Is Wisdom Enough?

I want to say something that is controversial in Western modernity, with its technocratic and reductive vision of life. It is, however, common sense in most other cultures across place and time:
The thing you have the most power over in life, is the cultivation of wisdom.
The thing which will most benefit your life, is the cultivation of wisdom.
The most important task in life, is the cultivation of wisdom.

Remember that the cultivation of wisdom is the cultivation of a wise way of being—the cultivation of the character virtues too.

Almost everything in life can be taken from you, but if you keep your sanity, you can keep your wisdom. 

That which brings about all the other things we long for and are able to have, insofar as they are up to us, a product of our efforts, are made possible, or made more possible, by the cultivation of wisdom.

Yet, our culture produces a deep skepticism (and implicit despair) about this truth.

The exercise and cultivation of wisdom and virtue is the exercise and cultivation of the intellect and the will. People sometimes object that an effort of intellect and will is simply not enough. They have told themselves to be more rational, disciplined, or philosophical about their difficulties, and it has not worked. So they conclude that they need something else: psychological therapy, perhaps, or some deeper intervention that bypasses the conscious mind and works directly on the brain or the unconscious. 

Sometimes people do need something else. More often, we do better with multiple means, for example both philosophical and psychotherapeutic (psychological) work. In most cases, however, most people make this objection on the basis of a mistake. They have given up too soon on cultivating wisdom and virtue, and so they have not experienced the profound difference it can make.

The fundamental fault here lies with our culture. Culture is a parent, who tells us how to be, why to be, and gives us the means to do that. It also obstructs, shames, and punishes what it does not want. Our culture is technocratic. It has made a religion out of technology. 

Technocracy sees no richness in being, including the being of a human. It reduces us to objects which must be acted upon from without. We are nothing more, ultimately, than measurable mechanisms to be diagnosed and manipulated by some expert. A technocratic culture also devalues the inner life, beyond concerns for psychological comfort. Insofar as "it pays" to push this line, for example the society's economic system is geared less toward the greater good, and more toward the manipulation of the masses for the selfish interest of an elite, then these problems are only deepened. We lose sight not only of the mystery and depth of our humanity and our inner life, but also of our capacity, the power of being human. I am referring to what people often call agency, though that does not quite capture it.

Such a culture therefore neglects the concepts and practices that make for wisdom and virtue, and so it provides no guidance for understanding and cultivating them.

Let me repeat that for emphasis: 

• our technocratic culture neglects the concepts and practices that make for wisdom and virtue

Thus:

• our technocratic culture provides no guidance for understanding and cultivating wisdom and virtue.

People today don't even think in the ways I have described above, because it is not in the culture. Instead, they see themselves as psychological objects. If they do try to see life in this way, and to cultivate wisdom and virtue, their attempts are disorganised. The results reflect that.

If we did psychotherapy in this way, it would fail too.

If we tried to cultivate physical strength and fitness in this way, we would fail. 

​Without understanding, experience, and growth in the work of cultivating wisdom and virtue, it naturally seems like a weak faculty, and we conclude that technology is all we have. But we have been set up to fail.

This situation is completely unnecessary. Consider my description above of wisdom as a more true and good vision, that is achieved through the exercise of the intellectual virtues. The idea may be new to many people, but it is not at all complicated once you explore it. Sure, there is a lifetime of ever greater depth on offer here, but the basic concepts are basic. Yet, have you ever thought about it this way? I mean, has it ever been communicated to you? If it has, have you engaged in the effort and discipline required for such growth? If that was difficult to start and maintain, were you able to find a professional who could guide and support you? After all, it is relatively easy to locate a counsellor or psychologist, so why not a professional in this most important of life's concerns? 

Actually, in most cases you have succeeded to make life better through your effort of intellect and will. It is a great power you have. But that goes unnoticed. We tend to pay much less attention to our successes, compared to our perceived failings. The latter loom large. Yet those failings are simply the places where more intensive work is needed—informed, coherent, systematic, disciplined effort. To do such kinds of work in any sphere, we often need guidance so that we can understand what needs to be done, and so that we are supported in the ongoing work of doing it.

It is telling that cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) is in many ways an imitation of classical philosophy's cultivation of wisdom and virtue. You investigate your assumptions and improve your thinking, and you reshape your emotions and behaviour in light of that. CBT picked up what classical philosophers were putting down, albeit it in a modern scientific way, as many have acknowldged. Notice that we do not question whether CBT works—it does work, because it is generally done in an informed, coherent, disciplined way.

I put it to you that your capacities as a conscious being, your ability to see, know, love, choose, which we call wisdom and virtue, is far more powerful than anything in your life. Not that it is merely a form of power. It is what you are. And it is the source of all that matters in life. So I put it to you that this should be your main concern, well beyond any faith in technology, and well beyond the power and effects of good psychotherapy.

The master therapist Irvin Yalom wrote that the role of psychotherapy is to clear away psychological obstacles to flourishing. It clears the ground for the different work of "becoming more fully human," which is the work of philosophy. Further below I will discuss this relationship between philosophy and psychology, which is to say between the cultivation of wisdom and virtue versus work on our psychological patterns. We need both, but as Yalom suggests, though in different language, cultivation of wisdom is far more important; it is the point of life.

Further below I discuss the nature of humanistic, or what I call phenomenological, therapy and I list some of the benefits of insight. Insight is a part of wisdom—it is vision, sight, recognition. I point out that a powerful insight can reshape how we then see, think, feel, desire, and behave from that moment on. Take a negative example: you discover your partner is cheating on you. That is an insight, or something similar—it is new information—which may radically change you. You did not have to practice that change, and nothing needed to repeatedly reshape you; one moment was enough. Now consider positive examples: a more true and good vision, especially when it floods the soul. That too changes us, without further psychological work needed. Of course, many insights require habituation. That is important too, but we see here the power of insight, and by extension wisdom. The path of Socrates and Plato is the radical reshaping of how we see, in ways that transform who we are and how our lives go.

Insofar as who we are, and what we do, matters then the thing we need most of all in life is wisdom. That is the root from which the rest follows. How we see reality, and what we see, is the prism through which everything else flows. That is the heart and purpose of my work. However much I draw also on the work of habituation, and on psychotherapeutic work, it is the cultivation of wisdom which lies at the centre of my philosophical counselling. My work is the attempt to see, in ways that change us.