The Wisdom of Seeking

I came across this quote a while ago, and at first felt as though Epicurus was simply trying to encourage people of all ages to be open to acquiring wisdom, regardless of their age. Thinking about it at length, though, I wondered if his phrasing was sufficiently clear.

The idea of “seeking wisdom,” while noble as an intention, is a bit misleading when it comes to the acquisition of it generally, since it usually involves first gaining experience, which then produces consequences or benefits, leading to an evaluation and to conclusions, which then render the wisdom, whether we were seeking it or not. Seeking deliberately to be wise, or to discover wisdom along the road as we go, misses the point. It usually arrives after experience, in retrospect, and one cannot truly know what may come from experience until one has had it. Even if we seek out those who are wise, and question them about how one might acquire wisdom, the truly wise person would not recommend the path they already traveled, but rather, would encourage the seeker to find their own.

As a rule, in my own experience, whatever truly beneficial wisdom I acquired was usually “hard won,” and the lessons which most often rendered what one might describe as “useful conclusions,” particularly when related to being thought of as wisdom, were often not the ones I was expecting, nor were they even related to the consequences I might have been anticipating.

Epicurus was clearly attempting to encourage others to attend to their experiences in a way which might lead to gaining in wisdom, while they are young especially, and cautioning those who are older, who may have had what they considered their sufficient portion of “hard-won” experience already, that further wisdom of the useful sort may still be available.

The most interesting aspect of the quote, for me at least, is that Epicurus expressed the benefit of experiences which might produce a degree of wisdom, as contributing to the “health of the soul.” Attending to this vitally important part of life, regardless of age, is a matter of some urgency as he saw it, and although he was not particularly religious in his approach to philosophy, invoking the idea of the existence of the soul in this way points toward the importance of our “inner life,” as well as our life out in the world.

Another quote which I found interesting recently was from Herman Hesse, one of my favorite writers, and it got me to thinking about why I sometimes feel so compelled to suggest the importance of our “inner evolution.” Hesse rightly points out the fact that many people take only what they perceive outwardly as being worthy of the title, “reality,” when it seems to me that the world within us accesses more directly, the experience of the world around us. It is well-established by our current understanding of how the brain processes our sensory data that what we perceive through the senses is only an approximation of what’s actually out there, and that the brain “fills in” the rest based on a host of interactions between brain regions and previous encounters with similar phenomena.

Hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution have provided us with this ability and it has proven itself to be advantageous for survival, particularly in the early epochs, when there wasn’t time to consider if the noise you heard was a danger or just the wind. We may still need to process incoming stimuli utilizing these same strategies in certain circumstances, but we are much more aware of the process now and can rightfully question what it is we are perceiving.

Here is where it really starts to get interesting. If Mr. Hesse was right, the phrase “friction between the soul and the outside world,” clearly emphasizes that the distinction between the outside world and our “soul,” is not a spiritual one, and rather points more toward there being a domain within us, which is integral to the conduct of our passions, which is in opposition to the world outside of us.

My own passion for the topic of the human subjective experience of consciousness, seems to fit well into this paradigm. While I personally feel that any reference to a human “soul,” or “spirit,” may indeed have a spiritual connotation in a general sense, and that particular approach may inform some people’s views on the subject, I see no reason to be concerned either way about just what might account for the primacy of our “inner world,” nor do I suppose that differences in viewpoints can exclude any reasonable approach to viewing the “world outside of us.” The truth seems to be somewhere in between, given that we are physically part of the “outside world,” and also enjoy a richly textured “inner experience” of that world, which cannot be satisfactorily accounted for by empirical means.

My recent posting about my “Journey into Nature,” attempted to honor both worlds, and I am looking forward to the continuing explorations of the world outside of us and within us.