The Pearl of Wisdom

By Christopher Greaves

Wisdom might well be called the quality of qualities—thequintessential quality—yet defining it further is strangely difficult. Is it another word for rationality? Or isit a form of common sense? What kind of thing is it? What principles inform it? In what is wisdom grounded? To what end does it point? And, in particular, why is it so neglected at this present time?

From the author of "Art, Love and Truth" comes this fascinating, entertaining and uncompromising exploration of the mysteries of wisdom, undertaken in the hope that if we could understand its nature better, it might help us grow wiser ourselves.Referring to numerous fairy tales as well as to the work of William Blake, Marie-Louise von Franz and Thomas Sowell among others, "The Pearl of Wisdom" illuminates its subject in new ways, while at the same time showing how the quest for this elusive quality has been obstructed by a different project altogether.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Aug 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781471642104

Book preview

1: THE RIDDLE

There is a tale in which a princess sets her suitors a riddle; she will marry the one who can solve it.

Nothing is more valuable than this, yet nothing is less valued, goes the riddle. Nothing so lights up the world, yet nothing is so obscure. Nothing knows so much, yet nothing is so unknown. What is it?

One by one, the princess’s suitors come forward with their answers, some of which more or less fit her description of this unknown quantity and some of which don’t, but all of which have something to be said for them. There are worldly answers such as wealth, power and fame, and there are subtler ones such as freedom, love, truth, and enlightenment. But only one of the suitors solves the riddle.

The answer is wisdom.

Naturally, the princess would like her husband to be handsome, intelligent and kind…but all the same, what is kindness, what is intelligence, and what are good looks without the wisdom to go with them? Obviously, she would like him to be loving, too. But what is love? We hear the word all the time; we hear it being used in religion at one end of the spectrum and in popular culture at the other; we hear of carnal love, romantic love, ‘true love’, spiritual love, and even something called ‘unconditional love’. Yet what are these loves without wisdom? Are they actually love at all, in the most meaningful sense of the term?

And as for truth—yes, of course, the princess would like her spouse to be truthful: in fact, to exemplify truth. She would also like him to be truthful in the spiritual sense. But what is spirituality without wisdom? What is the point of practicing meditation, for example, if the kind of meditation we practice and the way we practice it and the spiritual sensations we experience when meditating are failing to make us any the wiser? What is the point of seeing visions if our wisdom is insufficient to interpret them correctly, or to recognize their origin, or to realise that their lack of commensuration with our everyday lives, if such is the case, suggests that there is something strange about them? After all, not only do mystics have visions; acidheads and schizophrenics have them too.

What, indeed, is the point of enlightenment itself if the light it brings is not the light of wisdom? Here, the locus classicus is the tale of Ravana, the villain of that ancient Indian epic, the Ramayana. He was said to have attained a state of yoga through the practice of austerities, yet this achievement did not give him pause when—from the thought that such a beauty should belong to him and him alone, or because of a need to assert his superiority, or out of infatuation, or simply out of lust, but at any rate out of vanity, not out of wisdom—he abducted Sita, the wife of Rama, thereby setting in motion the train of events that led to his destruction. He might have achieved a degree of self-realisation, but his fatal error was that he did not care or was not able to achieve sufficient wisdom in the process.

So, from the princess’s point of view, it is wisdom that has the highest value, it is wisdom that lights up the world, it is wisdom that is the purest, most perceptive, and most immediate form of knowledge. Wisdom is that which allows us to discriminate. It helps us differentiate between alternatives. It is savoir vivre in the deepest sense, since it lets us know best how to live, to what to give priority, how most effectively to love and how to avail ourselves of freedom without our falling into licence or licentiousness. It sees the Spirit clearly; it can tell it apart from all the fakery and negativity that passes for ‘the spiritual’. It knows how best to endure the twists and turns of fate, the blows of ill-fortune and the shocks of defeat—and, equally, it knows how to use authority, success and good fortune with the most munificence.

And if all this is so, and wisdom represents the key to dealing with all eventualities; if it is relevant in every situation, both in private life and public life, not only in the vita contemplativa, where we might expect it, but in the vita activa too—if, in sum, it can be said to constitute the know-how of living, then: how good it would be to be wise! And how transforming it would be if, not simply in the way we think and decisions we take, but in every aspect of our individual and collective lives, in our manners, speech, dress, and behaviour, in our art and architecture and town and country planning, in our science and the uses to which it is put, in our conception of education, in our politics and economics, in the way that we bring up our children, in the way that we govern our societies and in the way that we govern ourselves, we could be wise as well.

