Wisdom

Plato treats wisdom as one of the four cardinal virtues, and in the Laws he makes it chief among the divine goods that govern human life. In the Republic, he divides the soul into reason, spirit, and appetite, and assigns wisdom to that part of the soul which is capable of knowledge and which ought to rule the rest. The wise person is the one in whom reason has a knowledge of what is for the interest of each part and of the whole. By the same principle, the wise city is governed by those who have ascended from the cave of appearances to the vision of the Good. Wisdom, on this view, differs from mere learning. It is the virtue that orders thought and conduct together, so that fair reasonings are not left idle in the soul while appetite or passion commands.

In the Apology, Socrates offers a more modest account. The oracle at Delphi declares that no man is wiser than he, and after examining pretenders to wisdom among statesmen, poets, and craftsmen, he concludes that his advantage consists in knowing that he does not know. God alone is wise; the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing. In the Symposium and the Phaedrus, Socrates refuses the name of wise man to any human being and reserves for men the modest title of lover of wisdom. The philosopher stands between the wise and the ignorant: neither possessing wisdom as the gods do, nor indifferent to it as the foolish are. Human wisdom, on this account, begins with intellectual humility and with the recognition that the highest knowledge remains an object of desire rather than of secure possession.

These two pictures need not be treated as contradictory. The vision of the Good in the Republic may be read as the completion of the Socratic search, and the philosopher's love of wisdom as the disposition that makes that ascent possible. Wisdom starts in acknowledged ignorance and aims, if it aims at anything, at the contemplation of what is highest, and then returns enlightened to the sphere of action. The question of whether such contemplation yields a science of divine things, or only a dialectic that never fully attains its object, is taken up under the ideas of Knowledge and of Good and Evil. Plato also connects wisdom with the harmony of the soul and the state: where reason fails to rule or be obeyed, there is, he says, no shadow of wisdom, but only a kind of folly in which knowledge and conduct fall apart.

Plato leaves the tradition two related claims: that wisdom is knowledge of the highest things ordered toward right rule of soul and city, and that the human condition is that of the lover of wisdom rather than of the wise man already in possession. Aristotle will divide what Plato holds together, distinguishing theoretical wisdom as knowledge of first causes from practical wisdom as deliberation about human affairs, and treating the philosopher-king who unites both as an ideal rather than as a political possibility.

Aristotle identifies wisdom with the highest form of knowledge, and he names as its object the highest things by nature. In the opening of the Metaphysics, he defines sophia as knowledge of first principles and causes, the science that asks why things are, rather than only what they are. He calls this science divine or theology, because God is thought to be among the causes of all things and a first principle. It is not the most useful science, but the most desirable for its own sake. All the other sciences are more necessary, he says, but none is better. The wise man knows the causes behind appearances and can teach them; he possesses truth about first principles and also what follows from them.

In the Nicomachean Ethics Book VI, Aristotle introduces a second excellence that cannot be reduced to this speculative science. Phronesis, practical wisdom or prudence, is the capacity to deliberate well about what is good for human beings and to act accordingly. It concerns things about which it is possible to deliberate: particulars, changing situations, and the right moment for action. Philosophic wisdom, by contrast, contemplates none of the things that make a man happy in the ordinary sense of human goods. Aristotle illustrates the difference by the early Greek sages. We say that Anaxagoras, Thales, and men like them have philosophic but not practical wisdom when we see them ignorant of what is to their own advantage. They know things remarkable, admirable, and even divine, yet useless for the conduct of life, because it is not human goods they seek.

This separation of speculative from practical wisdom shapes much of the later discussion. When Aristotle refers to wisdom as one of the four virtues in the Politics, he sometimes speaks as if it named a single excellence; more often he insists on the division. Wisdom, as an intellectual virtue, is not even required for the growth of the moral virtues in the way prudence is. As treated under the idea of Prudence, it is impossible, on his account, to be good without practical wisdom, and impossible to be practically wise without moral virtue. A person may therefore be a brilliant metaphysician and a fool in practical affairs, or skilled in action and without knowledge of first causes. The complete life would need both, but they remain different excellences directed toward different objects.

