IS THERE A SINGLE WISDOM TRADITION?
The Wisdom Tradition (sometimes referred to as “wisdom traditions”) is the common pursuit of men and women to find meaning and purpose in this life, and its significance as a whole in the eternity of time. Different wisdom traditions individually express their own coming to terms with matters of life and death, goodness and evil, truth and falsehood, and pose different questions, arriving at different answers, on purpose, meaning, and destiny. I believe that there is an overarching Wisdom Tradition that can be discussed that constitute various traditions by their common denominators. But first, it is by exploring the “depths” of a select number of ‘traditions’, note their commonalities and distinctions, and summarize findings, and draw conclusions from the weight of factors that appear to constitute the main items that make the traditions worthy of the appellation ‘wisdom’.
WHAT IS COMMON TO WISDOM TRADITIONS
“Wisdom tradition” is a more unifying and neutral term to describe a common ground of essentially shared premises about what is worthy, and from that, provide the language that enables different peoples to share in a vision of the common good.
Although ecumenism and interreligious or interdenominational collaboration may be all the rage, my preference and purpose here is not to encourage religious communities to water down their theologies, nor to be all-too-willing to paper over differences. There is still something called a common morality that exists in every place and time, such as reverence for the family, the dignity of labor, and ‘investment’ in children. They are expressed differently, in different forms, as sanctioned or inappropriate, depending on circumstances at one time, and not another.
Spiritual Wisdom entails recognizing the fact that humans are corporeal beings, that we are made of matter – bones, flesh, carbon, cartilage, water, and much, much more. We are not just disembodied spirit. Nor are we only corporeal beings with ‘fearfully, wonderfully made “hardware”’ of neurological, circulatory, endocrine, and other systems that interlinkingly work together in harmonious homeostasis. Nor is who we are represented as the programmed software operating system known as the soul or spirit or psyche, or mind, or brain, or elan vital (that is, if anyone takes Henri Bergson seriously anymore).
THE PRACTICAL WISDOM OF ARISTOTLE
To understand the nature of Man*, starting from Aristotle’s premise that “all men by nature desire to know”, the question arises: to know what? Individuals, families, communities, populations and whole societies desire (need) to know different things. The most important knowledge that one needs to know is to survive – which is the most practical knowledge to have. Any knowledge of a practical kind that gives man the knowledge to “get on” in this world is what Aristotle calls praxis – the possession of skills that one can apply in this world, in a “real-world setting.” Praxis is more than applying knowledge to material handling, machine operation, or the military arts. It involves making judgments when to apply the skill, under what circumstances, and for what reason. This involves often having to make prudent judgments when dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity. Man, in this “state of nature”, makes decisions based on an understanding of assumptions about life, and what can be known. To survive, he has neither the time nor inclination to speculate about much of anything, hazarding guesses and risking ventures that are perilous to pursue. He is not interested in what Aristotle refers to as theoretical knowledge, which he considered as constitutive of the highest way to live – the contemplative life. For man to survive, he needs something more practical to know. This is what Aristotle refers to as phronesis – a set of practices that leads one to a type of “practical wisdom” which is enough for most men, which gives man everything he needs to know, to live well.
*There is always controversy and contention, deadly disagreement on how to designate – assign a name to – the world’s more than seven billion human beings, as a collective concept or term for the totality – or total enumeration of humankind. As a substitute for the word “mankind” humankind is a fitting substitute. However, humankind is composed of two root words, meaning earth or clay (humus); and kin or type (kind). The terms man and mankind are derived from the Germanic word Man, which is not maleness, per se, but is an indefinite pronoun, (could be male, could be female, could be something else). Man is translated in German as You never know; One ought to pay his dues. They caused the problem. {Who is they?} Someone who responded like that should be fired. Man, as maleness in German, is Mann. In reflecting more on trying to capture the essence of human beings, I follow the scientific designation of homo sapiens as the principle of Man (in its Germanic meaning) the knower. I also view with disfavor the awkward syntactical constructions of he or she; him or her. I will try to be liberal in flexibly using either one of the two gender forms for collective references.
