odin Archives | Neel Burton

We Know More and More—but Understand Less and Less

Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818). Greater perspective is the beginning of wisdom.

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Wisdom begins with the willingness to hear difficult truths, especially about ourselves. Our problem is not merely that we are no wiser than our ancestors; in many ways, we are less wise.

One reason for this is that we have abandoned wisdom as an ideal. The word ‘wisdom’ appears 222 times in the Old Testament, and ‘philosophy’ in the original Greek literally means ‘the love of wisdom’. But today, anyone who speaks seriously about wisdom risks sounding grandiose or ridiculous—like me right now.

We admire intelligence, productivity, and innovation because they can be measured and monetised. Wisdom, however, is quieter, and often goes against the grain.

What Wisdom Is

Having replaced wisdom with expertise, we confuse knowing more with being wiser. But if wisdom simply amounted to knowledge, learning the name of every river and mountain in the world would make us wise, and every modern school-leaver would be wiser than a Socrates or a Seneca. Socrates was declared the wisest of men not because he knew everything, but because he understood what he did not know.

Aristotle took a different view. He said that wisdom is the understanding of causes: the wise person knows not merely that something is, but why it is. Wisdom consists in seeing the relations between things, for example, the immediate action and its distant consequences, the present moment and the shape of an entire life. It’s not so much a kind of knowledge as a way of seeing, or ways of seeing.

Why We Lack Wisdom

If wisdom is perspective, our lack of wisdom becomes easier to explain. Today, knowledge is increasingly specialised and compartmentalised. Nobody is responsible for assembling the fragments or asking what they are for. There is no job description for someone like me, who falls between the cracks—and, unfortunately, no salary either.

In addition, we suffer from an overload of information. We’re always checking our phones, flitting from fragment to fragment, living in abstract bubbles. Our ancestors may have known far less, but they were exposed to the rain and the wind: to nature, mortality, connection… to the things that can give us perspective.

Although, to be fair, our ancestors too struggled with wisdom. Wisdom derives from the Indo-European root, weid-, ‘to see’. In Norse mythology, Odin sacrifices one eye at Mimir’s well in exchange for a higher kind of vision. Later, he hangs for nine nights from the world tree, pierced by his own spear, to win the runes. That’s what wisdom demands: the courage to see what we would rather not see.