Is Intelligence at Odds With Wisdom?

There is a mysticism surrounding the concept of wisdom. Yet, wisdom wherever manifest seems to be simply knowledge. How else is it gained through things like life-experience? The effect of this knowledge is that it is applicable in every situation of general understanding: It is marked by general application, not technicality or specificity. Though one must be exceedingly intelligent to become an ophthalmologist, they mustn’t necessarily gain wisdom, for the information required for this profession isn’t relevant to life at large.

Conversely, the nature of intelligence is specificity — in creating distinction. The moment that we come into existence represents the formation of individuality; it is the moment we separate from all else. We, or the components that make us up, were always here, but, whereas they were once integrated into the whole system as free-floating parts, they’re now amassed into a resilient construct, known as Martin (in my case). This marks the beginning of our existence and our separation from all else.

As our eyes eventually open to the world, and our ears and neural circuitry create sounds, and all of our sensory modalities begin to interpret the world around us, how do they go about doing it? They make distinctions. Sight colors somethings in blue and others in yellow — though these colors do not actually exist in the world outside our perception — and so we can distinguish them. We cull molecules for smelling and vibrations for hearing, so that we can make distinctions between what is really just a jumbled, moving mass of molecules.

We learn to recognize groupings of these sensorial characteristics we’ve superimposed on the world around us, and learn to connect like grouping with like grouping, and to separate it from all else. We name this tall brown thing with all the little green things hanging off of it a “tree,” and so we call all things that appear this way, distinguishing them from all else. Now, it has an individual existence. The most intelligent of us can make such fine discriminations as to tell Hegelian philosophy apart from the ranting of a lunatic with an expansive vocabulary, even if only ever so slightly.

We develop fabular constructs such as one piece of green cloth (dollar bills, a.k.a. dyed cotton and linen) being much more valuable than other pieces of green cloth. We discriminate so thoroughly that we even discriminate against other people, and they’re 99.99% identical to us. Running contrary to these discriminations, we have much of Eastern philosophy and even some of Western philosophy. The Tao te Ching, the principle book of Taoism, begins by saying, “The Tao that can be told of is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnameable is the eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things.” Socrates was named the wisest of all Greeks by the Oracle of Delphi when he said, “One thing only that I know, and that is that I know nothing.” Edmund Burke, on the other hand, wrote, “Never, no never, did Nature say one thing and Wisdom say another.” As most of us know, “Nature” — a club that humankind at once belongs to and at the same time marks a divergence from — is famously tight-lipped. The “three teachings” — Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism — at their roots go beyond the already widely encompassing and vague symbol of the yin and yang, representing omnipresent duality, to an earlier form the “taiji,” which is simply a straight line: it is the “oneness” that precedes the excessively complicated twosome.

All of this is to say, what is the wisest thing to say? Wait a second…there, did you hear the answer? It is absolutely nothing. It is indiscriminate, indescribable existence commingled with non-existence. Intelligence functions to grant us understanding. Yet, it necessarily moves us away from the deepest understanding.

However, for all those who are not yet ready to clear their mind of all thought for the duration of their life in order to achieve enlightenment, I’d contend there is a middle ground: a way that intellect can move towards wisdom. If Ophthalmology is one extreme of specificity, and the “taiji” is another extreme of generality, what of those subjects that have a range of applicability somewhere in the middle? Those subjects that use specific conceptualizations to describe a wide-range of occurrences.

There are two realms of knowledge which are the most ubiquitously applicable: knowledge of self and knowledge of the circumstances of existence. There are many subjects within these classes. A statistician has knowledge that can serve to contextualize every feasible occurrence. A psychologist can find motivations that will hold true for nearly every human action. An astronomer knows the smallness of this thing called Earth where our entire species’ existence has been spent thus far. A student of natural history understands the shortness of our species’ existence, as well as the nature of our creation and all other life forms. The historian comes to understand the origins of the happenings of the day and the thematic truths of human behavior at large. A philosophical understanding of values, perception, and the like are broadly applicable. The philologist or etymologist understands a defining quality of the human species and thereby knowledge as we know it. Knowledge of self applies to all, for each of us is the prism we view reality through, as well as the vehicle which our intent is funneled through.

When one considers the limitations of their awareness and the influence of their emotions; their life in the context of natural history and modern society in the context of human history; our planet in the context of the universe; our values and beliefs in the context of the host of others; the occurrences we witness in light of statistics at large; and so on, they have become wise. Maybe not sage levitating just off the ground wise, but still wise.

Intelligence and wisdom, in many ways, are opposed to one another, but, if we’ve learned anything from the wisdom of the yin, yang, and taiji, let it be that even opposing forces rely on one another and are in a way one.