PRACTICAL WISDOM VERSUS THEORETICAL KNOWLEDGE
Wisdom is nothing, if not practical. To be practical is not ‘to be’, but ‘to do’. Practical behavior comprises activity. It implies something that one can practice, do, apply, or carry out – to accomplish something, to reach a goal, or discharge some responsibility. And it implies growth, that practice makes perfect, that one becomes “better” at something, and perhaps attaining mastery in that kind of activity. Here, Aristotle makes a distinction between practical wisdom [phronesis] and theoretical reason, a type of knowledge for which the “man of leisure” with time on his hand and immeasurable resources can pursue the contemplation of nature, and play a responsible role as citizen in the polis. Before he reaches that stage, one necessarily learns the “laws of life” governing human nature, nature naturing, and nature natured – the three realities that constitute natural law – being, becoming, and realization. Having mastered the Kantian moral law within, and the natural law without, he will be prepared for life in the polis, the cosmos, and integrating them both – in the cosmopolis – the world arena.
Thus, phronesis is more than a ‘skillset’. Nor is mastering a course or curriculum of study sufficient to achieve phronesis. In fact, there is no body of precepts for required behavior. It is developing an attitude towards the world that is interested, involved, curious and respectful to tradition, custom, and values of the community. The ‘magnanimous man’ overmasters his deficiencies by always practicing the following seven distinct activities:
- Develop the faculty of discernment to behave rightly in society. Besides ‘doing the right thing’ and avoiding evil, behaving rightly also entails practicing the highest virtues as a citizen of a polis: to show deference and allegiance to the public order, and to exercise these very virtues through considered judgment and consideration towards fellow members of the polis. This does not entail being an ‘activist’ – one who shouts down speakers at public meetings, and are generally destructive of community life.
- Speak and act prudently, with an acute sensitivity to others, neither being timid nor rash in speaking your views.
- If presented with circumstances which are outside your ‘comfort zone’, obtain expertise of all relevant, useful knowledge in preparation for the challenges to be faced.
- Judge! Make judgments, and not fear to be judged. Know the goods that are truly beneficial, avoid all the vices and evils that weaken the will and attack the fabric of the soul.
- Follow custom in good manners, act with propriety, observe due occasions with solemnity.
- Seek out counsel, listen, admit that you can sometimes learn a better way from others.
- Whatever your talents, possessions and skills, be discriminating and elegant in their display.
ARISTOTLE AND THE WISDOM TRADITIONS
Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore, get wisdom: and with all thy getting, get understanding.
(Proverbs 4:7 KJV)
While I have provided a description of wisdom in terms of the archetypal Aristotelean man, where does such a remarkable person fall within the scope of the Great Wisdom Traditions? More than any other wisdom tradition, Aristotle’s greatest impact has been in Medieval Scholasticism, which not only shaped the entire Roman Catholic Tradition, but also to some extent in the Islamic Tradition and Post-Reformation Christianity. It lives on today as the bedrock underpinning of the political and social values that constitute Western Civilization – both Protestant and Catholic – as well as the Enlightenment and its successor philosophies.
To the extent that “The West” and Western ways have touched nearly every hamlet and village across the globe, Aristotle has had an impact on virtually all other wisdom traditions. These include Buddhism, Christianity, Daoism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, as well as lesser classifiable wisdom traditions such as humanism and numerous indigenous peoples located in every continent and Oceania – which are often referred to collectively as “Wisdom Communities”. Such communities tend to be a local or regional group of people gathered in a sacred, holy place associated with a certain mountain (or mountain range); or groves, forests, fisheries (or rivers, lakes, or other wetlands); or hunting grounds.
A wisdom tradition does not satisfy itself with limited explanations of natural occurrences or wildly imaginative fabulous myth-making. Starting with their own beginnings, Wisdom Traditionalists start from the ground up, evaluating and passing judgment on how humans actually live, behave generally, under natural conditions – what is today referred to as ethology. The elders in these traditions are interested in learning not just how humans actually live, but how to live better lives, pondering the question of how one ought to live a good life, which is subsumed under ethics and moral philosophy; how to give meaning to the ordinary, petty quarrels of quotidian life, while maintaining steadfast purpose and a feeling that you are destined to greater things. This constitutes the study of metaphysics, which is concerned with an ultimate comprehension of the whole of one’s life in the totality of the cosmos. And what would a life be without an appreciation of the symmetry, order, and beauty of both the natural world and man’s noblest creations? Naturally, it would be a ‘poor’ life if it were not for aesthetics. And as we are social and sapient beings, one needs to acquire and possess the requisite knowledge (the branch of philosophy known as epistemology) to live in community – socially, politically, and economically – in harmony within the limits and conditions of one’s environment – the science of ecology.
