Two Fools on Top of a Mountain: Against Wisdom
In this article, Roberts considers the value and worth of wisdom nowadays. Where are the sages, you might ask? Roberts asserts: having their spines detached from their skulls.
Wisdom is for idiots.
Now, why would I write that? Well, there are many reasons. Some of them are fun, and some are serious; our culture has a tendency to fetishize wisdom, usually while being unable to define it. How many people are internet 'sages', repeating with pristine recollection the works of Stoics, Buddhists, or yogis? They are accompanied by the pessimists and nihilists, repeating in one form or another the 'wisdom of Silenus', whining to us about the suffering of life.
However, at risk of repeating something Zizek has a joke for, I'll say this: wisdom is spineless. Worse, it is an idea 'on loan'. It is an inflatable arm waving man outside a car dealership; bendable, trying to sell you something used, and pumped up with continuous hot air. You are enticed to borrow an idea whose sole basis of authority is that it has been around for awhile.
The issue with the aged, invertebrate nature of wisdom? Well, what plagues people the most are ideas which, having lodged themselves in their minds, get stuck there and end up outliving their usefulness. Ideas, of course, are strategies for dealing with the world. A strategy, applied beyond its usefulness, is a guarantee of failure in one way or another. If you play chess and never change your strategy, you will lose.
Now, if this is the case, why does wisdom appeal to us? Because it does not actually present itself as being against this. How many wise sayings refer to being like water? Who has not come across a proverb that plays on the need for patience? It is not attempting to change us, but justify whatever we already think. If there are two pillars that define human existence, it is that we do not learn from our experiences and that we live on a faith in our own justifications. At worst, experiences are moments of interruption in the chasing of personal faiths that conditions human activity.
I live my life much like Cyrus from Vidal's Creation; I have come into contact with, and listened to, the 'wise people' and sages of our postmodern world. I listen, and I nod, and laugh. I hear of 'being like Nature' from the Stoics, or the assertion by Buddhists of Nirvana and the denial of self, or the absurdists tell me in the same breath that there is no metaphysics and then say the world is absurd. From these wayward bustirapes to people like Jordan Peterson or Marianne Williamson, the claim to wisdom seems to be both proposed as something we are in desperate need of and yet is something plentiful. You can make a pretty penny from spouting sayings and ideas from such 'sages'. Not even the dead are safe from our obsession with money.
And like Cyrus, I turn all of these thinkers away. Everywhere I look, I see people believing in some greater transcendence, a greater truth, a greater power, even a greater peace. Even the pessimist accepts that if we just denied our will--a la Buddha or Schopenhauer--that we would find peace. Every time I grasp with our 'wisdom', I find myself understanding, appreciating, and uttering the observation of Vidal's protagonist when he weighed the religions and philosophies of the world:
"It is astonishing to think that millions of people in my time—now, too, I suppose—actually thought that at a given moment in history two human beings had evolved to a higher state than that of all the gods that ever were or ever will be. This is titanism, as the Greeks would say. This is madness."
Wisdom is this madness; born of a weak, infantile knowledge, its application to the world requires it to be separated from the mind and the times that produced it. The postmodern age has done little more than detach ideas from their roots, with the belief that those ideas can still be used. What modernism did to Christianity--as Nietzsche said--postmodernism has done to philosophy; everything has exposed roots, and when we reach back for them, we fumble about. There is not a postmodern philosopher who has not written some jargon-filled billet-doux to madness. They wondered what secret madness held, what truths or lies it would give us. Madness was promoted, and what we found out, we found out too late: madness is just madness, and it is driving us insane.
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Many might need this wisdom; after all, a lot of people do not examine their lives, and so a word from the wise is enough. As it should be clear, the lives of we humans are not driven by truth, transcendence, hope, spirit, or love. It is driven by what is useful. That is why it seemed every psychoanalyst from Freud to Adler to Bion took some attempt--not always useful or coherent--at bringing truth into psychological diagnosis. Truth, it is often believed, helps us change. It does, I think, but let's not be reverent here; truth 'changes' us the way a shove changes our direction. The direction we go means more than the shove.
Beyond this, wisdom has truly come to haunt us, has it not? We have people approaching events and situations as if this wisdom rivals the knowledge we have now. And they do so at their own convenience; they would never go around proclaiming, as the Stoics did, that all life is based on the pneuma of fire and wind. But the modern Stoic will unabashedly claim that the world is rational, that people are rational, and that their apathy towards anything is rational. The Buddhist will, especially in the West, emphasize meditation and 'one-ness', but they shy away from anātman when it comes to producing goods for consumption through their job. And what is anātman to the downtrodden, whose life has been little else but denial?
This, I think, drives us--those who can stomach it--to living a life without wisdom, what Nietzsche would call 'misosophy'. When wisdom is evoked, one should not be relaxed but suspicious; ancient beliefs are always coupled with the modern motives that drive them. Why does the Stoic love apathy? Because emotions are harder to embrace in our snarky world. Why does the absurdist claim life is just absurdities? Because our societies seem complicated, and instead of wanting to know them better, they pretend they cannot. Why does the Buddhist claim one must deny their will? Because they have been denied.
Does this make all wisdom wrong? No, but that is neither here nor there; wisdom does not desire to be right. Wisdom can make sense, sometimes. If taken in good faith--as in Sartre's notion of this--wisdom can be a strategy un-tried, which brings one closer to achievement. An aged idea is not a bad thing, but like most dead things it should not be embraced. It died for a reason, and one should deduce this before considering its usefulness.
But to live without wisdom is not to deny it as much as to treat it as a strategy, one of many. Much like treating religion as a cultural rather than a metaphysical phenomenon, one must treat wisdom not as truth, but as psychological. And since humans are animals, often living out our desires through delusions, the motive that harnesses this wisdom should be questioned.
The stereotype of the wise man on a mountain, contemplating the world and offering advice to the mountain climbers, is a good analogy for wisdom. You did not require the guru's wisdom to achieve the feat of climbing a mountain; whatever wisdom they tell you is worth less than what you just did in its name. And you did not need it to achieve the feat, did you?
When in the presence of wisdom, there are two fools; they who accepted the wisdom, and they who gave it.
Wisdom, as you can see, is for idiots.
“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!“