by Guy Claxton
Wisdom often involves seeing through the apparent issue to the real issue that underlies it. Where the Summerhill students saw only conflict, Neill saw a much more complex dynamic that included affection and playfulness in addition to the superficial disgruntlement; while his wife gently hinted at a longer-term perspective within which enacting and resolving such minor conflicts constituted an important and proper part of the ‘curriculum’ of growing up. The girls are reacting from a level of irritation which is genuine but also incomplete, less than the whole story, and Mrs Neill gently reminds them of a larger set of values which they share, but have temporarily forgotten. There is a part of the girls that would indeed be disappointed if the boys were to leave them in peace. On a grander scale, Nelson Mandela, in his famous inaugural speech as president of South Africa in 1994, sought to reframe the fears, and the aspirations, of his countrymen and women. He attempted to peel away one layer of understanding to reveal another.
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? . . . There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you . . . As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
We might say that wise people are able to act and judge ‘rightly’ because they see through the complicated intermediate layers of value in which people sometimes become enmeshed to the simple truths and concerns that animate almost everyone: to feel safe; to express oneself without fear; to understand one’s place and purpose in the world; to act with integrity; to belong somewhere; to love and be loved. As the French psychologist Gisela Labouvie-Vief has concluded from her study of wisdom, ‘What makes the artist, the poet or the scientist wise is not expert technical knowledge in their respective domains but rather knowledge of issues that are part of the human condition. Wisdom consists, so to say, in one’s ability to see through and beyond individual uniqueness and specialisation into those structures that relate us to our common humanity.’3
Wise judgements take into account not just ethical depth but the social and historical repercussions that may ensue. An expedient solution may follow from a partial analysis of a problem that represents only one point of view, or excludes a long-term perspective. Those attempting to conduct ethical business, for example, try to make decisions that benefit a constituency of ‘stakeholders’ that includes employees and their families, customers and local residents, as well as the shareholders, and which respect the interests and rights of future generations. Wisdom works with ‘the big picture’, one that accurately incorporates the moral, practical and interpersonal detail, however inconvenient, and tries to find a solution that fits and respects this complexity as well as possible. Wisdom does not search the rule-book for templates and generalities that the situation can be forced to fit. It tends to go back to the moral and human basics and custom-build a response that reconciles as many of the constraints and desiderata as possible.
Wisdom is uncompromising about fundamental values, but flexible and creative about the means whereby they are to be preserved or pursued – sometimes surprisingly or even shockingly so. A Zen master astounded his monks by burning statues of the Buddha to keep warm. Jesus cut through a convoluted moral predicament by telling his confused and angry followers to obey the law, but keep their spirits free, by ‘rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s’. A wise action may seem to disregard convention, or even rationality. In desperate situations, where all other avenues are blocked, it may be wise to do something apparently absurd.
When in 1334 the Duchess of Tyrol encircled the castle of Hochosterwitz she knew that the fortress, built on a steep rock rising high above the valley floor, was impossible to attack directly, and would yield only to a long siege. And so it proved. Eventually both the defenders and the Duchess’s troops were on the verge of giving up. The defenders were down to their last ox and their last two bags of barley. The attacking soldiers were becoming bored and unruly, and there was pressing military business elsewhere. The commander of the castle, at this point, seemed to lose his sanity. He ordered the ox to be slaughtered, its carcass to be stuffed with the barley, and the body thrown over the ramparts, whence it rolled down the cliff and came to rest in front of the enemy camp. Upon receiving this disdainful message, and assuming that anyone who could afford such an extravagant gesture must be well provisioned and in good heart, the discouraged Duchess gave up the siege and moved on.
If a predicament can be solved by d-mode, it does not need wisdom. Wisdom has been defined as ‘good judgement in hard cases’.4 Hard cases are complex and ambiguous; situations in which conventional or egocentric thinking only results in heightened polarisation, antagonism and impasse. In hard cases personal values may conflict: to choose the course of honesty is to risk the sacrifice of popularity; to choose adventure is to jeopardise security. As with the ‘bystander studies’ which I mentioned earlier, publicly to go to someone’s aid may risk your being late for your appointment, getting your clothes dirty, or looking a fool when the situation turns out to be a student prank. Hard cases are those where important decisions have to be made on the basis of insufficient data; where what is relevant and what is irrelevant are not clearly demarcated; where meanings and interpretation of actions and motives are unclear and conjectural; where small details may contain vital clues; where the costs and benefits, the long-term consequences, may be difficult to discern; where many variables interact in intricate ways.
