The Wisdom of Stephen S. Hall

Ten years before Dr. Dilip Jeste published “Wiser,” a science writer by the name of Stephen S. Hall published “Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience.” His views on how to define wisdom are so aligned with my own and so well-articulated, the best I can do is quote him (at some length) and provide a very few comments.

 Part One is (humbly) titled “Wisdom Defined (Sort Of).” 

The days of our life are seventy in years,

Or perhaps eighty if we are strong;

Even then their span is only toil and trouble;

They are soon gone, and we fly away …

So teach us to count our days

That we may gain a wise heart. 

                                                      Psalm 90

The book begins with the author’s dropping his five-year old daughter off for school in Brooklyn on 9/11. Within minutes, the first plane hit the World Trade Center. This is the backdrop for his initial thoughts about wisdom.

In truth, the future is always unpredictable, which is why these moments of shock remind us, with unusual urgency, that we have a constant (if not often unconscious) need for wisdom …

One of the hallmarks of wisdom, what distinguishes it so sharply from ‘mere’ intelligence, is the ability to exercise good judgment in the face of imperfect knowledge. In short, do the right thing – ethically, socially, familiarly, personally.

We crave wisdom – worship it in others, wish it upon our children, and seek it ourselves – precisely because it will help us lead a meaningful life as we count our days, because we hope it will guide our actions as we step cautiously into that always uncertain future. At times of challenge and uncertainty, nothing seems more important than wisdom – economic wisdom, moral wisdom, political wisdom, even that private, behind-closed-doors wisdom that allows us to convey the gravity of changed circumstances to our children without making them afraid of change itself.

We all aspire to have wisdom. Not necessarily because it will guarantee us happier, more fulfilling, better lives (although those have been worthy goals almost from the moment philosophers began to contemplate it), but wisdom as a process can serve as a guide to helping us make the best-possible decisions at junctures of great importance in our lives. With an added, implicit (or sometimes explicit) tincture of morality, it can get us to slow down long enough to think about actions and consequences.

Wisdom resides not just in the decision per se, but also, as Confucius perhaps best of all philosophers shrewdly understood, in the Way of life – what he called gen – that precedes wisdom.

Decision making lies at the heart of wisdom, but it’s not the whole story.

Even in times of crisis, however, wisdom sometimes demands the paradoxical decision to resist doing something just for the sake of doing it – that flailing impulse ‘to do something, anything’ that social scientists sometimes call ‘action bias.’ ‘Some of the wisest and most devout men,’ the French essayist and philosopher, Michel de Montaigne observed, ‘have lived avoiding all noticeable actions.’

All of us have an intuitive sense of what wisdom means and what constitutes wise behavior. In a rough, academic sense (to paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous opinion about pornography), we know it when we see it, even if we can’t define it.

My recent use of the same analogy is purely coincidental or due to unconscious forces over which I have no control!

… the struggle to define wisdom is embedded in the texture of its philosophical, psychological, and cultural history. . . In trying to define wisdom, we are not merely engaging in a dry academic exercise, engaging in a conversation with ourselves about how to lead the best-possible life.

By studying and becoming more aware of wisdom, by looking at every decision from the perspective of “Is this the wise thing to do?” you develop what I call a wisdom consciousness. Awareness is incredibly powerful.

Wisdom begins with awareness of the self and the world outside the self; it deepens with our awareness of the inherent tension between the inner “I” and outer world.

“To understand wisdom fully and correctly probably requires more wisdom than any of us have.” Robert J. Sternberg

But, thinking about wisdom nudges us closer to the thing itself.

Simply put, thinking about wisdom forces you to think about the way you lead your life, just as reading about wisdom, I believe, forces you to wrestle with its meaning and implications.

 … to separate wisdom from action is a form of malpractice in the conduct of one’s life. ‘We ought to seek out virtue not merely to contemplate it,’ Plutarch wrote, ‘but to derive benefit from doing so.’

