The Difference Between Wisdom and Understanding

Excerpt from The Forms of Things Unknown: An Essay on the Impact of the Technological Revolution on the Creative Arts by Herbert Read:

Le Penseur (The Thinker), Auguste RodinA distinction which runs through the whole development of human thought has become blurred during the past two hundred years. Implicit in all ancient philosophy, acknowledged by medieval scholastics and the natural philosophers of the Renaissance, and even by Locke and Newton, is a difference of kind, if not of value, between wisdom and understanding.

By wisdom was meant an intuitive apprehension of truth, and the attitude involved was receptive or contemplative. Intellectus was the name given to this faculty in the Middle Ages.

Understanding, on the other hand, was always a practical or constructive activity, and ratio was its name — the power by means of which we perceive, know, remember and judge sensible phenomena. Philosophy was conceived as an endeavour to perfect this constructive power of the mind as an aid to wisdom.

To clarify perception, excluding all distortions due to emotion and prejudice; to analyse statements so that our knowledge is consistent; to establish facts, so that our memory is consolidated; to bring the inquiring will into harmony with the intuitive intellect, so that our judgment is true and constant — such have been the aims of all who called themselves philosophers.

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See also: "The Forms of Things Unknown: A 1963 Essay on the Role of the Creative Arts in Society," Brain Pickings, August 29, 2012

Love Kept Demanding More

Topiary Park, April 18, 2013

Christian Wiman, in conversation with Krista Tippett, from "A Call to Doubt and Faith," On Being, May 23, 2013:

I think there's some kind of excess energy. We tend to think of love as closing out the world and we can only see the face of the beloved. You know, everything else goes quiet or goes numb. But actually what I experienced was that — and I've experienced it again with my children — is that the love demanded to be something else. It demanded to be expressed beyond the expression of the participants. You know, it kept demanding more.

That excess energy, I think, is God. And I think it's God in us trying to return to its source. I don't know how else to understand it. But if I think of myself as having returned to faith — and I do think of that, although I feel like I'm a desperately confused person. When people look to me for advice or direction on faith, I just feel sometimes like it's hilarious. You know, I think we have these experiences and they are people reacting against the word spiritual these days. But I don't know what other word to use at this point. They are spiritual experiences and then religion comes after that.

Religion is everything that we do with these moments of intense spirituality in our lives, whether it's whatever practice we have, whether it's going to church, whether it's how we integrate sacred text into our lives.

Being religious or taking on some sort of religious elements in your life, you're not necessarily saying I agree with everything that this religion says. What you are saying is that I've had these incredible experiences in my life of suffering or joy or both and they have demanded some action of me and demanded some continuity of me.

And the only way that I know to do this is to try to find some form in it and try to share it with other people.

Listen to the produced or unedited conversation...

Not Our Dream

Illustration by Debbie Millman 

Peer Pressure

This makes me wonder whether there's a scientific explanation of the high level of concentration experienced by meditators practicing in groups and on silent retreats. Details about the synchronization of metronomes at Krulwich Wonders. 

See also: "Emergence," Radiolab, August 14, 2007

A Wrestling Match Between Science and Mystery

American Hipster Presents: Radiolab