Aristotle's twofold account shapes much of what follows. Aquinas builds his theology on the distinction between philosophical wisdom and prudence, while adding a further, supernatural gift of wisdom. Later modern writers often restate the gap between pure and practical reason in terms that still echo the Aristotelian split. Whether wisdom is one thing or two, and which form of it is properly called highest, remains an open question in the tradition.

Augustine takes over the Platonic identification of wisdom with knowledge of the highest things, but he redirects that knowledge toward God as known in faith and revelation. The philosophers sought wisdom by reason, and the best of them, the Platonists, came nearest to Christian teaching. "It is evident that none come nearer to us than the Platonists," he writes, when he attributes to Plato the conception of the wise man as one who imitates, knows, and loves God and is made blessed through fellowship with Him. Yet human reason, weakened by sin, cannot reach its goal unaided. True wisdom begins with the fear of the Lord, a recognition that we are creatures dependent on a Creator whose nature surpasses our unaided understanding. The Scriptures, in Augustine's reading, open a path to the heart of wisdom that the methods of natural inquiry alone do not provide.

In the City of God, Augustine distinguishes the wisdom of the earthly city from the wisdom of the heavenly. The world's wisdom seeks happiness in temporal goods, in power, pleasure, and reputation. The wisdom of the saints rests in God alone, the only object that can fully satisfy the restless human heart. This is not a rejection of learning. Augustine studied the Platonists with care and credited them with real insight into the intelligible order. He insists, however, that philosophy without faith remains incomplete, and that the fear of God is the first of seven steps by which the soul ascends to wisdom, followed by piety, knowledge, resolution, counsel, purification of heart, and finally the peaceful enjoyment of wisdom itself. The relation of this ascent to the broader problem of happiness and the last end is treated under the ideas of Happiness and of God.

Augustine also distinguishes scientia, knowledge of temporal things, from sapientia, wisdom concerning eternal things. Both are good, but wisdom is higher because its object is higher. The mind that knows the world and does not know God has learning without wisdom. Folly, in one of its principal senses for the Christian tradition Augustine inherits, is not mere ignorance but the turning of the heart away from God toward earthly things, or the denial that there is a God. Against such folly he sets a wisdom that is both speculative, in its contemplation of eternal truth, and practical, in its ordering of human life according to the divine law.

Augustine sets the terms for much of medieval thought: wisdom is theological in its highest form, its source is divine illumination as well as natural reason, and the philosophers who sought it by reason alone were noble but insufficient. Aquinas will press the point further by asking how far natural reason reaches and where grace must take over, without collapsing philosophical wisdom into a single undifferentiated dependence on faith.

Aquinas adopts Aristotle's definition of wisdom as knowledge of first causes and Augustine's claim that true wisdom requires knowledge of God. His contribution is to show that these need not be competing claims, but different levels within a single ordered structure. Since it belongs to the wise man to order and to judge, and since lesser matters are judged in the light of a higher cause, he who considers absolutely the highest cause of the whole universe, namely God, is most of all called wise. Sacred doctrine, which treats of God not only as known through creatures but as known to Himself and revealed to others, is therefore especially called wisdom. Metaphysics or the theology of the philosophers remains a genuine form of wisdom, but an incomplete one. The contrast between natural and supernatural wisdom is developed more fully under the ideas of Metaphysics and of Theology.

Aquinas distinguishes several modes of wisdom. There is philosophical or metaphysical wisdom, an acquired intellectual virtue that grasps the highest causes through natural reason. This is Aristotle's sophia. There is the theological wisdom ordered by faith, which accepts on divine authority truths that reason cannot demonstrate. And highest of all is the gift of wisdom, a supernatural grace by which the Holy Spirit enables the soul to judge all things from God's perspective, connaturally, through charity rather than through study alone. Wisdom as a gift differs from wisdom as an acquired intellectual virtue: the latter is attained by human effort, whereas the former descends from above. As charity is the perfection of the will, so wisdom is the perfection of the intellect; and the gift of wisdom is both speculative and practical, directing human acts to the sovereign good which is the last end.

