At the end of the article on wisdom by Sharon Ryan located on the Stanford Encyclopedia site, Ryan concludes that a general understanding of the nature of wisdom is as such:
S is wise iff:
1) S has extensive factual and theoretical knowledge.
2) S knows how to live well.
3) S is successful at living well.
4) S has very few unjustified beliefs.
[Ryan 1]
I understand, after reading over her entry, the desire she has to have a definition that holds each of the premises, as she is answering certain concerns located within previous definitions of wisdom, such as the ideas of the humility theories and such [Ryan 1].
The 1st problem: Too much luck…
Honestly, it is my opinion that the theory that Ryan has set forth relies a little too much on luck. Condition three is a perfect example of this. According to ones personal definition, an agent [S] may or may not be ’living well’ due to various factors out of their control. If one is born at the lowest tier of the economic scale, would someone such as Ryan ever look at that person and honestly believe that [S] is successful at living well?
Likewise, isn’t it probable that a Paris Hilton would look upon the life conditions of someone such as Ryan [I am assuming that Ryan is an average academic in this example] and reject that a person in academia could be successful at ‘living well’?
Of course this view could be un-courteous to Ryan as she does point toward Nozick for a definition on the aspect of what it takes to ‘live well’, but even in its abstractedness, it is still vulnerable to the concept that ‘living well’ could have a multitude of definitions and no way to reconcile them. What’s worse, after working on my end of term project, I have met a few people that I would consider wise and leading flourishing lives, yet I shrink from the idea that they are ‘living well’ as their illness has noticeably taken something away from their quality of life…
It seems that condition two and three suffers from an extreme amount of vagueness, to the point of being ludicrous. Let us assume that we hold a vague idea of what ‘the good’ is, which by itself is another debate entirely. To know what the ‘good life’ entails we would have to come from our assumed definition of ‘the good’ and then entrench ourselves in a definitional warfare that would have to account for various cultures, implications, religions and more. To be blunt, I don’t think one could even begin to satisfactorily designate what ‘the good life’ is in such a way that it would entail everything that could be considered ‘the good life’.
I point out this as it seems that if an agent were wise, it would be an aspect to that agent that would be apparent to more than just the people who agree with the agent on what ‘living well’ entails.
The 2nd problem: Wise yet illiterate?
Condition one states the need for knowledge to be wise [Ryan 1]. I do grant Ryan that it seems that an agent should be in possession of a certain level or kind of knowledge before being considered wise, but it seems that ‘extensive’ is a bit strong for such an explanation.
Granted, in the world of philosophers as I’ve seemed to have noticed, there is this strain of elitism present. There appears this overwhelming need for many people to browbeat others with their intellect, and yet I have difficulty believing that many of these individuals are on the correct road to wisdom.
A person that comes to mind is my grandfather. This is a man that I would claim to be wise, or at least in possession of a certain type of wisdom. The man has a high school education and quite a bit of mechanics certificates and whatever schooling those certificates require, but the man learned quite a bit of this in the Air Force as he never attended a university. My grandfather has a certain type of ‘earthy wisdom’ in which I have trusted with a number of issues, yet it would seem that under condition one that he would not be in possession of ‘wisdom’.
Let us take this a step further and ask about people who lived centuries ago, back when most of the population was illiterate. Would this mean that the only wise people in existence were the academics and the bourgeois? I am uncomfortable with such an assumption and with what I believe is good reason. I have met a number of educated people who fit condition one, yet they were by far the most unwise individuals I’ve ever known.
Overall, I understand what Ryan is trying to accomplish, and I applause her courage at doing so. It just doesn’t seem that what ‘wisdom’ entails can be couched so comfortably in the terms of academia as she is attempting. There seems to be qualities involved that her conditions touch upon, but don’t actually represent.
Sharon Ryan, 2007 http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wisdom/
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