On the topic of Wisdom.

[Plato - The Apology]

The issue at hand then is that Socrates is defending an accusation as presented against him by the people of Athens. Three important citizens of Athens are charging him with corruption of the youth, promoting a lack of belief in the Greek gods. Pojman suggests that the underlying and more important reasons for the trial was simply that Socrates’ questioning nature led him to undermine most of the public leaders and speakers, demonstrating publicly their lack of knowledge or skill, thereby creating a great many enemies for himself.

The introduction that Socrates presents seems to be his own request simply to be heard. He understands that people are generally wary of those that seem to always be attempting to be “right” and asks that they simply listen to him while, for the moment, suspending any previous judgements. He also asks that they not immediately judge any lack of understanding of official legal language, but, again, to simply listen.

Socrates does admit that he went about questioning a great many leaders about their capacity for wisdom, and was consistently disappointed, but that he did so based on a sort of mission as required by himself after a friend of his visited the Oracle of Delphi, who stated that there was no man more wise than Socrates. He then decided that as he knew nothing, this must clearly be not the case, and so he set out to find any man wiser than himself to present that man to the Oracle and show that he was not the wisest of all men.

This then presents one of what I think is the most important ideas presented anywhere in the history of philosophy. What is wisdom? How does one acquire it? How does one cultivate it? Socrates spends years searching for any person wiser than him, and never does. He spends time with politicians, and finds that they were so full of confidence and charisma, that people simply followed them blindly. Upon challenging their self-proclaimed wisdom, and demonstrating that they knew nothing of beauty of goodness, they argued with him. Upon demonstrating that they really knew nothing, they declared him an enemy. Socrates then went to the poets, and went through a similar process. He found that while they could string together a long set of words and sounds, and would speak of their own works for hours on end, they did not demonstrate and understanding of their own words, and so he compared them to a diviner, that they came from a sort of inspiration, not that there was an wisdom in the words put forth. Again, in demonstration of the lack of understanding that the poets had of their own works, those challenged argued and declared Socrates an enemy of all poets. Socrates then went to the artisans, and here he found the specific error that seemed to plague all those he has spoken with. They were talented and skilled people, but the ability to learn and master a skill only meant that they then had that skill, not, as they so consistently believed, that they held the deeper wisdom of all other matters.

Socrates observed that these people knew nothing, but believed they did in fact know things. He believed of himself that he knew nothing, but he knew that he knew nothing, and in this way, in this tiny detail, came to realize that he was then, the wisest of all men.

The issue of course, was that in going through this very lengthy task, with the meticulousness that he did, he made enemies of all sorts of men throughout all of Athens.

Another issue was that as the process was being undertaken, make of the wealthy youth, those who had the time and finances to allow for this behaviour, would follow Socrates as he ventured forth challenging all for wisdom. While his student Plato did indeed found The Academy, the first school of philosophy, Socrates himself did not recruit any students. These youth came to him because of his reputation, to witness Socrates topple social leaders. This meant that not only was Socrates challenging the leaders, but that it was becoming an increasingly public affair.

And the last issue presented, was that an assumption was made, a potentially reasonable assumption, one that may appear simple enough to those watching Socrates engage in what he declared his profession at the time, but one that he never stated himself. Many of those simply assumed that as Socrates challenged those self-proclaimed wise men, and proved that they themselves did not contain any wisdom, that Socrates would have that wisdom himself.

The thought that because Socrates sought to prove others were not wise, and he would, by simple logic, be the wise person he seemed incapable to find.

And so when the trial was put forth, these three details all worked against Socrates, for to the bystander, it seemed as though he was seeking to gather the youth of Athens, and train them to attack social leaders, without having anyone worth leading to replace them with.

I think the first time I really had any real attempt to understand wisdom was, and I’m not certain I want to include this, but it was when I played my first game of Dungeons and Dragons. I was creating my character, a Fighter class of some sort, and as I rolled out my stats, the DM helped me to choose where to place the numbers I rolled based on their importance to a character of that type. [those for interested/who know what I’m talking about, the method we used was the one where we roll several times, and then pick which numbers we want those attributes to have] The point was that he suggested that my character would likely have a greater Wisdom score than Intelligence, but at the time, I don’t think I really understood the difference, other than that intelligence came from learning and wisdom from experience, and even that only makes limited sense. Some years ago, I might have said that intelligence came from study, education, and so on, while wisdom was simply a person’s common sense, which really isn’t that different that what I had thought in early high school times.

Now, I am in almost as much a loss for words as to describe any understanding I have for what wisdom is. I think intelligence is easier. I believe that that is the capacity for learning and understanding. A person with a grand “Intelligence score” will pick up new skills faster, learn and understand more complex concepts with greater ease, and will perhaps see things with greater clarity. Someone I once knew told me that intelligence is simply [and I mean *very* simply], a person’s ability to identify patterns.

So what then is wisdom. Is it common sense? Is it ingrained understanding? Is it a lifetime’s worth of experience? I believe, at least within myself, that wisdom is the understanding that we carry that cannot be learned, not insofar that we happen to experience something that teaches us that lesson rather than learning it in a class, but such thing’s that cannot be taught by any conventional means. There are a great many things that institutions like universities cannot “teach” us, but for whatever reason, they seem to carry less value than those that can, and may that detail is part of the key. We place value on that which we understand, and a diploma or degree implies that we have put forth the time to become more intelligent, to suck in all the knowledge that we can carry. A person who graduates from my university is “intelligent”, but are they wise? Have they experienced anything more than a collection of lectures and pub nights? While a great many people criticize those who take the time off to live the cliché and spend a year backpacking through Europe or Asia, I can’t help but think that that must be a great and fantastic experience to have, to see and take in the simple idea that there is more to the world than North America, that maybe we aren’t the standard of existence. And while I am able to have those thought, assumptions, and so on, I haven’t left the country in a great many years, when I travelled to France last time, but even then, almost ten years ago, I remember the understanding that while we are all human, we are profoundly different people. So when I studied cultural relativism, I understood it, because I had experienced it. You can teach the words, but you can’t share the understanding.

And so I think that that there is the most significant difference between intelligence and wisdom, one must be learned, and the other experienced, to fully grasp each. And this is my no means my way of propagating anything against these universities, this is just me saying, experience more.