Reflective Understanding

Reflective understanding involves the evaluation of our personal attitude formed of our changing, often faulty, and frequently conflicting beliefs, emotions, desires, experiences, and evaluations. Their evaluation proceeds from two points of view. One is that of our personal attitude. The other is the point of view of the various modes of evaluations that jointly form the evaluative framework of the context in which we live. Both kinds of evaluations may be faulty. Reflective understanding involves the critical evaluation of the reasons for and against the prevailing social evaluations that follow from our personal attitude and of the reasons for and against our personal attitude that follow from the prevailing social evaluations. The test of the adequacy of our personal attitude is our satisfaction with our life. And the test of social evaluations is the continued long-term allegiance of those who follow the social evaluations, although they need not do so.

Basic Assumptions

Basic assumptions are those we cannot help holding. Some of them are factual, such as that we have a body; other people exist; we need nutrition, rest, contact with others; we have and use language, and so forth. Others are evaluative, like health is better than sickness, happiness better than misery, appreciation better than humiliation, peace better than war, and so on. Such assumptions are about the fundamental conditions of our lives and presupposed by how we respond to the world. Some of them may be mistaken, but if many of them were mistaken, human life would be endangered. We can then test our beliefs, emotions, desires, and evaluations by asking whether they conform to basic assumptions. Part of human wisdom is to know which of the many assumptions we make are basic, which are not, and how to avoid confusing strongly held assumptions, especially evaluative ones, with basic ones.

Approaches to Wisdom

This chapter develops human wisdom by considering the reasons for and against four alternative approaches to wisdom: classical, epistemological, psychological, and moral. It discusses the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches and explains the reasons for and against incorporating their components in the gradually emerging conception of human wisdom. One main difference between the humanistic and these approaches is the central importance the former attributes and the latter moots of the personal attitude we all have to how we rightly or wrongly think we should live.

Human Wisdom

Human wisdom is approached by way of a plain commonsensical account of how wisdom is generally understood. This account is developed further by contrasting it with the classical conception of wisdom, introducing some reasons for and against the two conceptions, and describing some of the problems with each of the two conceptions. It stresses the central importance of our personal attitude formed of our beliefs, emotions, desires, experiences, and evaluations that jointly make wisdom personal, important, and essential to our sense of identity. The critical evaluation of one’s personal attitude is one of the central tasks of human wisdom.

Wisdom

This chapter is the concluding account of the humanistic conception of wisdom that has emerged from the preceding chapters. Human wisdom is to form and maintain throughout the adversities and contingencies of life a sense of proportion, and reasonable, realistic, but at the same reduced expectations. It enables us to compensate for the loss of some of what we value by the enjoyment of others and to recognize that the contingencies of life may also benefit and not just harm us. If we possess sufficient depth, we do not confuse basic assumptions with our personal evaluative commitments, persevere in our lifelong effort to cultivate reflective understanding and depth, and to do so especially when the contingencies of life and our faults frustrate even our most reasonable efforts.

Wisdom

Human wisdom guides how we cope with perennial problems by relying on an unstable compound of often conflicting evaluations prompted by our personal history and the various social modes of evaluations prevalent in the context in which we live. For this we need to rely on considered judgments that weigh the relative importance of these conflicting evaluations. This is difficult because both personal and social evaluations change in response to changing conditions. And because making a considered judgment to override one of our own evaluations in favor of another requires violating one of our own s commitments. It makes matters even more difficult that no matter how well considered our judgments are, they may be mistaken and may themselves change in response to the changing internal and external conditions of our life. Human wisdom nevertheless enables us to make more reliable considered judgments by adhering to basic assumptions, cultivating reflective understanding, and growing in depth. These are the subjects of the following chapters.

Perennial Problems

Three perennial problems are discussed: external goods, internal conflicts, and evaluative contingencies. These problems are recurrent and ineliminable conditions of human life. External goods are the physical, physiological, and social resources we need for living however we think we should. The problem is that the availability of these resources is often beyond our control. Internal conflicts are between our personal and social evaluative commitments. We are often forced to choose between them, and the problem is that whichever we choose, we lose something important for living as we think we should. Evaluative contingencies affect both what commitments we make and the conditions that may frustrate even our most reasonable efforts to honor them. We need human wisdom for coping with these problems again and again, because they unavoidably recur.

Last Words

Calling this approach to wisdom “humanistic” and a “conception” is meant to carry weight. It is humanistic in that it is anthropocentric, not metaphysical or scientific. It does not absurdly assume that the humanistic conception is a substitute for metaphysics or science. It is concerned with evaluative questions and answers that are different from metaphysical and scientific questions and answers. Embedded in the humanistic conception is a point of view from which we, the particular person each one of us is, can evaluate the possibilities and limits of life as they are in the context in which we live. It is an evaluative conception of how we should live in the world, not a theory about the nature of the world. It enables us to form a complex personal attitude based on our beliefs, emotions, desires, experiences, and evaluations that jointly guide us as we seek understanding, enjoyment, human contacts, love, recognition, security, and a sense of the worthwhileness of life. It guides how we should live, given possibilities and limits of our personal attitude and the context in which we live. The resulting account of the humanistic conception of wisdom is intended as a contribution to philosophy as a humanistic discipline.

Depth

Depth enables us to form a dispassionate view of ourselves, our context, and the ups and downs of our life in particular and of human lives in general. It provides a detached yet not indifferent point of view that restrains over-reactions to our faulty, ambivalent, and conflicted personal attitude and to the perennial problems that we have cope with throughout our life. It enables us to acknowledge the fallibility of our responses to the contingencies of life, to guard against losing heart and becoming disillusioned by the uncertainties of even our most reasonable efforts, and to understand that although we are at risk, we are not doomed. Depth enables us to view our situation from both a personal and impersonal point of view, to evaluate our personal attitude reasonably, and to avoid succumbing to comforting illusions and self-serving excuses.

Two Assumptions

The account of human wisdom is developed further by giving reasons against the widely held assumption that wisdom is knowledge of the ideal of The Good that reason requires everyone, always, in all circumstances to aim at. The contrary assumption of human wisdom is that all goods are plural and context-dependent. Human nature is varied, and human aims are many, ambivalent, and varied depending on changing psychological and social circumstances. Human nature is not basically good or bad, but basically complicated and ambivalent. Human wisdom is needed to form a reasonable view of our context, guide how we want to live, and enable us to cope as well as we can with adverse circumstances that prevent us from living as we think we should.