Not So Wise

When we think of wisdom, we often think of a sage man characterized by a long, white beard and wrinkles worn in to the corners of eyes that have seen many years of life. A wise person is expected to share sound advice and good judgement. Similarly, a so-called “pearl of wisdom” is an idiom for an insightful piece of knowledge. Knowledge is often conflated with wisdom, but I would argue that the two are distinct.

Knowledge is referred to as the understanding of a fact or experience, but understanding a fact is entirely different from understanding an experience. Facts are objective; they are self-contained and exist as undeniable pieces of information. Experiences are subjective; they are more often than not personal, relying on other experiences and formerly-held values and beliefs to define their meaning. Experiences may also only exist in a moment from the perspective of one person, unable to be truly understood or re-created by anyone else, anywhere else, at any other moment in time.

Understanding experiences seems to be outside of the realm of simple knowledge, depending on more than knowing facts. So does that mean that wisdom is the ability to understand experiences? Perhaps it is, but to say that is to say that experiences have a definite way to be understood. Of course, we can understand what happened in an experience, but that does not mean that there is a clear-cut message meant to be taken away from an experience.

If an infant is sitting in the kitchen next to a hot stove, they don’t necessarily have an experience of that stove. However, if they put their hand next to a burner and withdraw it because it is hot, they have had an experience with it. The act of extending oneself into the environment and having the environment push back is a kind of circuit that becomes a model for future behavior that can be applied elsewhere.

Another child is sitting in the same kitchen, but this time the burner is cooling down, and on top of the stove there are sweets that a parent has prepared. The child reaches up and grabs the sweets and has a different experience with the same object. He got different feedback from his environment. Both kids will have difference experiences with the same physical object and take that in to their lives in the future.

The two infants had different experiences with a drew conclusions from their experiences, which served as a model for future behavior and became a layer of what they probably consider to be wisdom from life experience. However, they may not be as wise as they think. If wisdom is having good judgement learned from life experience, then how can people with two different perceptions of the same experience both be wise? Is wisdom even a valid concept?