Aquinas also treats the beginning of wisdom with care. For the philosophers, wisdom begins in wonder and proceeds from the axioms of reason. For the theologians, wisdom begins, as to its essence, in the articles of faith, and as to its effect, in the fear of the Lord, whether servile fear that disposes a man to refrain from sin or filial fear that is already the first fruit of wisdom itself. He further distinguishes true wisdom from the counterfeits of worldly wisdom: earthly, if a man fixes his end in external goods; sensual, if in the goods of the body; devilish, if in some excellence that imitates the devil's pride. These worldly wisdoms constitute the sin of folly, which withdraws the mind from spiritual things and plunges it into earthly ones. The problem of folly and of the praise of fools is one strand of the larger discussion of virtue and vice treated under Virtue.

Aquinas offers a full and ordered account of wisdom, holding together philosophical science, revealed doctrine, and the infused gift. Later modern writers will often set aside the highest of these levels and redefine wisdom as a human achievement of method or of moral discipline, without requiring charity, grace, or the ordered ascent through the modes Aquinas describes.

Montaigne turns the discussion of wisdom away from systems of first causes and toward the examination of the self. The schoolmen and the philosophers had built architectures of wisdom; he asks whether any of them actually made a man wise. Learning and wisdom, on his view, are different things, and the learned are often among the least wise. Christians, he notes, have a special knowledge of how natural and original an evil curiosity is in man: the thirst of knowledge and the desire to become more wise was, in the biblical story, the first ruin of humankind. Montaigne does not simply reject inquiry, but he distrusts the pride that confuses the accumulation of opinions with the possession of wisdom.

In "Of Experience," he argues that wisdom comes more from honest self-observation than from books. He studies himself as a specimen: his fears, vanities, bodily habits, and contradictions. This is not presented as vanity but as method. If a man cannot understand himself, he has little ground for pronouncing on the cosmos. Montaigne revives the Socratic counsel to know oneself, yet without the Platonic ascent to the Form of the Good. There is no secure vision of the highest causes; there is the patient examination of a particular human being, with its mixture of cheerfulness and double-mindedness. He observes that we are, he knows not how, double within ourselves, so that we do not believe what we believe and cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn. Wisdom, for him, includes the courage to live well within this uncertainty rather than the claim to have escaped it.

His skepticism is gentle in tone but thoroughgoing in scope. The dogmatists, whether philosophers or theologians, claim more certainty than they can justify. Montaigne does not deny that truth exists; he doubts that human minds can possess it with the assurance they often assert. He also joins the long tradition that finds a kind of wisdom in folly and in the speech of fools. He hears fools say things that are not foolish, and he notes that obstinacy of opinion and heat in argument are among the surest proofs of folly. The plague of man, he suggests in one of his sharper formulations, is the opinion of wisdom. The broader question of how far self-knowledge can replace or correct systematic philosophy is connected with the ideas of Mind and of Truth.

Montaigne's Essays become a lasting counterweight to systematic philosophy on the subject of wisdom. Descartes will respond by seeking certainty through method. The suspicion that wisdom lies closer to self-knowledge and the acceptance of human limits than to metaphysical system, however, continues to reappear in later moralists and skeptics.

Descartes accepts the force of Montaigne's challenge that received knowledge may be unreliable, but he refuses the conclusion that we must settle for uncertainty. If the old foundations are unsound, new ones must be built. The Meditations enact a program of methodical doubt: everything that can be doubted is set aside, in order to discover what cannot be. What survives is the thinking subject itself. The first certainty, that I am a thing that thinks, becomes the point from which knowledge may be reconstructed. Wisdom, on this account, is not primarily a gift from above or an inherited body of doctrine, but the fruit of a procedure that any mind can follow if it is willing to examine its beliefs with sufficient rigor.