2: THE MAN IN THE T-SHIRT

Yet at the same time the girl is right: while wisdom may be valued in theory, it rarely seems valued in practice. At any rate, we would be hard put to say that wisdom is readily apparent among the typical features of contemporary life. Take, for example, the case of the student who shuffled into the room in which I was invigilating a while back, wearing a T-shirt reading KISS MY ASS in big black capitals across the chest—or it would have done, except that with an ingenuity only the ‘creatives’ of the modern world could have devised, the Ss had been replaced by 5s, like so: KI55 MY A55. (Hence the ‘Slightly’ part of the T-shirt’s ‘Slightly Offensive’ brand name, I assume.) So glaringly discourteous was his message to the world at large that it was a wonder no-one had taken exception to it, perhaps by grabbing hold of his ring-tab-shaped earring and trying to pull his head off, or, failing that, merely by punching him in the ki55er. In fact, it was a wonder I didn’t do it myself. Or, at the very least, that I didn’t ask him to take his custom elsewhere. As it happened, I had just been reading about one of my wife’s relatives, a philosopher who, when a student in the 1920s, was expelled from his university simply for asking questions considered to be insolent. So, why didn’t I tell this fellow to go away and change his shirt?

The answer is simple. Times have changed, and if I had told him no, he couldn’t come in and take his exam—his degree-level exam, I should say, for we’re talking about a university here—since I found his slogan insulting and it was time someone in loco parentis gave him a lesson in manners; in fact, it was high time someone told him he had better change his attitude if he wished to impress prospective employers, partners, friends, or merely the man in the street—if I had done such a thing, the person the authorities would have looked askance at would not have been the student, it would have been me.

3: FRANNY’S COMPLAINT

Admittedly, there’s nothing new about stupidity: there have always been silly mistakes and embarrassing misunderstandings, no doubt we have made them ourselves, and likewise there have always been dunces—or ‘Wise Men of Gotham’ as they are called in folk tale typology—and it would be perfectly possible to look at particular individuals or even whole communities from any period in history and exclaim at how absurd they were, how superstitious their beliefs, how crazy their carryings-on, how lacking in wisdom they were. Yet one of the things that is particularly telling about the present age is not the way we are so well-supplied with unwisdom, but the fact that we seem to set so little store by its opposite—by the notion of wisdom itself. Generally speaking, the seeking and cultivation of wisdom is not seen as important. It’s not on the agenda. It is as if the idea of wisdom has been erased from the curriculum. The getting of qualifications and the getting of skills: yes. The development of coping strategies: perhaps. The acquisition of techniques: yes. But the getting of wisdom? No.

The disenchanted student Franny’s outburst in J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey suggests that this has been so for some time:

Nervously, and without any real need whatever, Franny pushed back her hair with one hand. ‘I don’t think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while—just once in a while—there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn’t, it’s just a disgusting waste of time! But there never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on a campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge. You hardly ever even hear the word wisdom mentioned!’ [Salinger, 1962: 145-6]

Certainly, this describes the situation I found when I first went up to university. In my naivety, I had imagined a serious engagement on the part of the teaching staff with the great, perennial questions, and that this engagement would constitute the deeper, or even the real, purpose of a university education in the Humanities. But no, nothing of the kind. Occasionally, one would come across a fellow student with a philosophical position of his own (or, more usually, of someone else’s) that he was prepared to argue for, often aggressively, and without really listening to what anyone else had to say—but the sort of passionate yet disinterested conversations I had hoped to have with my teachers and peers were simply not forthcoming. In fact I can only think of one lecturer who had anything of any philosophical depth to say for himself beyond teaching the prescribed course…although now, on reflection, many years later, I can’t say I feel that what he had to say was particularly wise, either.

But then, our attitude to wisdom is a strange one. In principle, we approve of it. Wisdom is a good thing, and being wise is to be esteemed. Everyone accepts this. At any rate, we never hear anyone say—unless, of course, they are trying to be funny—‘Wisdom? What rubbish! Who needs it?’ And this is quite surprising, for whereas certain qualities—such as innocence, beauty, and femininity, for example—have been picked apart by cultural analysts to the point where it has come to seem that there is nothing essential or solid about them, nothing real about them, nothing that hasn’t been culturally constructed by the powerful for social or material gain—the quality of wisdom has more or less been left alone. Whether this is because it really would be rather difficult to deconstruct the concept of wisdom or because it is simply considered too vague, irrelevant, slippery or negligible a quality for there to be any need to critique it out of existence is another matter, however.

At any rate, in practice, we rarely think of the significance of wisdom or pay any attention to the work of developing it. At best, we would like to be good, or we want to be at peace with ourselves and the world, or we want to live ‘mindfully’, or we would like to be much-loved or well-thought-of, or to be regarded as intelligent or generous—or, more commonly, we would like to be rich, or successful, or famous, or healthy, or slim, or attractive, or cool—or all of those things at once. But wise? As Franny says: ‘You hardly ever even hear the word wisdom mentioned.’

