My Paper - Applying Wisdom

Applying Wisdom
Throughout this semester in Biblical Foundations of Literature we have explored many intriguing and thought provoking subjects of what is found in the Bible and how people interpret it in the literary world. When I came into this class I had no idea the influence it might have on me as I progress through my college career. The topic that struck me the most though was the one on wisdom. I liked this topic best because it was one that throughout this semester I have encountered numerous times. The time that it became a prevalent and continuous thought in my mind though was when we covered it in this class. I remember the day when Dr. Sexson read the line from Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, all is vanity.” This line according to him was the perfect representation of skeptical wisdom. He proceeded to tell us that that line means that everything is pointless or a simple breath of air or fog, as derived from the Hebrew word hebel. At first I had a hard time accepting this concept, I remember walking away from class that day running over and over again the topics we covered and trying to make sense of it. This topic has sent me on an inward, thoughtful search to learn how to define wisdom in my own life, and once discovered to learn how to use wisdom in order to lead my life in the best way possible. If this is possible at all, I still don’t know, but as many people do, I have found a way to accept the answers I have discovered and plan to attempt the type of happiness that has culminated in my head from various readings and realizations.
To begin the explanation of my discoveries and my own personal thoughts on how to live a wise life I feel I must first define wisdom. The dictionary.com definition is, “The ability to discern or judge what is true, right, or lasting; insight.” The word insight in this definition gives a feel of stepping away from a situation and evaluating it for what and how it is. This is a thought that I will come back to, but first I feel I must continue to clear up some misgivings that many people apply to the word wisdom. The first and foremost misunderstanding of the word is in the separation of wisdom from knowledge. Each time this argument has come up it seems to me that the same conclusion is reached, and that is that wisdom is what comes from experience, and knowledge is what comes from the study of a subject or skill. This is a very basic review of an argument that I have experienced twice in this semester, both coming from being a peer leader for the US 101 Freshman Seminar class. The argument came from a discussion of the Apology section of Plato’s Euthyphro, in which Socrates claims that he is wise because he is aware that he knows nothing. The easy thing to latch on to is that Socrates knows nothing, but in reality the most important part of his statement is that of his awareness. He is aware that he does not know the specificities of certain practices, and that is where he is wise.
I came across this argument around the same time that we covered wisdom in our class. While I have had Socrates’ Apology before this semester, it had never occurred to me to continue to question the process of awareness and the play it has in wisdom. Again I think my investigation was prompted by our discussions on this subject. At this point though, the sense of wisdom as knowing that there is nothing to look forward to as covered in Ecclesiastes still did not make sense to me. I continued to question though and I started to think about that topic of insight. I feel that insight is directly caused by being aware of situations. Not aware as in the sense that a person is conscious in that situation, but aware in the sense that they know why it is happening and how that came to be. This type of awareness allows a person to be insightful.
Around the time that I was beginning to think about the relationship between awareness and insight, for my US 460 Peer Leader class (which goes along with being a peer leader for US101) I had to give a presentation on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s The American Scholar. In this speech he gave in 1837 he challenges how American culture (workers, scholars, and everyday people) at that time would become what they do, because they didn’t understand or weren’t aware of other proceedings within the country as a whole. A famous quote from this speech is, “The priest becomes a form; the attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.” What Emerson suggests that people begin doing is easily broken down into three steps; to investigate, to study, and to take action. He called for an awareness of other types of work, while still knowing one’s own field. This three step plan lends itself beautifully to being aware of situations and being able to use that insight gained from awareness. Investigate the situation, study why it is that it happens, and then take an appropriate action to what one finds.