From this foothold Descartes rebuilds by means of clear and distinct ideas. Whatever the mind perceives clearly and distinctly is true, a claim he grounds in the goodness of God, who is no deceiver. The sciences taken all together are, he says, identical with human wisdom. Diversity among the sciences is only diversity of subject matter; the light of reason is one. The Rules for the Direction of the Mind make this explicit: the truly wise person masters the method of analysis and synthesis rather than the mere accumulation of particular facts. Wisdom is thus in a certain sense democratized. It depends not on birth, revelation, or mystical experience, but on the disciplined exercise of natural reason. Whether such a method can reach the highest causes in Aristotle's sense, or only rearrange the materials of experience and mathematics, remains a disputed question in the chapters on Knowledge and on Science.

Descartes does not treat wisdom as a moral virtue in Plato's sense, nor as a supernatural gift in Aquinas's. He treats it as the perfection of the understanding secured by right method. Good sense, he observes, is the most evenly distributed thing in the world; what distinguishes men is less the amount of reason they possess than the way they apply it. The practical life is not thereby ignored, but it is ordered by a clarity that first belongs to the intellect. The union of speculative certainty with the conduct of life is, for him, a consequence of method rather than of a separate excellence called prudence.

Descartes makes method the path to wisdom and identifies human wisdom with the unity of the sciences under reason. Spinoza will accept the demand for rational certainty but will abolish the dualism of an independent God who certifies clear ideas, so that the wise person's understanding of nature becomes a participation in the one substance knowing itself. Kant will later question whether speculative reason can reach as far as Descartes assumed.

Spinoza takes the Cartesian demand for rational certainty and carries it to a conclusion Descartes did not draw. There is only one substance, God or Nature, and everything that exists is a mode of that substance. Wisdom is not a method applied to problems external to the mind, but the mind's progressive understanding of its own place in the whole. The highest happiness or blessedness of man consists, he writes, in making perfect the intellect or reason as far as possible, for blessedness is nothing but the peace of mind that springs from the intuitive knowledge of God. From that knowledge there necessarily springs also the intellectual love of God. Wisdom and love, on this view, are not two separate attainments but two aspects of one cognitive achievement.

In Part V of the Ethics, Spinoza describes the highest form of knowledge as scientia intuitiva, an immediate grasp of particular things as they follow from the divine nature. This third kind of knowledge, beyond imagination and discursive reason, yields what he calls the intellectual love of God (amor intellectualis Dei). It is not presented as a mystical transport opposed to understanding, but as understanding itself at its fullest. The mind sees that everything follows necessarily from God's nature, including the mind itself, and in that vision finds freedom and blessedness. Blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself. The wise person is free from the bondage of the passions not chiefly by suppressing them, but by understanding them, so that what was passive becomes, so far as possible, an active state of mind.

Spinoza thus restores a union of the speculative and the practical that Aristotle had divided and that the theologians had reunited only through grace. For him, to know wisely is to love God, and to love God wisely is to understand necessity. A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life. The calm of the wise, which Lucretius had associated with the teaching of the philosophers, reappears here as the peace that follows from intuitive knowledge. Whether such knowledge is available to finite minds, or whether it confuses the categories of thought with the structure of reality, is a question later critics will press. The relation of this intellectual love to older doctrines of beatitude and the vision of God is discussed under the ideas of God and of Happiness.

Spinoza identifies wisdom with a kind of salvation achieved through understanding alone. Kant will deny that speculative reason can comprehend things as they are in themselves, and will relocate wisdom toward the discipline of moral practice within the limits of what can be known. Hegel, by another route, will treat the self-knowledge of reason as historical rather than as the intuition of a timeless substance.