It is true that the traditional religions with their sundry references to ‘wisdom’ are still being practiced, even if it is somewhere off to the side of everyday life, which for most people has become an almost entirely secular enterprise. It is true, too, that over the past decades a substantial interest has developed in ‘wellness’ or the ‘care of the self’, with an industry growing up in order to cater to this demand, and that one only has to glance at the internet to see wise sayings posted on Facebook, Tumblr sites and elsewhere by well-meaning individuals with some sort of connection to that self-help industry, sayings often ascribed to Rumi, freely translated from Marcus Aurelius, copied verbatim from Charles Bukowski, or taken from some maverick politician who, due to their complete failure to gain the power they crave, has never suffered the misfortune of having had their utopian fantasies tested out in practice. Yet when we look a little closer at what else those keyboard gurus post: the soft porn, the paeans to coffee, the celebratory references to cheesy rock songs or second-rate movies, and the crudely phrased right-wing or left-wing rants, it soon becomes clear that there is no real wisdom there either, none at all, only a show of wisdom. They are posting these proverbs, wise words, Taoist anecdotes or Native American fables because they want to be seen to be advising themselves without actually having to take that advice, or, which amounts to the same thing, because they want to present a self-image of wisdom and spirituality to the world at large without actually having to do anything about it beyond posting something online, or because the desire to lecture others is too powerful to resist, or because such second-hand wisdom or pseudo-wisdom is a sop to the Cerberus of their own conscience which is trying to tell them that they ought to give up all this nonsense and set off in search of wisdom themselves.

In any case, the purpose of the self-help industry is, as it says, to help the self—which, whether it involves our going to the gym or adopting particular diets, practicing one or other kind of ritual, decluttering our houses, looking after our mental health, or submitting ourselves to some form of therapy, has for the most part a great deal more to do with developing our self-esteem than with growing wiser, however much it might be supposed that those two things are the same. It has to do with what is sometimes called, in one of the more vacuous phrases of recent times, living your best life, not with the seeking of wisdom.

It is the same in ordinary workaday life. When taking decisions, for example, people in business or public office are rarely heard to foreground wisdom. I would agree that in the U.K. the term ‘wise men’ has generally been applied to the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, but it is not altogether clear whether this is a soberly respectful description of the people who have the responsible task of setting interest rates, or whether it is meant to be a mildly ironic or even a savagely satirical comment upon such officials. Likewise, when talking heads are invited on to TV to discuss current issues, it is generally observable that they are chosen not for their wisdom but for their deeply opinionated mentality, together with a cast-iron self-confidence when it comes to expressing those opinions fluently and at length—or in convenient soundbites, if preferred—whatever the subject may happen to be.

At all events, no-one would be taken seriously if, when applying for work, they put ‘seeker of wisdom’ on their CV. They would be more likely to be thought pretentious, ineligible for the job on offer, or off their head.

In short, we lack a culture of wisdom.

4: AN INVESTIGATION

Yet if we regard the getting of wisdom as something worthwhile, or even as the ne plus ultra, then how are we to go about it? It is all very well saying ‘wisdom is this’ and ‘wisdom is that’, as has been said above, but how do we substantiate these statements? How do we put them into practice? Moreover, while it’s easy enough to say that wisdom is the most profound form of savoir vivre, and that wisdom discriminates, and so forth, on what basis is it savoir vivre and on what basis does it discriminate? On what foundation is wisdom grounded and on what principles does it operate? Because wisdom must have some foundation, otherwise anyone could say whatever they liked about it—and if that were the case, then wisdom would not be a definite, identifiable attribute or quality at all.

Yet the strange thing is that as soon as we start to think about wisdom, we find that its nature is oddly elusive. If I say ‘wise’ or ‘wisdom’ in a sentence, it is clear enough, in a rough and ready sort of way, what I mean. But once I try to sharpen up that meaning, the subject seems to shift out of focus. For instance, is wisdom merely another word for intelligence? Or for a particular kind of intelligence? Or is it nothing more than common sense? Can it be learned? Can one take a course in it? What does it mean, to be wise? What does it entail? Is there a pattern to wisdom? A structure? A protocol? Ontologically speaking, what is it? Where is it, inside ourselves? Is it always a kind of thinking, or can it be more than that? Can there be a wisdom of feeling? A wisdom of posture, of gesture? And so on.