Where this left me though, was with how to take action on the wisdom that I have begun investigating, and have studied in this short period of time. I still did not know what I should do, because that type of wisdom still did not quite make sense. It was about here that I discovered a book in the library called Me by Mel Thompson. This book is a part of The Art of Living series, and I randomly found it on the display shelf. What caught my eye about this book was that it claimed to be an exploration on the idea of the self. In this, Thompson claims that we are more than a materialistic set of neurons as many recent philosophers have argued, and also more than just a soul occupying a physical body. He sees that it is a mixture of both of these claims for in our awareness of ourselves the materialistic view becomes obsolete, and in the fact that Alzheimer’s disease can take away our memories and change who we are, the dualistic view becomes a poorly thought out claim as well. What hit me the most about his argument was not this part, but rather that life is a set of random happenings that will constantly shape each of us. People strive to become one thing and they often times find once they get there that they are dissatisfied. Thompson claims that we must accept this constant and unavoidable set of chances and changes within ourselves, because a stagnant existence is not something that we can experience. Whether or not we find that we have reached our desired station in life, we will experience something new that will change us, for better or worse.
Here was where I started to really latch on to and understand what to do with Ecclesiastes’ message. I finally understood why everything is but a breath, for if we are just experiencing random chances, we cannot truly know everything that there is to know, we will just find over and over again that there really is nothing to look forward to. To use a cliché, it seems the message is one that tells us to live in the moment. To really live in the moment, for we can’t know what will happen to us no matter how hard we try to shape our lives so that things will happen in a predictable way. With our insight and awareness, we can take what we know and what we have experienced to live situations anew, whether good or bad.
I finally came to a conclusion to lead a life of continuous and constant change and to be aware of why it is that I must live this way. Once I discovered this I began to look back on what I have been learning throughout this semester and one topic came to mind. In my Literary Criticism class, we have studied many critics and their different approaches to literature. When I began looking back I remembered a conversation about T.S. Eliot’s essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. In this Eliot claims that all of art is one great big entity, and that each artist cannot escape from the traditions set forth before their existence. Also that nothing truly new can be created, for in all likelihood somebody has probably done the same thing before that artist even existed. He claims that we cannot escape this, but each and every time somebody creates something new, while it may not be entirely new, they are adding to the tradition and causing the entire entity of art to change. In a sense all of art would ripple with the effects of this new work.
When I thought back on this it began to make sense with what I had discovered, while nothing I experience is new, it is in actuality constantly changing the entire experiences of all others. For what I experience may have been slightly different from what somebody else experiences, much the same way that art may have the same conclusions but is reached in a different way.
To continue with Eliot, I feel I must include his insistence in interpreting literature on leaving the author out of this process. He claims that in order to make something worthwhile the artist must surrender themselves to emotions and whatever creative work they are making. In a way to leave their thoughts out and to let the feel of the moment create what it is that an artist is making. He calls this his Impersonal Theory, and because of an author’s surrender, we as critics have to leave him out of the interpretation.
The question now becomes how do I apply this to my study of wisdom, and how does this affect how I must lead my life with a sense of constant change. I believe the argument now becomes leading life with thought verses leading life with emotion. These are very basic terms on what it is that I am trying to portray, but are the only words in which I know how to explain it. The struggle leads into trying to live by emotions, for situations experienced with emotions, whether good or bad, are the ones that people remember the most, and the ones that will ultimately continue to change a person. Thought on the other hand just gets in the way of experiencing something. This is not to say that thought is bad, because without it humans would not be self aware, and I would not be able to come to the conclusion of leading life with a sense of constant continuous change. Northrop Frye touches on this subject in his book The Great Code, especially in the section on wisdom that we specifically talked about in class. He says that, “Here we finally see the real form of wisdom in human life as the philosophia or love of wisdom that is creative and not simply erudite.” How this applies to my argument is that a creative and emotion filled existence is one that will be more meaningful to a person than one lead by knowledge and erudite pure thought. Again I do not think that we can totally escape thought, but rather that we must balance our thought with our emotions, in order to experience situations in the right way.
Now I know that in this paper I have kind of gone away from the influence that the Bible has had on my investigation and the interpretation of wisdom that is found there, but I would like to point out that it was this first discussion of wisdom in the Bible that started me out on this type of search to not only define wisdom but learn ways of applying it to my everyday life. I believe that my discoveries are valid and can be used in a proper way, but whether or not I am right is arguable, and I will not after this experience be closed to any new ideas on the matter. That would only contradict what it is that I have claimed. That is that after a complete and total understanding of what wisdom is a person can then use the knowledge that everything is but a breath, to lead a life of constant, continuous change with a well balanced mixture of emotion and thought.