Kant reshapes the question of wisdom by drawing a line between what reason can know and what it cannot. The Critique of Pure Reason argues that speculative reason overreaches when it tries to prove God's existence, the soul's immortality, or the world's infinity as objects of theoretical knowledge. These are not mere failures of industry or method, but boundaries belonging to the structure of finite cognition. Theoretical wisdom in the traditional sense of a science of the highest causes is, on this account, not available to human minds as knowledge. Kant says that he had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith. The claim is not that the highest objects are unreal, but that they cannot be known in the way the sciences know their objects.

He does not leave wisdom without a home. He relocates its principal exercise to the practical domain. The Critique of Practical Reason holds that moral reason makes legitimate demands that theoretical reason cannot fulfill as knowledge. We must act as if we are free, as if the soul is immortal, and as if God exists, because morality requires these postulates. Practical wisdom is the capacity to recognize duty and to act from it, without making inclination or calculated consequence the measure of the will. The wise person is not simply the one who knows the most about nature, but the one who acts rightly under the moral law. Two things fill the mind with admiration and awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. The first belongs to the order of nature; the second, to the order of freedom.

This position departs from the line that runs from Plato through Spinoza, in which wisdom is identified with contemplation of the highest truths. Kant holds that we cannot contemplate those truths as theoretical objects, and that wisdom lies in acknowledging this limit and living well within it. The moral law, rather than the metaphysical vision, becomes the final measure of the wise life. Aristotle had already distinguished practical from philosophic wisdom; Kant presses that distinction further by denying to speculative reason the knowledge of first causes that Aristotle thought philosophy could attain. The connection between wisdom, duty, and the good will is treated more fully under the ideas of Duty and of Virtue.

Kant's critical philosophy forces later thinkers to choose, or at least to clarify, whether wisdom is chiefly the contemplation of eternal truths or the discipline of living rightly within the limits of what can be known. Hegel will refuse the modesty of those limits and treat reason's self-knowledge as something that unfolds through history rather than as a fixed boundary of the human mind.

Hegel refuses the conclusion that reason is permanently trapped behind the limits Kant assigned it. Reason, on his view, unfolds through history and comes to know itself in progressively richer forms. Wisdom is not a static possession, as in Aristotle's knowledge of first causes, nor only a practical discipline of duty, as in Kant's moral philosophy. It is the mind's comprehension of its own historical development. Spirit knows itself by passing through contradiction and resolution, and philosophy is the retrospective grasp of this process. The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom. Wisdom, accordingly, is bound up with the idea of History as well as with the older idea of Knowledge.

The image of the owl of Minerva is meant to fix this point. Philosophy does not prescribe in advance what ought to be; it comprehends what has already taken shape. Wisdom arrives late, after the living substance of an epoch has formed itself. The philosopher does not guide history from outside it; the philosopher understands it after the fact. There is, on this account, no standpoint wholly outside of time from which the whole can be surveyed in advance. Plato's philosopher-king sees the eternal Good; Aquinas's wise man judges by the highest cause, including divine law; Hegel holds that such standpoints are true for their moment in the life of Spirit, yet none grasps the whole while the whole is still becoming. Wisdom is the self-consciousness of Spirit at a particular stage of its development.

This historicizing of wisdom alters the older contrast between speculative and practical wisdom without simply abolishing it. Comprehension of what has been is itself a kind of speculative act, yet it is inseparable from the ethical and political life in which Spirit has realized itself. The Philosophy of Right presents philosophy as the thought of the world after the fact, not as a program for making the world rational by external prescription. Whether this late-coming wisdom is a gain in self-understanding or a resignation of philosophy's claim to guide action remains a point of contention among Hegel's readers. The relation of wisdom to freedom, the state, and the course of nations is taken up under the ideas of History, State, and Liberty.

Hegel closes one arc of the classical discussion by making wisdom itself historical. After him, the question is less often posed solely as "What is wisdom?" in the abstract, and more often as what can be understood about our own moment in the life of reason, and whether philosophy still arrives only when a form of life has grown old.