What Is Wisdom?

In the SEVEN FACES OF DOCTOR LAO, the main character tells us that the only wise person is the one who does not know what wisdom is. In STAR TREK, the android Data tells his daughter that wisdom is 'the difference between knowledge and experience.' There seems to be truth in both reflections.

Wisdom is strange. It is hard to quantify. Experience no doubt does tend to teach wisdom. Yet I have heard and seen great wisdom in children who had little experience, and have seen a complete lack of wisdom in older people who had experienced quite a bit. All wisdom is practical, yet it can be stated abstractly. Or at least one can use abstract formulas to express it. It is a little bit of art, and also a bit of rational reflection. It comes and it goes. I can be wise one minute, and not so wise the next. It seems to me that wisdom is very much like the wu-wei concept of Taoism. It is just an action, or a reaction, attenuated properly to the issue at hand.

I think Lao is right in that I think that Wisdom is something heartily mysterious. As soon as I have my have my mind around it, I've lost it again. A person can be trained to be wiser, wisdom can become more likely through instruction, but instruction is no guarantor of wisdom.

In the Bible Wisdom takes on almost mythic proportions. In Proverbs 8 Wisdom is seen as a person, as a living being that is God's apprentice in creation. Wisdom can be sought or wooed, but she cannot be forced. She comes to those she chooses. And indeed it does seem that people of great wisdom seem in some sense 'chosen' for the role of wise person. It is like knowledge, but it is more than that. It is found in experience, but one can be experienced it and miss it altogether. It comes through self-reflection and abstract thought, but also the daily doing of deeds. Certainly the Book of the Wisdom of Solomon is right in raising the experience of wisdom to the level of the mystical. Divinity dwells here. No wonder the Wisdom tradition was so important to the New Testament writers.