Plenty Coups (Crow: Alaxchíia Ahú, ‘many achievements;’ 1848 – 1932) was the principal chief of the Crow Nation (‘Apsáalooke’) and a visionary leader.*
Wise people, one might argue, possess epistemic self-confidence, yet lack epistemic arrogance. Wise people tend to acknowledge their fallibility, and wise people are reflective, introspective, and tolerant of uncertainty. Any acceptable theory of wisdom ought to be compatible with such traits.
[Most theories of wisdom] ... require a wise person to have knowledge of some sort. All of these views very clearly distinguish knowledge from expertise on a particular subject. Moreover, all of these views maintain that wise people know ‘what is important.’ The views differ, for the most part, over what it is important for a wise person to know, and on whether there is any behavior, action, or way of living, that is required for wisdom.
Wisdom is not just one type of knowledge, but diverse. What a wise person needs to know and understand constitutes a varied list: the most important goals and values of life – the ultimate goal, if there is one; what means will reach these goals without too great a cost; what kinds of dangers threaten the achieving of these goals; how to recognize and avoid or minimize these dangers; what different types of human beings are like in their actions and motives (as this presents dangers or opportunities); what is not possible or feasible to achieve (or avoid); how to tell what is appropriate when; knowing when certain goals are sufficiently achieved; what limitations are unavoidable and how to accept them; how to improve oneself and one's relationships with others or society; knowing what the true and unapparent value of various things is; when to take a long-term view; knowing the variety and obduracy of facts, institutions, and human nature; understanding what one's real motives are; how to cope and deal with the major tragedies and dilemmas of life, and with the major good things too. — Robert Nozick
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“Wisdom doesn’t require method,” said one of my wiser friends in an online post. In the sense that our acquisition of knowledge seems to require various kinds of method that act as means to the ends of knowing, this helps distinguish knowledge (and information or data as well) from wisdom. Yet I am ambivalent about the truth of this claim, one reason hinging on precisely what method is intended to mean here. In addition, and conceptually speaking, there are several different characterizations of wisdom which invoke somewhat different properties or qualities for distinguishing wisdom from mere knowledge (and we have the idea that a person, like Socrates, is wise because he disavows any claims to wisdom while nonetheless exemplifying its properties; this may perhaps mean only that epistemic humility is one quality of the wise person, as he or she is aware, unlike the rest of us, of the extent of his or her ignorance). If we look at people we consider wise, especially, for example, those in religious and philosophical traditions around the world, there existed more or less similar methods (generally speaking, ‘ascetic’ exercises or practices [from the Greek áskēsis]) which appear to have been essential to their individuation, self-actualization, or self-realization (used here rather broadly so as not to imply any one particular religious or psychological or philosophical traditions or school of thought) which led eventually to wisdom. By this I mean what the philosopher John Cottingham calls “spiritual exercises,” which overlap with what has been termed “therapeia” or simply therapy in both philosophical and religious worldviews (the latter being those in which philosophy plays a prominent part in the tradition, as we see in some forms of Indic philosophy, be it from Hinduism or Buddhism, as well as in Daoism and Confucianism, as well as early Islam and Sufism more generally).
These methods of course do not guarantee one will arrive at wisdom, thus we might say they are necessary but not sufficient conditions for same. It may also be true that those who do not practice spiritual exercises or philosophical therapy may, on occasion, be wise or display wisdom (such as is captured in aphorisms, maxims, and proverbs), but I believe these to be exceptions to the rule. In ancient Greek philosophy there are indeed “methods” of this kind (which often exemplify the ability to avoid the folly of ‘willing what cannot be willed’), hence the title of John M. Cooper’s book, Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plotinus (Princeton University Press, 2012). Thus we speak of individuals exemplifying wisdom (indeed, narratives of such persons are not hard to find in religious and non-religious or philosophical worldviews around the planet). Having said all of this, I suspect the most compelling way we identify embodiments or incarnations of wisdom in the first instance is through what is known as a “direct reference” theory of the Good (and wise!) wherein we anchor our moral concepts and epistemic virtues in actual exemplars (although fictional characters might be used here as well), thus we say that a wise or good person is like that, referring to the character, life, or actions of a particular individual (see the Zagzebski title below). What makes for wisdom may differ in particulars across worldviews and traditions, but it would appear that, at least in principle, cross-cultural recognition of wisdom is still possible, there being a strong family resemblance here, although such recognition of course presumes prior knowledge of the respective societies or cultures and their worldviews. At the very least, it appears that wisdom is more often than not linked to some conception of what it means to live well, to live in the light of the Good. As for wisdom’s possible intrinsic ties to eudaimonia and happiness, it would seem much depends on how we fill out these concepts, although we might be justified in seeing these states as by-products or incidental benefits of being wise, thus not necessarily as constitutive of wisdom as such.
* On Plenty Coups, please see the Jonathan Lear title below. One might argue that Plenty Coups was wise both before (embodying the ideals of the Crow way of life or culture and especially the ideal of a Crow chief) and after (symbolized by Plenty Coup leaving his war bonnet and coup stick on a sarcophagus during a ceremonial burial in Washington of the Unknown Soldier in 1921) the traditional martial and nomadic Crow way of life ended. I trust by the end of Lear’s book one will learn why and how Plenty Coup exemplified wisdom (and what today we term transformational leadership) “after the buffalo went away” and the Crow people were confined to a reservation. As for the spiritual and moral psychological “methods” practiced by Plenty Coup, these would include his training as a young warrior as well as the practice of “dream-vision” and interpretation:
“What is striking about Plenty Coup’s dream—and the interpretation the tribe gave to it—is that it was used not merely to predict a future event, it was used by the tribe to struggle with the intelligibility of even that lay on the horizon of their ability to understand. Dreams were regularly used by the Crow to predict the future. People would, for instance, wait for a vision in a dream to them it was a propitious time to go into battle. But young Plenty Coup’s dream was of a different order. It did not predict any particular event, but the change of the world order, It was prophetic in the sense that the tribe used in to face up to a radically different future.” — Jonathan Lear
Recommended (in addition to the Cooper title above)
- Cottingham, John. The Spiritual Dimension: Religion, Philosophy and Human Value (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
- Fiordalis, David V., ed. Buddhist Spiritual Practices: Thinking with Pierre Hadot on Buddhism, Philosophy, and the Path (Mangalam Press, 2018).
- Ganeri, Jonardon and Clare Carlisle, eds. Philosophy as Therapeia (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement: 66) (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
- LaFargue, Michael. The Tao of the Tao Te Ching: A Translation and Commentary (State University of New York Press, 1992).
- Lear, Jonathan. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Harvard University Press, 2006).
- Nussbaum, Martha C. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994).
- Olberding, Amy. Moral Exemplars in the Analects: The Good Person is That (Routledge, 2012).
- Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus. Divine Motivation Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
“I hear the white men say there will be no more war. But this cannot be true. There will be other wars. Men have not changed, and whenever they quarrel they will fight, as they have always done.” — Plenty Coups
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