7 posts tagged wisdom

In an era still dominated by a naive belief in scientific method [1] many people believe that if they just diligently follow a step-by-step guide on leadership, in addition to imitating what their current leaders do, that will somehow eventually result in them becoming leaders too. But that is the mindset of those who obey, not those who lead. If it leads anywhere, it is not some place new other than a dull reproduction of the status quo.
Having the courage to disobey and venture alone into the unknown because you feel something better can be built there as an enactment of indepedent thought instead of a juvenile reaction to authority constitutes a large part of what it means to lead.
But where to? You’d think an answer to that question would make an essential chapter in every contemporary leadership book. Yet a casual glance at the contents of Leadership 101: What Every Leader Needs to Know by John C. Maxwell, one of the most celebrated authors on leadership alive today, reveals that knowing where to lead is apparently not something a contemporary leader needs to know [2]. Perhaps the fact that we’re more interested in becoming leaders than in knowing where to lead is why we’ve been going nowhere.
Leadership is not just about expertise. What’s the value of expertly leading people over a cliff? Not much; by that logic Hitler and Stalin were great leaders. To make a fetish out of the techniques of leadership is to glorify the means over and above the ends. I think we can do better than that. We have to.
I studied philosophy, not management. I wanted to know what the good life is before trying to lead myself or others to it. You can’t be a good leader if you’re not a wise one, and wisdom is the province of philosophy, not management. We need to integrate both.
When you integrate both you want to lead somewhere better, not just lead. That’s what’s at the core of being an entrepreneur. If we want a better future, we need more entrepreneurs and better managers.
Successful leaders abolish the conditions that make them necessary, just like teachers through teaching students successfully, lessen the gap between themselves and their students till it disappears, thereby creating an equality that enables a more sublime relationship to emerge [3].

Notes:

[1] Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did a good job in demolishing the idea that there is a single prescriptive scientific method and that science progresses in a uniform way by following its dictates.

[2] Don’t be fooled into thinking Chapter 4 “How Should I Prioritize my Life?” has anything to do with overall ends. It’s more about how to prioritize not what those priorities should be and why.

[3] See Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, 1955. New York: Owl Books, 1990, p.96-97.

With the tremendous advancements in science human beings have reached the technological capacity to exterminate themselves and their world. In fact, at least one time we came pretty close to a nuclear war. Over the past decades, with the rise of the environmental movement, we’ve become ever more aware of the impact we have not only on the health and well-being of our own communities but on the planet as a whole.

It is, therefore, no secret that we currently have the know-how to radically change the world.

The crucial question, therefore, is not whether we can change the world. It is whether we are wise enough to act towards making it better, given that scientific know-how does not in itself make us wiser.

Shall we be more precise? Science is analytical description, philosophy is synthetic interpretation. Science wishes to resolve the whole into parts,the organism into organs, the obscure into the known. It does not inquire into the values and ideal possibilities of things, nor into their total and final significance; it is content to show their present actuality and operation, it narrows its gaze resolutely to the nature and process of things as they are. The scientist is as impartial as Nature in Ivan Turgenev’s (1818-1883) poem; he is as interested in the leg of a flea as in the creative throes of a genius. But the philosopher is not content to describe the fact; he wishes to ascertain its relation to experience in general and thereby to get at its meaning and its worth; he combines things in a interpretive synthesis; he tries to put together, better than before, that great universe-watch which the inquisitive scientist has analytically taken a part. Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom – desire coordinated in the light of all experience – can tell us when to heal and when to kill. To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy: because in these days our means and instruments have been multiplied beyond our interpretation and synthesis of ideals and ends, our life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. For a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete except in relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

- Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy, p.2-3, Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 1961

“Philosophy?” someone may wonder in puzzlement. Could it be that such a seemingly outdated discipline may be required to play such an important role? Besides:

What is the task of philosophy today? We know the familiar answer: None –
for it is just the private business of a guild of specialists. These philosophers, we are told, occupy university chairs dating from the Middle Ages and meet in futility, at conventions which are the modern occasions for showing off. Their monologues are attested by a voluminous literature, scarcely read and rarely bought, except for a few fashionable publications with snob appeal.
If the press, as the organ of public opinion, takes note of these books and periodicals which gather dust in libraries, it does so without real interest. All in all, we hear, philosophy is superfluous, ossified, behind the times, waiting only for its disappearance. It no longer has a task.

Karl Jaspers, Basic Philosophical Writings, “The Present Task of Philosophy”, p.125, ed. and trans. by E. Ehrlich, L.H. Ehrlich and G. B. Pepper, Humanities Press, 1994.

But Jaspers did not end that thought on philosophy with that paragraph, but with this one:

Against such strictures we may point out, first of all, that not everything which goes by the name of philosophy should be confused with philosophy itself. Philosophy exists wherever thought brings men to an awareness of their existence. It is omni-present without being specifically identified. For no man thinks without philosophizing – truly or falsely, superficially or profoundly, hastily or slowly and thoroughly. In a world where standards prevail, where judgments are made, there is philosophy. There is as much of it in the cohesive faith of the Church as in a conscious, self-contained philosophical faith; there is philosophy even in the belief of the unbeliever, in nihilistic disintegration, in Marxism, psychoanalysis, in the many precepts for living that are not popular, such as anthroposophy and others [a contemporary example could be what may be roughly called ‘New Age’ philosophies]. The very rejection of philosophy goes back to a philosophy that is not aware of itself.

(ibid.)

It is time we become aware and do our best to recover and champion the traditional role of philosophy which is the development of wisdom, not just in our words and heads, but in our hearts and actions. It is time for the philosopher, as an ideal, to come out of his academic cave and return to the market (agora), where he was originally born, to help his fellow humans live a better life.