For more than a decade a group of Harvard professors has taught a class about wisdom and its religious, moral, and aesthetic dimensions to undergraduates. The four professors are friends from distinct disciplines: Michael Puett, a historian of religions; Arthur Kleinman, a physician and medical anthropologist; Stephanie Paulsell, a theologian and literary scholar; and Davíd Carrasco, a historian and anthropologist. Inside and outside of the classroom, they have sought to understand how their own areas of study might relate to the art of living well and seeking wisdom during both ordinary and extraordinary times.
Now they have written a book that outlines some of the insights they have shared with students and what they have learned while teaching the class, The Practice of Wisdom: Five Quests. These quests wind through the labyrinthine challenges of caregiving, solitude, self-understanding, and transcendence. Wisdom, they note in their introduction, is plural.
There are many distinctive forms it can take, depending on the place and time one inhabits and the forms of suffering they face. I spoke with Puett, Kleinman, and Paulsell about how they define wisdom, why one should avoid romanticizing wisdom, what solitude and ritual can contribute to the practice, and what kind of wisdom might be required for our current moment. I wanted to invite each of you to briefly define wisdom.
Arthur Kleinman: Aristotle said there were three forms of knowledge or wisdom. One was episteme, how we know things. Then there was techne, or craft, the technical knowledge that is so important to our work.
But he thought the most important of all was practical knowledge about how to live a life, which he called phronesis. And that last kind is my definition. I think we went out of our way at the beginning of the book in the introduction to explain that we did not feel that any of us is a master of a particular type of wisdom, nor that we were conveying this wisdom as a truth to students and readers.
We believe that wisdoms differ, and people’s use of them would differ. We wanted to offer examples based on our own work that emphasized what we think is a universal process: the quest for wisdom. Stephanie Paulsell: Yes, we didn’t want to present wisdom as something you could print on a page and say, “This is it,” but to invite our students into practices that would help them figure out ways of living wisely and compassionately in the midst of ordinary life.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