The conditions in which wisdom is needed, in other words, are precisely those in which the slow ways of knowing come into their own. To be wise is to possess a broad and well-developed repertoire of ways of knowing, and to be able to deploy them appropriately. To be able to think clearly and logically is a constituent of wisdom, but it is not enough on its own; many unwise decisions have been made by clever people. One needs to be able to soak up experience of complex domains – such as human relationships – through one’s pores, and to extract the subtle, contingent patterns that are latent within it. And to do that, one needs to be able to attend to a whole range of situations patiently and without comprehension; to resist the temptation to foreclose on what that experience may have to teach. (The poet and critic Matthew Arnold, during his time as an inspector of schools, used to tell of a colleague who boasted of thirteen years’ experience – whereas, Arnold would comment, it was perfectly clear to anyone who knew the man that he had had nothing of the sort. He had had one year’s experience thirteen times.) And one must be able to take one’s time: to mull over a problem and to dwell on details and possibilities. In short, to be wise one needs the tortoise as well as – perhaps even more than – the hare.
Allowing oneself time to be wise is vital in the context of caring professions such as counselling and psychotherapy. Robin Skynner, co-founder of both the Institute of Family Therapy and the Institute of Group Analysis, and author, with comedian John Cleese, of the books Families and How to Survive Them and Life and How to Survive It, has talked of his perennial confusion on working with a new group or a new family.5 Even with more than forty years’ experience, it regularly happens, he says, that a few minutes into the first consultation he feels lost. Suddenly his accumulated knowledge and skill appear to desert him. It seems as if he has no precedents on which to draw. He may wonder what he is doing there, or may even feel fraudulent. Nothing wise occurs to him to say or do. Yet, Skynner says, one of the major benefits of his vast experience is the courage not to flee from this barren state. It remains, after all this time, uncomfortable, yet he now recognises it to be an essential ‘winter’ phase, in which nothing seems to be growing, which precedes the arrival of spring. After half an hour or so, some
tentative inklings and intuitions begin to form, and gradually a new sense of being able to work with this unprecedented situation emerges. Skynner’s knowledge of interpersonal dynamics does not manifest itself as fast and certain prescriptions: far from it. It appears through the courage to wait, and to notice and trust the fragile shoots of understanding that eventually start to appear.
The way of knowing that generates wisdom is a curious one, for it seems to transcend conventional dualities. It is at once subjective and objective; both involved, caring and affectionate, and yet dispassionate and unclouded by personal sentiment or judgement. There is what I have called ‘poetic sensibility’, in which the object of attention is known intimately, even ‘lovingly’, but without projection: no hopes or fears intrude to obscure the clarity of perception. If the ‘object’ is another person, someone in distress, for example, the wise counsellor is touched by their predicament, and yet untouched by it. She feels the situation as a human, and not just as a technical, one; but her empathy does not dissolve into mere sympathy or, worse, collusion. She is able to see – with her mindfulness – beliefs and opinions, both her own and others’, as interpretations, and not – as they may appear to the sufferer – as the transparent truth.
Psychotherapist Carl Rogers described empathy as:
entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it . . . It means temporarily living in his/her life, moving about in it delicately without making judgments . . . as you look with fresh and unfrightened eyes at elements of which the individual is fearful . . . To be with another in this way means that for the time being you lay aside the views and values you hold for yourself in order to enter another’s world without prejudice.6
To perform this delicate balancing act, the wise person needs to be mindful not only of the other’s world, but of his own as well. As in focusing, he needs to be able to ‘tune in’ to his own inner state to ensure that no judgements or projections are slipping unnoticed into his own interpretation of the situation. Only if his perception is clean and full will his judgement be subtle, fair and trustworthy. That is why the so-called ‘counter-transference’ in psychotherapy – projections of affection or even sexual attraction, for example, on to the client by the therapist – is such an important issue (and why doctors, in the United Kingdom at least, are not permitted to treat members of their own families). But this dispassionate yet kindly vantage point is not easily achieved. As the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard said: ‘The majority of men are subjective towards themselves and objective towards all others – terribly objective sometimes – but the real task is in fact to be objective towards one’s self and subjective towards all others.’7
There is little empirical research on wisdom itself; but there is some information about what people consider wisdom to be. Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg summarised the general view of the wise individual thus:
[She or he] listens to others, knows how to weigh advice, and can deal with a variety of different kinds of people. In seeking as much information as possible for decision-making, the wise individual reads between the lines . . . The wise individual is especially able to make clear . . . and fair judgements, and in doing so, takes a long-term as well as a short-term view of the consequences of the judgement made . . . [She or he] is not afraid to change his or her mind as experience dictates, and the solutions that are offered to complex problems tend to be the right ones.8
The ability which mindfulness brings, and which wisdom seems to presuppose – to see one’s own knowledge, as well as that of others, as a personal and social construction, capable of being interrogated, reframed or reconstrued – is not easily developed, nor does it come without cost. It requires a considerable sense of personal security to give up the belief in certain knowledge. It is not just the admission that one’s knowledge is always incomplete – that there is always more that one could consider – which is required, but the recognition that knowledge itself is essentially unsure, equivocal, open to question and reinterpretation. As Harvard educationalist Robert Kegan has recently reminded us in his book In over our Heads: the Mental Demands of Modern Life, this perspective is only gained at the cost of ‘a human wrenching of the self from its cultural surround’.9 Adult educators, for example, who are demanding this reflective, critical ability from their students, are asking
them to change the whole way they understand themselves, their world, and the relation between the two. They are asking many of them to put at risk the loyalties and devotions that have made up the very foundation of their lives. We acquire ‘personal authority’, after all, only by relativizing – that is, only by fundamentally altering – our relationship to public authority. This is a long, often painful voyage, and one that, for much of the time, may feel more like mutiny than a merely exhilarating expedition to discover new lands.
