Wisdom, Briefly

The following is from a written exchange with a student who has been reading Plato recently.

Why should I love wisdom? Loving wisdom and being wise are helpful for a truly good life?

No, loving wisdom and being wise are not helpful for a truly good life. They are the truly good life. Loving wisdom is the truly good life for a human. Being wise is the truly good life — the standard of all life — for a god.

⁠Is it also helpful for me to find out why I live? The reason why I live is something I can find out at some point?

Obviously wisdom would help you “find out why you live.” How could an unwise person find out the purpose of his or her life? Now, if seeking or having wisdom is the best thing we can do, then wouldn’t this have to be the answer to the question of why we live? “The good,” after all, is just another way of saying “the meaning” or “the purpose.” The defining aim. What is best for us (the most good) is certainly the purpose of our lives, or else our purpose would be something other than what is best for us. How could that make sense?

Everyone seems to instinctively love and want to own wisdom. Is it right? You said everyone wants to be good, but most people are not living well due to ignorance.

It may be true that in some ultimate sense of human nature, everyone “instinctively” loves and wants to possess wisdom. But it certainly doesn’t seem that way, since most people never consider the question of wisdom at all, and never make any effort to become wise — and yet they also tend to believe that they already have wisdom, even though they have never thought about it at all, as though whatever assumptions they happen to have absorbed from their society counted as wisdom.

What I said, surely, was not exactly that everyone wants to “be good,” but that everyone wants the good. I mean, we all seek happiness, and happiness means having what is good for us. So we all seek the good. The problem, as you said, is that most people never come close to the good, and actually spend much of their time doing bad and worthless things, because they do not know what the good is. In other words, we all naturally seek the good (= what will make us happy), but most of us never find it because we don’t have any idea what it is or how it can be found. So we stuff ourselves with delicious food, or get drunk every Friday with our “friends,” or gratify ourselves with sexual adventures, or chase wealth so we can “buy anything we want,” or dream of becoming famous so everyone will watch and love us, or imagine we will have the happiest life if we gain power over other people, and so on. None of these things will bring happiness in reality, but rather a lot of pain and suffering. However, we think they will make us happy because we have never figured out what the true good is. We are chasing fantasies, not truth. So yes, ignorance is the root of all evil and unhappiness. This makes wisdom — the opposite of ignorance — the only answer to our suffering.

What is wisdom? Is it what you can earn from experience and learning? Is it good judgement and good sense from lots of knowledge, experience and thinking? Or the capability of seeing the world or a very small thing, whatever it is, from a perspective beyond the current period?

Maybe you can earn it from experience and learning, but not just any kind of experience, like “trying many things” or “travelling to many countries,” and not any random learning, such as gathering a lot of information. Gathering endless facts and information can never make you wise — AI cannot be wise. Wisdom, described generally, involves understanding the whole, which means seeing the full picture of reality. This does not mean possessing every available detail or every specialized bit of knowledge — which would be like having all the ingredients for a perfect meal but no recipe, no pots, and no fire — but rather grasping how the beings and our experiences of them are related in the grand design, understanding the hierarchy of existence, recognizing the difference between permanent truths and current opinions, and, as you suggested, looking at the world around you (and being able to judge it) from the position beyond this or that time, or this or that place, or this or that “cultural perspective.”