To go further, there seems to be something about wisdom that actively resists analysis, that defies categorization, that doesn’t want to be fixed, defined, tabulated, exposed or pinned down. It cannot simply be put into boxes; it can’t be commodified; it cannot be packaged and sold. And in particular it would seem to confute or reject those who lay claim to being wise themselves. Even those whom we may not think of as being especially blessed with wisdom appear to be conscious of this. They’ll have the protagonists in the books they write say: ‘A wise man once told me’ whatever it happens to be, instead of having their protagonists state the same platitudes directly. Or in conversation they’ll say, ‘as Plato said’ or ‘as Einstein used to say’, instead of putting the same thing in their own words. Admittedly, this is also a way of supporting their opinions, of saying, ‘I am not alone in thinking this; Einstein and Plato thought the same, so it must be correct; I too am wise, Q.E.D.’ Yet even so it signifies a certain reluctance to lay claim to wisdom directly, since few things come across as more unwise than to say, ‘Look at me, how wise I am!’ Accordingly, when wishing to advertise her own wisdom during an interview, the Scottish Nationalist makar or poet laureate, Kathleen Jamie, prefers to do so obliquely, putting it in the third person as well as adding a cryptic, slangy touch. ‘The wise woman is a thing,’ she says, grinning mysteriously, allowing her interviewer to draw her own conclusions. [Brooks, 2021]

While none of this is quite as paradoxical as saying: the wise cannot be wise, because if they admit to wisdom, they must be unwise, it nevertheless suggests that wisdom appreciates discretion. It works obliquely. It comes at us tangentially. In a way, it is veiled. And if that is so, then wisdom cannot easily be identified. Nor can its modus operandi be easily determined. When the princess states in her riddle that ‘nothing is so obscure’ as wisdom, it sounds as though she’s referring to the way that wisdom is hard to find in this world, but perhaps she means something more than that. Perhaps it refers to the fact that there is something inherently or necessarily obscure about it. Similarly, when she calls it ‘unknown’ she may be suggesting that there is something unknowable about its ways and origins, rather in the sense that our own face is unknowable to us: we can only ever see ourselves in mirror images or photographs, indirectly.

Which all makes an attempt to describe wisdom in more detail rather difficult, perhaps even self-defeating.

Nevertheless, it would be foolish to claim that nothing can be said about wisdom. For one thing, we can try to see in what directions, approaches, attitudes or modes of being wisdom lies—and, equally, in what directions, approaches, attitudes and modes of being it does not lie. For another, we can try to understand why the concept of wisdom has come to be so neglected in contemporary society—and, indeed, not merely neglected, but also, I would argue, deliberately and comprehensively erased.

This attention to the present is important, for, after all, it is of no use our trying to be wise in terms of Confucian China, Socratic Greece or the Palestine of Christ; if we care for wisdom, then it falls to us to seek it now, in the complex circumstances of our own epoch and not of any other.

There is one further reason why wisdom is difficult to write about. Whenever people have asked me what I’m doing with myself these days and I’ve told them I am writing a book that examines the subject of wisdom, their replies have hardly been encouraging. While one or two have just about been able to summon up a faint, ‘H’m, sounds interesting…’, the more usual response has been one of silence tinged with puzzlement or scorn—as if to say, ‘What—you?’ No-one has yet said, ‘I can’t wait,’ or even, ‘I need to read that.’ Yet if the subject is tantamount to being taboo among friends and relatives, I can only hope that strangers will find something new and illuminating here. There is no percentage in teaching grandmothers to suck eggs, and that is not what this book is about.

Finally, we can try to see how wisdom might be restored to us.

What follows, then, is an attempt to think about wisdom, to explore its nature, to try to understand more about what it is and what it is not, and to come to some conclusions concerning why the present time seems so strangely inimical to wisdom—in the hope that such an investigation might help us towards attaining something of this quality ourselves.

5: A DISCLAIMER

It is at this point, however, that I should add a disclaimer to the effect that this is intended to be a book about wisdom rather than a book of wisdom. It represents an examination of the subject, not an anthology of wise sayings or the musings of someone setting himself up as an authority on wisdom. Besides, works of wisdom such as the Tao Te Ching, the Dhammapada, the Gospels and the speeches of Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi exist already and it would be fruitless to try to replicate them. So: this is a work of questioning, not of stating or declaring. It is a work of journeying, not of arrival—although of course there is little point in asking questions if some sort of answers, however provisional, are not forthcoming, just as there is little point in journeying if some kind of goal, however much of a way-station in the howling desert of contemporary culture it happens to be, is not achieved.