To be wise requires the development of a mode of mind which can accept the relative nature of knowledge without tipping into rampant subjectivity or solipsism. One must be able to live with Voltaire’s dictum: ‘doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one’. Yet this doubt must leave freedom to act – sometimes quickly and decisively. The wise person walks a narrow line between the twin perils of rigid dogmatism and paralysing indecision. As psychologist John Meacham has put it: ‘one abandons both the hope for absolute truth and the prospect that nothing can be known; in wisdom, one is able to act with knowledge while simultaneously doubting.’10 Meacham makes his point with an example in which this awareness of fallibility is conspicuously absent. In the film The Graduate, the young man Ben (Dustin Hoffman) is taken aside at his graduation party by his father’s friend Mr Maguire. ‘Come with me for a minute,’ says Maguire, ‘I want to talk to you. I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.’ ‘Yes, sir,’ Ben replies. ‘Are you listening?’ insists Maguire. ‘Yes, sir, I am,’ says Ben. ‘Plastics,’ says Maguire. There is a long pause while they look at each other. Finally Ben asks, ‘Exactly how do you mean that, sir?’ The humour of this laconic scene turns precisely on Maguire’s unwise conviction that his knowledge, so generously offered, is absolutely incorrigible. Meacham points out that an epistemological milieu, whether it be school, university or workplace, that requires one to appear certain militates against the development of wisdom. On the contrary, ‘An intellectual climate hostile to ambiguity and contradiction is one that encourages easy solutions such as stereotyping and intolerance.’
Wisdom arises from a friendly and intimate relationship with the undermind. One must be willing, like Winnie the Pooh, to ‘allow things to come to you’, rather than, like Rabbit, ‘always going and fetching them’. D-mode clings to lines of thought that are clear, controlled, conventional and secure: precisely those to which ‘hard cases’, by their very nature, will not succumb. Wisdom comes to those who are willing to expand their sense of themselves beyond the sphere of conscious control to include another centre of cognition to which consciousness has no access, and over which there seems to be little intentional jurisdiction. As Emerson puts it: ‘A man finds out that there is somewhat in him that knows more than he does. Then he comes presently to the curious question, Who’s who? Which of these two is really me? The one that knows more or the one that knows less; the little fellow or the big fellow?’
Those sages and seers who represent the most clear-cut embodiments of wisdom tend to give two different answers to Emerson’s question. Those that belong to the theistic religious traditions are inclined to retain their personal identification with the ‘little fellow’, and to assume that the ‘big fellow’ is some external source of authority who, through its grace and mercy, has chosen to speak ‘through’ them. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, for instance, the broadcasting authority is referred to as God. Yet even within these religions there have been dissenting voices which have insisted on seeing the source of wisdom as immanent. The ‘big fellow’ is still called God, or the Godhead, but is now construed as an inscrutab
le force or process that is located within. In the so-called ‘apophatic’ tradition within Christianity, for example, there are many mystics and sages who have expressed their rediscovered intimacy with the undermind in these terms. The founder of the apophatic tradition, the sixth-century Dionysius the Areopagite, described the mystic as one who ‘remains entirely in the impalpable and the invisible; having renounced all knowledge [he] is united to the Unknowable – to God – in a better way, and knowing nothing, knows with a knowledge surpassing the intellect’.11 To Dionysius, ‘The most godly knowledge of God is that which is known by unknowing.’
Eckhart von Hochheim, ‘Meister Eckhart’ to history and to his followers, is acknowledged to be perhaps the greatest of the Christian mystics, though in his time his works were condemned by a papal commission as heretical and dangerous. He died only just in time to avoid being burnt at the stake, it appears. For Eckhart, ‘A really perfect person will be so dead to self, so lost in God, so given over to the will of God, that his whole happiness consists in being unconscious of self and its concerns, and being conscious instead of God.’ The goal of spiritual practice is to find the inner place ‘where never was seen difference, neither Father, Son nor Holy Ghost, where there is no one at home, yet where the spark of the soul is more at peace than within itself’.