In order to understand humankind, scholars and teachers needed more than a set of behavioral and attitudinal precepts drawn from practical phronesis. The Wisdom Tradition sets out to delve into and discover the ground of human being, or Being itself. The forerunners, groundbreakers, and trailblazers within wisdom traditions start with being itself. The word being simply tells us that we are; that we ‘have our existence’. As humans we are humus – that we are matter, material, substance of the earth. But being, the second half of the collocation human being pauses us to ask: what are we besides matter”? Do we ‘matter’ at all – to anyone or anything else?
DO WE MATTER? TO WHOM?
While we cannot say with a strong sense of confidence that we matter to God, or that God cares about us, we can look for signs that point to His sovereign signature on creation and its creatures. While normally an essayist would present arguments in a wisdom tradition based on ethereal or otherworldly phenomena, I begin with movement in action. All movement and action produce, or is caused by, one body after another interacting, repelling, or attracting other bodies, subject to a constellation of gravitational forces. This totality of interacting things is known as the cosmos, and its study is called cosmology.
Cosmology reveals to us a presence of all things contingent. Anything contingent must be an end-result. Something must have caused the contingency. But what? While some may identify all contingency as self-enclosed in its own web of complexity (pantheism), the wisdom traditions have addressed the necessity, degrees of complexity, and order in the universe, to discern an intelligence operating in an energized universe of multi form life and structures constituting all creation. While this has shown to be insoluble and not amenable to proof, mere speculation has provided insight into a guiding spirit, a logos of immanence and rationality that unveils the Word that is God.
Catholic historiography regards history as a mechanism of economic, natural, political, and social causes, but also as the unfolding of divine Providence, to which hostile forces are opposed, sometimes referred to as forces of the Antichrist, or by classicists as the forces of the cosmos against forces of chaos. Cosmos comprises all that is form, law, order, spiritual hierarchy, and tradition. Chaos comprises all influences that degrade, disintegrate, subvert—and promote the inferior over the superior, matter over spirit, quantity over quality.
WISDOM IN RELIGION
Wisdom in virtually all the world’s religions is found in traditions faithfully handed down to be entrusted to a new generation of teachers. What constitutes wisdom in the world’s various religions is notoriously difficult to define. Religion is commonly understood to mean belief in, and reverence for, a supernatural power (usually a Supreme Being of some sort); a set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader, such as Buddhism; and a way or path that guide human beings in how to relate to and revere the absolute, divine, holy, sacred, spiritual aspects of existence, including ultimate concerns about their lives, their fate, and the meaning of death.
A religion has a set of practices, rituals, stories, truths, systems of questioning [enquiry]; and accepted methods of evaluation and critiques [inquiry] – on exploring human being. When Christians talk about their beliefs, we cannot be sure what they mean by faith. Not all traditions use that word, and many Christians use that word to mean trust in Providence; for others, it means subscribing to a number of propositions, dogmas, or doctrines; or for still others, it refers to the entire tradition, as reflected in oral testimonies, sacred writings, canonical scripture, and custom.
METAPHYSICAL KNOWLEDGE
Metaphysical knowledge is direct experience, but much of this direct experience is patterned by our knowledge of phenomena, by the contents of the mind, which are in turn the product of our personal history, which unfolded in a particular cultural milieu.
Before Metaphysical knowledge is physical knowledge (epistemology) of natural phenomena, which possesses its own objective patterns and principles. The objective patterns and principles of the physical world, for example, are described by the natural sciences. Science makes inquiries into the surface manifestations of the phenomenal world that can be measured, but not their nature or essences.
Metaphysical knowledge has a horizontal dimension, in relation to our peers in community; but it also has a vertical dimension of aspiring to what is higher, greater, or nobler. Both dimensions – the worldly dimension and the otherworldly dimension reflect the two worlds that must be navigated – the sublunary and the spiritual aspects of existence.
By exploring the wholeness of knowledge—both the vertical and horizontal dimensions—we may be able to arrive at a more fundamental dimension of knowledge that embraces both. The important point here, however, is that when we explore the forms of basic knowledge it reveals to us its truths, its invariant patterns and universal principles, and thus, the essence of things.