Such an enquiry can be called a work of philosophy according to the real and ancient meaning of philosophia: it is concerned with the love of wisdom: of holy wisdom itself. It is an attempt to get at and establish the first principles of wisdom—of which the discipline of philosophy is supposed to be the love. And if that is so, then the resulting understanding of Sophia ought to give us the basis for a far more fundamental renovation of Western thought than, say, the one advanced by Marx when he claimed that the point was not to describe the world but to change it, or the one proposed by Heidegger when he claimed to be turning towards Being from Thinking (while nevertheless continuing to think about it)—since wisdom is, first and last, the crux of the matter, and all the philosophizing in the world without the wisdom to go with it is of no use whatsoever.

Not that this subject of wisdom can be contained by the discipline of philosophy, as that discipline is generally understood. After all, one can be wise, or not wise, without ever having heard of Cartesian method, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and the rest. In fact, if we want to get at first principles, it is a good idea to step outside the Academy with its solely conceptual understanding of what wisdom is, and its official definition of philosophy, and its intellectual demands that we should relate our work to other, pre-existing academic studies and situate it in the context of ‘ongoing debates’, and so on, and look instead at the matter anew, insofar as that is possible—very much as Descartes sought to do when, as he states in his Discourse, he abandoned the study of letters and ‘resolved to seek no knowledge other than that which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world’; [Descartes, 2011: 20-21] or as Goethe implies when he tells us ‘all theory is grey, but green springs the golden tree of actual life’ in Faust; or as the boy in the Tadzhik tale of Musaffar and his Horse would have been obliged to do, and would have delighted in doing, when he finally emerged from his dark place of learning into the green gardens of the bright world…

6: THE GREEN GARDENS

The folk tale of Musaffar and his Horse tells of a padishah or king whose beloved wife died in childbirth. Such was his grief at her death that he could not bear to look upon the surviving child, so he ordered him to be locked up in an underground chamber unseen by anyone except a select few. At the age of five the boy, Musaffar, began his education under the guidance of a learned tutor; by the time he was fifteen, he had mastered every subject that the tutor had taught him. Then came a day when, for the first time in his life, the boy glimpsed the world outside his underground chamber. And at that point, so the storyteller tells us:

Musaffar stepped out of his prison and saw the green gardens, blue sky and flowing rivers; [and] he cried bitterly because it so pained him to realize that he who had mastered the whole world of learning had known nothing of the bright, living world in reality. [Anon, 1972: 27]

Like that can be the feeling when we leave the realm of concepts behind and ask ourselves what wisdom is in practice, what it really is, and how we may attain it.

Once, a few years ago, I remember feeling something not so dissimilar to what Mussafar must have experienced. I was reading Huizinga’s seminal Homo Ludens in an edition I had not come across before. The essay with which it was prefaced was a masterpiece of condescension; nevertheless, it included a reference to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle which, according to the author of the essay, had much to say about a subject in which I was interested at the time. So, off I went to the Humanities Library where a brief read-through of Freud’s book succeeded only in giving me a headache, so inauspicious was his brand of thought, while offering no discernible information on the matter in question. What I found intriguing, however, was that that particular copy of Beyond the Pleasure Principle was introduced by someone described as being ‘the author of Towards Reading Freud’. That’s right: not even ‘Reading Freud’, but only ‘Towards Reading’ him, as if some arduous spiritual preparation were required before approaching the works of the master. Musing over this title, I found myself imagining future academics writing books called Towards Reading ‘Towards Reading Freud’, and Towards Reading Towards Reading ‘Towards Reading Freud’ and so on and so forth, in a dizzying regression from everyday reality…while the sunlight shone in through the windows of the library, illuminating the white plaster head of an Ancient Greek thinker brought over from another, earlier building that had recently been demolished in order to make way for the customary ‘luxury apartments’—and all at once I felt as out of place in that catacomb of reasonings about reasonings about reasonings as the classical head appeared to be among the red plastic chairs and shelves of books on Media Studies and the like. It seemed to me, as it must have seemed to so many scholars before and since—and as it would certainly have seemed to young Mussafar on finding out that his underground chamber was not the whole world—that real life, where wisdom is found, was elsewhere.

So, yes: I am interested in wisdom and I would describe myself as a seeker of wisdom, a lover of wisdom, a student of philosophia; I am puzzled by the mysteries of wisdom and I want to find out more about wisdom, if I can, by conducting what I hope will prove to be a rounded investigation in which the small occurrences of daily life are alluded to as well as the great matters of history and the deep questions of philosophy. But what follows is far from being the work of a professor delivering a lecture or a priest preaching a sermon. If it is like anything, it can be said to belong to the categories of a diver diving for pearls or a detective investigating a crime.

7: THE CRIME

The crime in question is the mystery of the whereabouts of wisdom in our time—of how it has all but been made to disappear, not only as something that is practiced but also as an ideal, a thing to be valued and sought. And here there is a certain similarity with the fairy tale of The Pearl of Wisdom.

