The priestess of Apollo at Delphi. Before seeking answers from the oracle, visitors first met with the words, ‘Know Thyself.’
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Critical thinking has never been more popular. Schools, universities, and employers encourage us to evaluate evidence, identify logical fallacies, and recognise cognitive biases. Entire books are devoted to helping us think more clearly.
Yet intelligent people continue to believe ridiculous things.
They buy into political propaganda, dubious medical claims, financial scams, cults, conspiracy theories, and all manner of comforting or self-serving lies. They do so not because they lack intelligence, and often not because they lack evidence.
They do so because modern critical thinking shares our greatest blind spot. It teaches us how to analyse arguments, but not how to analyse ourselves.
Most books on critical thinking treat reasoning as though it were mathematics. Learn the rules and you will think more clearly. But reason is not merely an intellectual achievement. It is also a moral and psychological one. We do not merely need sharper minds, but greater courage and honesty.
The greatest obstacle to reason is neither dullness nor ignorance. It is our unconscious need to protect our sense of self. This is the realm of self-deception.
Unlike ordinary deception, self-deception is unconscious. We do not deliberately lie to ourselves. Instead, we unconsciously reshape reality to preserve a comforting image of who we are. We rationalise our failures, project our faults onto others, and convince ourselves that what we want to be true is true. These are not simply errors of reasoning but acts of self-protection.
This is why intelligent people can cling to implausible beliefs despite overwhelming evidence. Often, they are not defending an argument so much as defending themselves.
To think clearly, then, it is not enough to study logic, rhetoric, and cognitive bias. We must also understand the unconscious forces that distort our judgement before reason has even had a chance to speak. Self-deception is not peripheral to critical thinking. It belongs at its very heart.
More than two thousand years ago, Socrates reached much the same conclusion. Rather than speculate about the natural world, he turned philosophy towards the study of ourselves.
In Plato’s Phaedrus, as they pass the place where Boreas is said to have carried off Orithyia, Phaedrus asks Socrates whether he believes the story. Socrates politely declines the invitation. While still ignorant of himself, he says, he has no interest in such questions:
I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous.
For Socrates, self-knowledge came before all other enquiry.
Perhaps it should also come before critical thinking.
Socrates had been inspired by the oracle at Delphi, the greatest oracle of the ancient world. Long before there were textbooks on critical thinking, there was a two-word inscription above the Temple of Apollo at Delphi:
Ever Met a Clever Fool? Why Intelligence Alone Is Not Enough
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.
Every time I utter the word ‘wisdom’, someone giggles or sneers. Wisdom, more so even than expertise, does not sit comfortably in an egalitarian, anti-elitist society. In an age dominated by materialism and consumerism, science and technology, and specialisation and compartmentalisation, it is too loose, too grand, and too mysterious a concept. With our heads in our smartphones and tablets, in our bills and bank statements, we simply do not have the time or mental space for it—or even the idea of it.
But things were not always thus.
The word wisdom features 222 times in the Old Testament, which includes all of seven so-called ‘wisdom books’: Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Solomon, the Book of Wisdom, and Sirach.
Here is Ecclesiastes 7:12:
For wisdom is a defence, and money is a defence: but the excellency of knowledge is, that wisdom giveth life to them that have it.
The word philosophy literally means ‘the love of wisdom’, and wisdom is the overarching aim of philosophy—or, at least, ancient philosophy.
In Plato’s Lysis, Socrates tells the young Lysis that, without wisdom, he will be of no worth to anyone:
And therefore, my boy, if you are wise, all men will be your friends and kindred, for you will be useful and good; but if you are not wise, neither father, nor mother, nor kindred, nor anyone else, will love you.
The patron goddess of Athens, the city in which the Lysis is set, is none other than Athena, goddess of wisdom, who sprang out from the skull of Zeus. Her symbol, and the symbol of wisdom, is the owl, a bird of prey which cleaves through darkness.
Indeed, wisdom derives from the Proto-Indo-European root weid-, ‘to see’. In Norse mythology, Odin gouged out one of his eyes and offered it to Mimir in exchange for a drink from the well of knowledge and wisdom, symbolically trading one mode of perception for another, higher one.
