Last week the local Socrates Café group decided to tackle the question “what is wisdom”. There was a good turnout that night (about 12 people, including myself), and a lively discussion ensued. Just about everyone had a different take on the idea of “wisdom” and how it differed from facts, knowledge, art, scientific beliefs, technique, etc. Some people said it was all about love and relationships (the long-term versions of those things, anyway). Others cited the great spiritual avatars, including Jesus and the Buddha. I interjected that wisdom in the greater sense would even encompass economics and politics (e.g., Warren Buffet and Abraham Lincoln).

In the end, we were all “chasing a butterfly” with an intellectual net, and coming up empty. Unlike something like a lump of coal or an apple, which succumb quite readily to the taxonomic guidelines provided by science, wisdom is something that refuses to be nailed down. I cited two examples. First, I brought back memories of Robert Pirsig and his quest for the notion of “quality” in his first book, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. I proposed that Pirsig’s high-level concept of “quality” and our sought-after notion of “wisdom” were about the same thing. And that we both had about the same success; Pirsig went on in his second book (“Lila”) to derive a formal specification for quality, i.e.his “MOQ” or “metaphysics of quality”.

Lila was not nearly as successful as Zen and the Art, and Pirsig soon faded from the public scene (although his MOQ still attracts a small band of followers via the Internet). He had touched a nerve when he related his own tumultuous life story to the notion of quality. But ironically, he then lost what tried to capture, specifically by trying too hard to capture it. As good as the MOQ and the story of its genesis in Lila might be, the public could tell that this was NOT quality, not a part of wisdom.

Second, I cited the field of academic philosophy itself. The word philosophy is Greek for “love of wisdom”. And Pirsig showed in Zen and the Art that the pure essence of wisdom could really excite the public. So why doesn’t the field of academic philosophy get much public attention? Again, I think they have the same problem that Pirsig had. They have tried too hard to capture in their intellectual structures an ineffable notion, something that dies when you put it in a cage. Interestingly, we were discussing of all this in the context of a movement which was trying to bring public interest back into the broader concept of philosophy, i.e. the Socrates Café movement.

But academic philosophy does give us a variety of intellectual structures which can be useful in approaching the idea of wisdom. The question is, where is the border zone, the limit beyond which the academics can take us no further? And what does such a limit, which was so clearly apparent on the night of our recent conversation, mean for the intellectual systems that are so well regarded today in the academy? Well, perhaps this supports the old “folk wisdom” that there is “something more” to reality than we know via our three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.

Sure, I’m just as cynical as any academician or scientist of reports of ghosts and visions and ESP and seances with the dead. But I’m also cynical when those academians and scientists ask me to believe that what they know via their logical techniques eliminates all possibilities that there is a “grand theme” to reality (variously called God, Allah, Brahman, the Great Spirit, karma, etc. by different peoples in different times and places), along with an everlasting relationship between that God and our own self-awareness. The neural network structure of our brains and minds is a sponge which absorbs our sensory experiences, holds them in memory, and ferrets out that which is most regular and important from them. Our social network structure, supported by our complex language and other forms of interaction, carries that process to even higher levels. What I saw the other night at Socrates Café in our discussion on wisdom is perhaps one more tiny little hint, for me anyway, that the positivist / atheist view is not correct.

However, as to what in fact IS correct, in opposition to such a view, is still unknown (and perhaps mostly unknowable). As with Pirsig and quality, as with philosophy and wisdom, the organized religions often do more harm to the notion of the divine than good; the more dogmatic the religion, the worse the situation becomes. Perhaps that oft-cited quote from trumpeter Louie Armstrong regarding jazz is ultimately the best you can do:

“If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.”