There is a boy. He lives with his mother. There is a locked room in their house. He asks his mother what is in that locked room. ‘Hush, my son, it is no business of yours.’ He goes to school. His fellow pupils ask him who his father is, how he earns his living; he does not know.

Here he is now at home, asking his mother, ‘Who is my father?’ ‘Your father is no more, my son.’ ‘What work did he do?’ She will not say. He takes counsel of the woodpigeons; they repeat their song again, again, again. He goes back to his mother, he asks again, again; he persists: ‘What work did my father do?’ She is tired. She tells him. ‘Your father was a painter.’ ‘What became of him?’ ‘He fell into despair.’ She gives him the key of the locked room. It was his father’s studio. He sees paints, brushes, oils; he finds secret recipes and magical formulas, all the stuff of the artist’s trade. There are paintings, too; the boy examines them closely. They show a lighter world than the one where the boy and his mother live. The good woman says to him, ‘Ah, you do not know, you do not know how bright things were in days gone by. The pink rose was pink, the red rose red; sunlight and moonlight could be told apart.’

It is not uncommon for fairy tales to begin in this manner, with a boy wanting to know what his late father’s occupation was and his mother not wanting to tell him, since she doesn’t want him to follow in his father’s footsteps and meet the same fate that he did. Eventually the boy discovers the truth: as in the Greek story of The Son of the Hunter or the Kachari Story of the Merchant’s Son, and in each case, needless to say, the boy takes up his father’s trade in spite of his mother’s protests. Here in The Pearl of Wisdom, the boy’s father was something less ambitious than a merchant and more innocuous than a hunter; he was a painter. Fairy tales featuring portraits of girls are not uncommon but tales featuring painters are rare: the only other one that I can think of is a story from Western India: The Artist’s Stratagem, and that is unlike this one. At any rate, heedless of his mother’s warnings, the boy, now old enough for us to call him a youth, sets out to become an artist like his father. He practices, practices, practices—and certainly he has the skill to succeed. But something strange has been happening to the country where the youth lives; the skies, long dense with clouds, have been growing cloudier; the sun has seemed to be weakening; and even candles, fires and torches no longer give the light they used to do. This darkness makes the practice of his craft all but impossible, and in any case there is little call for such work. What is the point of paying for something that can barely be seen?

So gradually has this darkness spread itself across the kingdom that others have become inured to it and now they barely notice it; they consider it normal. But the youth is not satisfied, nor does he want to succumb to despair as his father did. One day he looks about him and thinks: enough!

And so it might be with us. Sometimes we see our culture as from a distance, and it strikes us just how dark things have become. It is dark in the way that wisdom is excluded from public discourse, dark in the way that our sense of aesthetics has grown diseased, dark in the way that all the tendernesses of the soul—or if not quite all, then a great many of them—have been cast forth as filth & mire, to quote William Blake; dark in the way that our notion of morality has become so vague and inconsistent, dark in the way that, in spite of the fact that the world in general, if not always in particular, is a less hazardous place than at any other time in history, there is so much dissatisfaction everywhere; dark in the way that, in spite of our democratic freedoms, there is a pathological amount of anger at every level of society, or so it would appear from reading the kind of comments people post online—and so on. It may be dark in the sense of a fog of confusion at nightfall rather than dark in the sense of the pitch black darkness of out-and-out evil, but this confusion—the confusion of the Ghor Kali Yuga or darkest part of the Age of Discord, as it is sometimes called—is omnipresent and intense. It is a confusion in which everyone has opinions and, through social media, can easily acquire an audience for those opinions, yet no-one seems to know anything. Some people may be thought to know the truth about this world, or may themselves claim to know that truth—but then, this is a confusion in which TV presenters, if allowed to go on presenting programmes long enough, get mistaken for sages; in which children’s authors may account themselves such experts on divinity that, upon producing books such as The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, they can be taken seriously; and in which a man can go to a costumier’s, buy himself a hat and cloak—the Mr Natural beard he supplies himself—and lo and behold, he becomes not just a guru overnight, but a satguru, meaning someone who is not only enlightened himself, but who can also enlighten others.