Hall describes his own evolution in wisdom consciousness:

Soon, whenever I found myself in a challenging situation – refereeing a sibling spat, confronting interpersonal friction with a loved one or friend, being called upon to deal with something that triggered titanic forces of procrastination, or even weighing a trivial dilemma of daily compassion, such as deciding whether to give a poor person some spare change – I felt myself slowing down long enough to ask myself that question: What would be the wisest thing to do?  

… I found it a refreshing exercise. It forced me to clarify choices. It slowed down the clock of urgency against which we all seem to be racing as we struggle with decisions. It allowed me to step outside of myself and momentarily stifle the urges of my innate selfishness – second to none, I submit, yet probably pretty much equivalent to everybody else’s – long enough to see the bigger picture. It had an archaic but familiar quality of self-monitoring.  It felt, for lack of a better word, responsible – not in the sense that others hold us responsible, but, rather, in terms of raising the bar of expectations we hold for ourselves.

But what exactly do I mean by wisdom?

Many definitions of wisdom converge on recurrent and common elements: humility, patience, and a clear-eyed, dispassionate view of human nature, and the human predicament, as well as emotional intelligence, an ability to cope with adversity, and an almost philosophical acknowledgment of ambiguity and the limitations of knowledge. Like many big ideas, it is nettled with contradictions. Wisdom is based upon knowledge, but part of the physics of wisdom is shaped by uncertainty. Action is important, but so is judicious inaction. Emotion is central to wisdom, yet emotional detachment is indispensable. A wise act in one context may be sheer folly in another…

One of the best ways to think about wisdom, in fact, is to try to identify those rare individuals who manage to reconcile these contradictions and still embody wisdom. . . We can learn a lot about wisdom from its exemplars, past and present.

I reached the same conclusion independently. Instead of defining wisdom by studying books and abstract theories, why not study the behavior of those we consider to be “sages”?

Hall suggests the following list: Gandhi, Confucius, Jesus, MLK, Jr., Socrates, Mother Teresa, Solomon, Buddha, the Pope (which one?), Oprah, Winston Churchill, Ann Landers (really), Nelson Mandela, Queen Elizabeth II. I can agree with most of them, but what about Marcus Aurelius, Benjamin Franklin, Yoda, Thales, Lao Tsu, Aesop, and Ekhart Tolle? I could go on, but, I believe that Hall is on the right track here, and I intend to follow it. For that matter, why not conjure up the archetype of the sage and describe would that would look like?

… a core element of wisdom is the commitment to social justice and the greater public good.”

In a profound sense, the figures we now celebrate for their wisdom often had a deeply adversarial relationship with the prevailing values of the societies in which they lived. . . Mandela and Gandhi were imprisoned; Confucius was unemployable; Socrates was put to death; even the closest friends of Jesus Christ, according to the philosopher Karl Jaspers, viewed him as a madman. In its particular time and place, wisdom not only perturbs but often appears socially dangerous.

Wisdom requires an experience-based knowledge of the world (including, especially, the world of human nature). It requires mental focus, reflecting the ability to analyze and discern the most important aspects of the acquired knowledge, knowing what to use and what to discard, almost on a case-by-case basis (put another way, it requires knowing when to follow rules but also when the usual rules no longer apply). It requires mediating, refereeing, between the frequently conflicting inputs of emotion and reason, of narrow self-interest and broader social interest, of instant rewards or future gains. Moreover, it expresses itself through an insistently social vocabulary of interactive behavior: a fundamental sense of justice (which is sometimes described as an innate form of morality, of knowing right from wrong), a commitment to the welfare of social (and, for that matter, genetic) units that extend beyond the self, and an ability to defer immediate gratification in order to achieve the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people.

On that utilitarian note, we will leave Stephen Hall for now, but not for good. He has more interesting observations about wisdom, including “the neural mechanisms for wise decision making.”

Give a kid an fMRI scanner, and you never know what he might come up with!