep their people contented?
If we ever get tired pursuing youth, celebrity, and beauty, we could do worse than listen to the answers in both of these books. That is all I am simply suggesting.