Is Wisdom the Same as Knowledge?
People often speak of ‘knowledge and wisdom’ as though they might be closely related or even the same thing. So one hypothesis is that wisdom is knowledge, or a great deal of knowledge. But if wisdom is knowledge, then it has to be a certain kind of knowledge, or else learning the telephone directory, or the names of all the rivers in the world, might count as wisdom.
Nor can it simply be scientific or technical knowledge, or else every contemporary person would be wiser than the wisest of ancient philosophers. Any twenty-first-century school-leaver would be wiser than a Seneca or Socrates.
Remember: the Delphic oracle pronounced Socrates the wisest of all people not because he knew everything, or even very much, but because he knew the extent of what he did not know.
Still, there seems to be more to wisdom than mere ‘negative knowledge’, or else I could simply be super-sceptical about everything and count myself wise.
Or maybe wisdom consists in having high epistemic standards, that is, in having a high bar for believing something, and an even higher bar for calling that belief knowledge. But then we are back to a picture of wisdom as something like science…
So Is Wisdom Simply Correct Opinion?
In Plato’s Meno, Socrates notices that people of wisdom and virtue seem remarkably poor at imparting those qualities. Themistocles was able to teach his son Cleophantus skills such as standing upright on horseback and throwing the javelin, yet no one ever credited the poor wretch with anything like his father’s wisdom—and the same could also be said of Lysimachus and his son Aristides, Pericles and his sons Paralus and Xanthippus, and Thucydides and his sons Melesias and Stephanus.
If wisdom cannot be taught, how, asks Meno, did good people come about? Socrates replies that right action is possible under guidance other than that of knowledge. A person who has knowledge of the road to Larisa (a city-state in Thessaly) may make a good guide. But a person who has only correct opinion about the road, despite never having travelled it, might make an equally good guide.
Knowledge and correct opinion can therefore lead to the same destination.
Since wisdom cannot be taught, it cannot be knowledge; and if it cannot be knowledge, it can only be correct opinion—which explains why paragons of wisdom such as Themistocles, Lysimachus, and Pericles were unable to impart their wisdom even unto their own sons.
Wise people, says Socrates, are no different from soothsayers, prophets, and poets, who say many true things when they are divinely inspired but have no real knowledge of what they are saying.
Or Is Wisdom the Same as Understanding?
Aristotle gives us another clue in the Metaphysics, when he says that wisdom is the understanding of causes. None of the five senses are regarded as wisdom because, although they provide the most authoritative knowledge of sensible particulars, they are unable to discern the more distant causes of anything.
Similarly, we suppose artists to be wiser than artisans because artists know the ‘why’ or cause, and can therefore teach, whereas artisans do not, and cannot.
In other words, wisdom is the understanding of the right relations between things, which calls for more distant and elevated perspectives, and perhaps also the ability or willingness to shift between perspectives.
In the Tusculan Disputations, Cicero cites as a paragon of wisdom the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, who, upon being informed of the death of his son, simply said, “I knew that I begot a mortal.”
For Cicero, true sapience consists in preparing oneself for every eventuality, so as never to be taken—or overtaken—by surprise. And it is true that wisdom, the understanding of causes and connexions, has forever been associated with both insight and foresight.
What, Then, Is Wisdom?
Wisdom is not so much a kind of knowledge as a way of seeing, or ways of seeing.
When we take a few steps back, like when we stand under the shower or go on holiday, we begin to behold the bigger picture. In common parlance, ‘wisdom’ has two opposites: ‘foolishness’ and ‘folly’, which both derive from the Latin follis (‘bellows’, ‘bag’) and involve, respectively, lack and loss of perspective.
In cultivating a broader perspective, it helps, of course, to be knowledgeable, but it also helps to be intelligent, reflective, open-minded, and disinterested—which is why we often seek out and pay for independent advice.
Above all, it helps to be courageous, because the view from on high, though it can be exhilarating, and ultimately liberating, is at first terrifying—not least because it conflicts with so much that we have been taught or enculturated to think.
Courage, said Aristotle, is the first of the human qualities, because it is the one which underwrites all the others.
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