Each arrives at detailed, extensive, and useful knowledge. Both seek to arrive at knowledge that is uninfluenced by opinions or prior presentations, or determined by prior constructions. This type of knowledge may be illusory, built upon the falsehood of an earlier presentation. Subsequent re-presentations will take us further from the truth.
For example, an expression such as “You can’t legislate morality” is a repeated statement, that has a running life as far back as I can remember, used by skeptics to give an impression that contemporary moral behavior is no longer ‘stuffy and stifling’, but is tolerant and liberating. Repeated statements, such as “You can’t legislate morality” are judged as more true, when compared to new statements, a phenomenon known as the illusory truth, because processing fluency increases, caused by prior presentations. People judge truth based on coherent references for statements in memory. Due to prior presentation, repeated statements have more coherently linked references; thus, a repetition-induced truth effect follows. Both the amount and the coherence of references for a repeated statement influence us as truth. People also judge new statements more likely “true” when they share references with previously presented statements. Advertisers and media propagandists know this very well. But it need not overwhelm us. Aristotle and the wisdom traditions have some things to say on this, on redirecting our attention to the essentials of both traditions.
REALIZATION
When one acts to actualize his potential, he sets out on a course to realize that potential, in which the individual achieves fulfillment. This potential is the same in all as it is said to exist. But in qualitative and quantitative terms, every person brings to the race of life inborn talents, or what some traditions call gifts of the spirit, or endowment of grace.
Man, follows on the trajectory of entelechy (a life path) to finally realize actuality – that state of being in which one has taken his situatedness, subsequent experiences, mature insights, and the practice of self-discipline – both of body and mind – to reach a point where ends-in-view meet up with a fully realized actualized personality. Thus, the complete human being, the being who is fully human, is one who has fully realized one’s potential.
Although traditions arose owing to the particularities of the culture and language in which a specific wisdom arose, there are nevertheless common themes and elements not completely determined by the particularities of a culture, language, or time period. That such interpretations of human experience and human nature can become a tradition at all, let alone traditions capable of spanning hundreds of years and multiple cultures and peoples, is significant and cannot be easily denied by the most ardent defenders of moral relativism, positivism, or postmodernism.
The moral development of the self and human nature we see in the relationship between praxis and belief found in the ancient wisdom traditions. Belief, without practical action, would be empty and useless, while practical action, without a basis in belief would be rudderless, floundering in whelming wave after wave.
EYES ON THE PRIZE: FINAL THOUGHTS
Can wisdom traditions bring about moral renewal to properly habituate, educate and imbue humankind with values to desire what is good, true, and beautiful? In the dawn of Greek Civilization, pre-Socratic philosophers focused on being and nature. Aristotle, with his polymathic scope of interests, expanded the scope of what man can potentially know, through praxis and theory – practical wisdom and theoretical knowledge – in the search for answers to perennial questions about the nature of reality, the eternal order of the cosmos, and the range of activities and practical knowledge one seeks in order to live a good life.
The wisdom traditions have recognized that Man is ‘complete’ when men and women develop their potential to reach a level of success. Philosophers would describe ‘success’ as the realization of a potentiality possessed by all men and women.
The wisdom tradition needs to cultivate anew an aspiration for human excellence combined with new roadmaps on guiding us to modern-day Avalons as the goal of life’s journey. While the wisdom tradition, per se, cannot make one wise, it can provide to the searcher a gazetteer guide of interesting places that may deeply affect us and move us to the praxis of action. It may even become a succinct vademecum for confessors on how to think and live successfully, free from the recurrent vices and pitfalls that arise in the course of a human life. Right mindfulness in the Buddhist tradition reminds us to dwell on thoughts, feelings, desires, and behaviors that are fitting or natural for us, in our time and in every age, that enabled our ancestors to survive, prosper, and reproduce by fulfilling conditions of life set aside for us by a wisdom tradition to meet the demands of an often-hostile environment. The regulation of reproduction, coupling, and birth entailed a network of rituals, obligation, and sanctions by the group to maintain and control the transmission of a cultural heritage.
The wisdom tradition reminds us we are not free in the sense of liberation, that views moral codes as shackles upon an untampered and undisciplined will to power. Moral codes provide a framework to face change and redirect expression of hopes and values to worthy aspirations to strive for in the race of life. Traditions that do not change are already half-dead, unless it revisits the sources of its own past to renew a wisdom tradition with refreshed insights, and a renewed hope and optimism about the future.
