Human Wisdom

In written cultures, wisdom is often associated with the elders and their experience. But it is largely expressed in their writings, in the wisdom literature of the ancient world, in Proverbs and the wisdom of Solomon in the Bible, the wisdom books of ancient Egypt, of the Baghavad Gita in Hinduism, and of the equivalents in Buddhist writings. Once again these texts are concerned with relations between humans rather than about relations of humans with gods. There are right and wrong ways of conducting the latter, but in general wisdom is not a notable feature. Wisdom literature, however, is concerned not with the more abstract questions of the ethical philosopher, whose activities are involved with general principles, but with the immediate problems of daily life.

Priests may be knowledgeable, even wise, about the ways of the gods, but there is no special wisdom automatically attached to being a priest, although they are often expected to conduct themselves in a restrained manner. Wisdom is more likely to be seen as the result of reading the works of secular authors, especially philosophers, interested in morality and the daily conduct of human affairs.

Societies with writing were heavily divided, until very recently, into those who could read and those who could not. The latter are sometimes spoken of as belonging to an oral culture; some would rather see them as attached to an oral tradition, one that has been significantly affected by the "high culture" of the written. An oral tradition, when combined with a written culture such as the biblical, has its own characteristics. The written culture may incorporate and transform earlier oral culture and myth and produce a "folk wisdom" that enters into oral repetition. That may consist in the appropriate reference to proverbs, such as "a stitch in time," but it also produces a kind of wisdom, more often associated with the country rather than the town, that draws on a wider experience not of books but of life as it is lived in the round. The paradigmatic example of such unlettered wisdom is provided by the peasant Karataev in Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace, whose "wisdom" is contrasted with the anxious cleverness of the aristocratic, cosmopolitan Pierre, a great reader.

The unlettered still had a wisdom to offer in a society many of whose activities were dominated by the written text. By contrast, in mixed societies too much reading is sometimes seen as leading to the loss of wits, of "sense," of contact with the real world. The text is distanced from human affairs and may prevent the profound contact that encourages wisdom, at least folk wisdom, and that comes from an unmediated experience of human affairs.