Wisdom

The dream of a Liberal (arts) education—which is the scaled, democratic form of the Keatsian ideal of negative capability—cannot hold up when liberalism itself is held to be suspect.

Like the Stoics and Daoists, I want to put my focus on wisdom so that a “wise agency” can emerge. This would mean people take the right action and get the right things done, in whatever domain they find themselves.

Tell a wise person or else keep silent

for those who do not understand

will mock it right away.

A simpler, more elegant definition, still compatible with Grossmann’s, comes from Tom Morgan of LE:

“Know what to do, and when.”

I love parsimonious definitions, which is why I favour Tom’s over the academic ones.

Wisdom refers to the slow accumulation of personal values that work well for people living in different kinds of ways.

An enlightened being sees their agony without diminishing its reality. In other words, it doesn’t just turn away from it—but, on the other hand, simultaneously sees everything, including that agony [and] including hell, actually, as bubbles of bliss in an ocean of bliss. That’s the kind of cognitive dissonance that the ordinary mind cannot get... See more