Why Timeless Wisdom Will Not Help Us Out Of this Mess

Hello and welcome to life as lab - a newsletter that explores philosophy as a practical response to the crises of our time.

At a dinner, someone asked me about the dress that I have been wearing for months: So, how do you wash it?

I answered.

And then I added: there’s a tradition for this, you know. Diogenes lived in a jar.

Someone said that’s amazing. The conversation moved on.

I had used a dead man to justify my experiment in wearing one dress for a year. The dress was mine. As was the decision. And still I reached back two and a half thousand years for a man in a barrel to underwrite it.

I could say that I am philosophy-ing when I cite quotes and ideas from ancient philosophers.

I could also say, though, as I friend of mine did at said dinner, that it is name-dropping.

I once read this definition of wisdom, which I really like: Wisdom is knowing how to live, and living that knowledge knowingly.

The and is important.

Wisdom is theoretical-practical.

It’s not knowledge that gets applied or practice that gets explained.

Ideas are not wisdom. However weighty or useful. A sentence on its own has no source, and wisdom cannot not be sourced. When someone hands us a line about impermanence or the unexamined life, our first question is ideally not whether that’s true but who had to live for that to be sayable. For the idea to be wisdom, there needs to be life behind it. And ideally it’s our own life and not that of Diogenes. Otherwise I’m repeating directions to a place I’ve never been.

So — actions, then. Wisdom is what you do.

Not quite.

Mere acts are not wisdom either. An act on its own is just an act. I gave up motorized transport for months, that could be a logistics decision. I wore one dress for a year (which ended up being 16months), that could be a laundry decision. Steve Jobs also wore the same outfit every day to spend fewer decisions on it. Anyone watching Jobs and me would not be able to tell the difference in our outfit decision, because the difference wasn’t visible from the outside. Now, I don’t know if I am making too many assumptions about Jobs, but my hinge is that his outfit was more like an answer — settled once so it would never be asked again. And mine was a question, which is why mine was philosophical — in the pursuit of wisdom (knowing how to live and living that knowledge knowingly).

So, neither of these two modes on its own mean anything.

Bortoft says that the whole doesn’t sit behind or above the parts, it comes to presence in them. The word for this is the authentic whole. We don’t collect enough deeds to add up to a wise person. We encounter the person, entire, in a single deed.

So every action represents the whole person.

Any gesture is a whole life. We can read the entire person in the one thing.

So wisdom has to be lived (knowingly) as the summation of a total life, or it isn’t wisdom at all. Any part of it has to carry all of it. That’s a brutal standard. It disqualifies almost everyone, including — especially — the people who quote most fluently, like me.

A sage would be someone who knows how to live and who lives that knowledge knowingly. All the time. In everything she does.

If wisdom is the summation of a life, it is the summation of a life — one that took place somewhere, under specific conditions, with specific things at stake. Athens had slaves and an assembly and a plague. Warring States China had collapsing feudal order and no plumbing.

These were the conditions the specific wisdom was an answer to.

The perennialist move is to bracket all of that, to strip the history and make it timeless. It’s a comforting move because it makes books portable.

• “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” — Aristotle

• “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” — Lao Tzu

• “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” — Seneca

It also makes for good t-shirts.

Just as Indigenous wisdom must be rooted, though, wisdom must be of its time. Which means: to be wisdom for us, it has to become of our time.

Otherwise there are only three things left to do with a sage, which Andrew Taggert summarizes as:

• Anachronism: pretending the sage’s problems are my problems.

• Antiquarianism: admiring the sage, changing nothing.

• Idolization: Taylor Swift.

We cannot read the Daodejing or the Apology properly until we can situate these figures here. In the metacrisis. Now.

Not Socrates in Athens. Socrates in the group chat. With a phone that buzzes, in a city where the assembly has been replaced by a feed, refusing to leave a conversation that everyone else has already left, being unbearable at a dinner in Neukölln, being told he’s bringing the mood down.

Not the Buddha under a tree. The Buddha in the fourth consecutive summer of heat waves (it’s 37°C / 98.6°F in Berlin today) watching that tree die.

You get the picture.

This doesn’t mean discarding the books. Philosophical insight from anywhere and any time helps us make sense of the world.

But making sense of the world is not wisdom. As I wrote last week, Vervaeke distinguishes four kinds of knowing: propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory. Sense-making lives mostly in the first — knowing that. Wisdom lives in the last two: how the world shows up for me, and what I am becoming in relation to it.

And most philosophy books were not written by sages.

Seneca wrote on the contempt of riches while being one of the wealthiest men in Rome, in the employ of Nero. Rousseau wrote the great book on education and left all five of his children at the foundling hospital.

They were philosophers - in the pursuit, but not sages.

This is probably the reason the books exist in the first place. Those philosophers wrote because they struggled with what they wrote about. Philosophy tends to be written from the side of the wound, not the side of the cure — which makes the book a report from someone still walking, not a transmission from someone who arrived.

Very useful. But not wisdom, and not inheritable.

There is no timeless wisdom because there is no timeless life.

Which means the book that would help us most does not exist. The life it would have to be sourced in is being lived right now.

So next time someone asks how I wash my dress, I’ll just tell them how I wash it.

Thank you for being here 🙏🖤.

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