The experience of being in a dense fog at twilight can be briefly entertaining, then estranging, then alarming, and then bewildering, as the things which seemed clear and familiar only a few moments ago become unfamiliar and unclear, proportions become distorted, distances grow deceptive, directions become obscured and the path ahead lost. Nor is ordinary lighting of any use. That is how it is in this kingdom of darkness. Yet the worst part of it is that the darkness is not just outside ourselves, so that if we were to hold something up close to our eye, we would be able to see it very well, or that if we were to move away to somewhere brighter, if such a place existed, we would see the world with perfect clarity; no, the darkness is within us too, as if we have no eyes to see that this is real and that is mere pretence, or that this is wise and that is affectation and stupidity. This is what the youth in our story of The Pearl of Wisdom senses: that it is not simply because of the fog of darkness all around him that it is hard to tell good from bad, right from wrong, and wise from idiotic; there is also the painful fact that his own discrimination is affected: the darkness is within him as well.

8: AGNOSIS

And what of philosophy itself? What are the philosophers doing to dispel this darkness? A glance at various philosophy department websites not only gives a rough idea of how philosophy advertises itself today, it also makes it clear that the getting of wisdom is not at the top of most philosophers’ agendas. For example, while Nigel Warburton acknowledges that ‘the word philosophy is derived from the Greek for love of wisdom,’ he adds: ‘But that isn’t particularly helpful in understanding how the word is used now.’ Walter Sinnott-Armstrong agrees: ‘Sure, the name philosophy derives from the Greek for love of wisdom, but what’s that?’ In both cases, philosophy’s literal meaning is skipped over in order to get to something more ‘relevant’, more up to date. From Sinnott-Armstrong’s perspective, the aim of philosophy is to arrive, by way of a properly analytical method, at a systematic world-view; from Warburton’s, it is to enable us to deal with practical contemporary problems—such as whether or not boxing should be banned, for example.

Indeed, the role of the philosopher as wise man is not one to which many modern philosophers would lay claim. Perhaps they would not even aspire to such a role. ‘People expect different things of philosophers,’ says David Bain. ‘Some expect us to be sages. When these people meet me, my heart sinks, since I know theirs is about to.’ For myself, I can’t say I’ve expected them to be sages since I first went to university and discovered that the quest for gnosis was not on the syllabus. Thenceforward, I must have encountered a good many philosophers in the form of students, postgraduates, lecturers and professors—and plenty of armchair philosophers too, of course—but none of them, not one of them, has exuded a notable sense of wisdom. Of erudition—yes, of course. Of intelligence—no doubt. Of debating skills—quite so. But of wisdom? No.

It is true that Bain’s remark is as nicely expressed as it is modest. Still, behind his remark is the sense that no philosopher should be expected to be wise, that wisdom is unrelated to philosophy as it is undertaken today, and that the very idea of the philosopher as wise man or wise woman is a fantasy left over from the classical world of the distant past.

Certainly, Bain’s view seems borne out in practice. If philosophers were really ‘lovers of wisdom’ and the acquisition of it were their priority, then you would think that people would be queuing up to ask them for advice. This does not happen. People will go to psychiatrists or counsellors, maybe their GPs or just possibly their local priests, imams, or rabbis (as they do in American sitcoms); they will go to astrologers, palmists, numerologists, tarot card readers and clairvoyants—but not to philosophers. The average philosopher is almost the last person you would think of calling on in an intellectual crisis—or, for that matter, in an emotional crisis, since even emotional crises have at some point to be dealt with rationally—whatever it is that has happened, one has to get it into some sort of perspective, one has to decide what to do about it. And it’s hard to imagine that philosophers would make themselves approachable, anyway. Yes: it is the case that, having exposed the traditional concerns of philosophy as all being based, as he presumed, on a mistake, Richard Rorty fantasized about the role of the future philosopher as being an advisory or ‘conversational’ one—which sounds like nice work if you can get it, for I dare say the kind of image he had in mind was of someone with a well-paid position in a government think-tank or business consultancy, or even of someone to whom presidents and Secretaries of State would approach in awe with pens in hand and notebooks ready, eager for a few gems of profundity to take back to the office…and not of Diogenes in his tub. At any rate, I doubt that he was thinking of philosophers as being freelance sages offering pastoral care around the clock. For one thing, such an idea is too much at odds with current work practices. If my own academic colleagues are anything to go by, even philosophers are fussy about the number of hours which they are being paid to work and the number of hours for which they are not being paid to work. In fact, the term hyper-sensitive comes to mind. But then, they are wage-earners like everyone else these days, with the exception of the unemployed. They are paid, not called. Or maybe they are called to a certain extent, but not so vociferously that the sound of time ticking by, where time is money, goes unheard. Yes, if you’re a celebrity, they might enjoy a chat with you outside office hours; but if you’re a nobody—or rather, which is worse, a nobody with problems—forget it. They are closed for business.

