Culture, intelligence and wisdom
31
Jan
The problem of contemporary culture has already
been addressed in several posts, psychiatrist Anthony Daniels who signs his books as Theodore Darlrymple (What We Made of Our Culture, Anything Goes, The Knife In, etc.), intelligence continues to be questioned now with the scapegoat of the digital universe, but whose crisis has been going on since the beginning of the last century (neopositivism, neologicism and the simplistic view of reality), now takes on the contours of a lack of balance, common sense and even some sense of humanity.
Edgar Morin explains this lack of wisdom through the disciplinary and segmented view of reality, a complete absence of a complex and broad vision that gives rise to what he calls polycrisis, however it is important to question what wisdom is.
In the Greek sense, it is not private knowledge in the sense of morality, but public and social, which aims to minimize exacerbations of the self’s egocentric impulsiveness, when placed in the perspective of the work of art, it reaches a level of universal, good and beautiful principle.
The Greek word as “friend of knowledge” or knowledge is reductionist, one of the Jewish words for wisdom is chokmah or tushiya which mean wisdom that leads to practical success, it seems more appropriate to the current reality, because it is wise if it has practical meaning for life of each person and of humanity as a whole.
This is in good agreement with the Greek word proposed in terms of a virtue, phronesis, which is usually translated as prudence, a term that the contemporary philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer adopts but translates as serenity, judging it to be closer than prudence.
Those who claim merely objective knowledge, with an idealistic flavor, are in reality impractical, indicating a lack of wisdom, they become impulsive and active (in the sense of the Vita activa that Hanna Arendt and Byung Chul Han claim), typical of Western society. tiredness.
We want quick, consumerist or media-based knowledge and it has nothing or little to do with wisdom, which requires thought, contemplation and non-immediate thinking about facts.
Current society has deviated from practical knowledge because it demands intelligence and culture without realizing the deep connection it must have with wisdom that comes from a deeper reflection on the Being, things and the essence of life.
We defend peace, but we do not avoid catastrophe, war, hatred and dialogue and respect for those who are different, there is no practical wisdom in this type of contemporary thinking.