But there may well be another, still more pertinent reason why philosophers have abdicated the role of seeker of wisdom. If wisdom suggests an intuitive knowledge about whatever happens to be the case—that is, if it suggests a kind of intellectual certainty regarding the matter in hand—then what we discover when we look at the dominant trends within contemporary philosophy is that the thick grey air of the kingdom of darkness is especially present here and no-one really knows anything. The one thing they do know is that they don’t know and can’t know anything, because of the slippery, unstable, fluid, undecidable, transitory nature of reality (which isn’t exactly ‘reality’ in the first place) and equally of the subject perceiving it (if indeed he or she can be properly called a ‘subject’). And not only this, but they’re proud of it! They are proud of having achieved complete uncertainty. Agnosis is seen as a mark of intelligence, whereas a foolish person in their eyes is defined as somebody who believes that he knows something for sure, like the difference between good and evil, and who makes judgements accordingly—as did George W. Bush, for example, when declaring war on Iraq.

One thing we can say about wisdom, however, is that it suggests certainty and gnosis, not agnosis and uncertainty. Wisdom may say ‘Yes’, ‘No’, or ‘Wait’, in any given situation, but one thing it is unlikely to say is, ‘I’m not sure…’

Far from dispelling this darkness of confusion, the philosophers have only added to its dense, all-pervading opacity.

9: THE GOLDEN HAIR

To whom are we to turn, then?

The youth rose up. He went to the river, he sat down. A golden hair came floating, floating by. The youth reached down and snatched it from the water.

In other words, one day, while sitting by a river contemplating his own situation and the strange fate of his country, the youth in the tale of The Pearl of Wisdom spies a golden hair in the water and manages to get hold of it before it can float past. So used to darkness is the youth that this single hair dazzles him: the light it radiates makes things that were previously hidden appear clearly for the first time. In that sense, we can say that the hair has something to do with wisdom. At the same time, it fills him with longing. It is a girl’s hair for sure, but what girl? Where is she? Who is she?

He knows he must find her, cost what it may!

This motif of the girl with the golden hair is a common one found in folk tales spread across the world from Hungary to Nepal. Presumably, it originates in a place where fair hair is rare. Or perhaps the hair really is of gold, as in the Indian tale of The Princess with the Golden Hair in which a young man is gifted a ring by the king of the snakes: this ring having the peculiar virtue of being able to turn things to gold when the snake-king’s name is invoked. By chance, the princess’s hair touches the ring while the young man is dreaming; in his dream he whispers the words of the charm and her hair becomes gold. One of her hairs floats downstream to be found by a prince who becomes obsessed with it. Likewise, a king finds a girl’s golden hair in another Indian story, The Magic Ring of the Lord Solomon, and offers half his kingdom to whoever can find the girl herself. Then, there is the tale of How the Raja’s Son Won the Princess Labam in which the sought-after girl is so radiant that there is no need to light any lamps at night; simply by sitting on the roof of her palace, she illuminates the city to such an extent that people can do their work as easily as if it were day. The girl to whom the hair in our story belongs must be someone like that.

At any rate, the first thing suggested by the finding of the golden hair in The Pearl of Wisdom is the fact of this influx of light in an otherwise ubiquitous darkness. This is important because so far we have talked about wisdom in a somewhat impersonal fashion, as if the subject were a little way over there—across the road, perhaps, or further away still—while we are here at home, comfortably distant from it. Perhaps we have also made it sound as though wisdom were after all an inessential thing, an add-on, a luxury item somewhat like a scholar’s gown or evening dress—the occasions exist when such things may be worn, but they are rare: they are not the norm. Yet for the youth on the riverbank, wisdom and the pursuit of wisdom are not small things, they are not extras, they are not luxuries and they are far from being optional activities that can be taken up or dropped as one likes. His situation sums up our desperation to find some way out of the confusion all around us, to make sense of our lives. For him, therefore, the question of wisdom is not an abstract matter. He feels that his life depends on it—that if he fails to find an answer to his predicament he will go mad.

In short, he is a seeker of wisdom.

Of course, plenty of people are seeking a way out of their present predicament and plenty of people want to change themselves or the world, yet not all of them can be said to be wise in the ways they go about these things or to have wisdom as their goal or guiding light. That is why so many go astray, conceiving of truth as something that belongs to organised religions or political parties, or supposing that it can be bought and therefore falling under the spell of sinister gurus of one sort or another, or confusing truth with power or magic, or turning to drugs or alcohol, or simply giving up.

Secondly, this golden hair—which, as it were, represents a part of the whole in that it belongs to the girl herself, who is as yet out of reach—suggests the truth of Schiller’s remark that ‘they would need to be already wise, in order to love wisdom.’ In other words, if there were no wisdom in the youth to begin with, he would not be interested in becoming wiser. At any rate, in having the hair, the youth has a scrap of wisdom, and because he can see what it does,