In the century or so that anthropology has been around it’s often found itself on shifting ground in terms of it’s disciplinary relations. The discipline itself is saddled with a commitment to holism which many are uneasy about, and it’s external relations have changed as well. I spent the other day hunting down the original version of Edmund Leach’s paper known as either “Genesis as Myth” or “Levi-Strauss in the Garden of Eden” — it originally appeared in the Transactions of the New York Academy of Science, an institution that today that I doubt would treat structural studies of myth as on par with biochemistry. Some of cultural anthropology’s adjoining disciplines are old neighbors: linguistics, geography, history, sociology, comparative religion, psychology. Others liasons — with literary criticism or cultural studies — are more recent. Given our discipline’s incredible mutability it’s not surprising that we read very widely and have done for some time.
The other day at a party I managed to have a word or two with Roger Ames, one of the major forces in that corner of philosophy that is interested in bringing East Asian philosophers into dialogue with continental philosophy. One thing he said to me which really struck me (one of many — he’s a very interesting and person) was that Eastern (read ‘Chinese’) philosophy had never given up on Wisdom, while the Western tradition had taken a pass on widsom and settled for the lesser goal of knowledge. I was struck by this because it is, to a certain extent, true. We have plenty of what we call ‘sapiential texts’ in the Western tradition, of course, but these are typically considered to be ‘religious’ rather than ‘philosophical.’
At the same time, there has always been a current in the ‘Western Tradition’ of ‘applied’ or perhaps ‘sapiential’ work — think of Aristotle, for instance, or the ‘Mirrors for Princes’ literature from (iirc) the Renaissance. Although we don’t talk about it much, many social scientists have the sense that their study makes them wise of more deeply human — I think, for instance, of the absorption of phenomenologists and other European thinkers into the American sociological tradition that produced books like Kurt Wolf’s Surrender and Catch. And of course anthropology as a discipline is fixated on the way that one’s personal perspective is altered and enriched by the experience of -culture shock- fieldwork.
For complex reasons I have no interest in attempting to knit together the Western and Chinese philosophical traditions (for a start, I’m not interested in the boundary maintenance needed to stabilize either as a canon). But I am always interested in the way that issues fall between the cracks of disciplines or, perhaps , get divided up between them. Thinking about the fate of wisdom in the philosophical tradition and its (re)location in social science really did make my brain open up for a moment, though.
Any thoughts?
Wisdom is definitely out of style in philosophy but not entirely gone. I feel like there are a lot of concepts that didn’t quite make it to this century’s discourse, which still inform our modes of thought, albeit in somewhat unconscious aesthetic ways. I think many philosophers too, have the sense that their study makes them wise or more deeply human, or at least I do. It’s not something we talk about though, for a variety of reasons.
We’ve been experiencing a general trend toward solidification, differentiation and directionality in academic disciplines, as well as a decrease in the value of wisdom within our culture as a whole. This has had an effect on the way philosophers think of what they’re doing quite a bit. For starters, I feel that there’s a general feeling that philosophy has become very underappreciated if not actually in danger. I remember being disturbed by the frequency of “what are you going to do with that?” as it was the only question asked when I told people I was a philosophy major. I like to think of philosophy as having responded with a number of trends. The first is the sort of “lets get serious, cut the BS” attitude, which manifests in attempts to cut out confusing or lofty or imprecise parts of philosophy and concentrate on things which are more evidently applicable. Secondly, and not altogether separate from this has been a retreat into academic minutiae and a great surge in squabbley argumentation about precise definitions. Given the value placed upon concrete terms by both of these trends, wisdom has sort of fallen under the radar, only surfacing in a sort of disguised way in the musings of people like Wittgenstein (who doesn’t fit squarely in any of the categories I’ll discuss.) There’s a kind of wisdom that motivates these two which is manifest as a criticality and sharpness. The third reaction has taken place in the parts of philosophy which aren’t clearly differentiable from other disciplines, which I’ll call “theory”. I don’t know how to characterise the relationship between wisdom and theory. I can imagine critiques of the concept of wisdom as a structural heirarchy of power, or as logocentric or whatever, but in a certain way, I feel that what theory shares at the least an aesthetic connection to the idea of wisdom as a sort of deep understanding beyond instrumental reasoning.
Additionally, I find that philosophers aren’t nearly as self-conscious about what philosophy as a whole means as are anthropologists about their discipline. We’ve had some interesting musings as to the purpose of it (Wittgenstein, D&G) but I don’t think we’re as tempted to try and understand philosophy holistically. Athropology seems to desire an ethical core, or at least a relatively coherent understanding of what you’re all trying to accomplish, much more than philosophy does, perhaps because “telos” so to speak, is our thing and we’re very divisive about it.
I don’t think we talk much about what we’re doing, and wisdom isn’t brought up much outside of Intro to Philosophy anymore, but I think that it still exists as a sort of implicit aesthetic motivation in the practice of philosophy.
I have several thoughts, & if I wait til I can put them down in coherent fashion they will probably never appear, so here goes, ad hoc:
1. What you say calls to mind a certain kind of mid-century american sociology–Lonely Crowd, Habit of the Heart, The Organization Man — that is about “how to live” (in the guise of being about how WE live).
2. Geertz’s recent book Available Light, though this is fairly non-committal to be wisdom.
3. I’ve always felt that anthropology in particular (as opposed to other social sciences) has a side which is philosphy with data: asking not “what is truth” but “how do people decide what truth is?” for example. I can’t fully devleope this argument, but I think that such an empirical approach leaves open the possibility of an approach to something one could call wisdom. (Or perhaps I simply think relativism is wise.)
Fascinating post Rex. I would say that the objectivism that pervades the knowledge practices of Western modernity perhaps obscure the sapiential consequences of “knowing.” Or they do at least roughly, but not, as you are suggesting Rex, completely. I think you are right Comet Jo that we anthropologists let the people whose cultures we explore speak for us on this issue, although in some ethnographies there is greater concern for this than others. The sapiential is evident in say, Cruikshank’s Life Lived Like a Story or Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places. The investigation of how “others” live could be said to be a Parsifal’s Quest, not just for knowledge of other ways of life, but, to paraphrase Schneider, “a life worth living.” If thats not sapiential I don’t know what is!
Yes, Wisdom Sits in Places is exactly the sort of thing I am thinking of. Often the ethnographies that tend towards — for want of a better term — saptientiality tend to be novelistic/humanistic etc.
One thing that strikes me — if the ethnographies that strive to ‘be wise’ (again I’m not happy with this term) do tend to threaten genre boundardies in a “Society for Humanistic Anthropology” sort of way, it is sort of interessting that the Writing Culture moment of the 1980s had so _little_ to say about wisdom.
uh… that’s kind of cryptic. But do you get what I mean?
Rex, I do understand what you mean, and you raise an important point. For all the genre crossing of the post-Clifford, Marcus era, I guess most of us still want to remain teachers and not gurus (I don’t mean that pejoratively, and I’m sure some in SHA would like to be known as the latter!). Perhaps “wisdom” speaks to a different idiom of authority? The Writing Culture moment has always seemed to me in large measure an attempt to reframe the project of cultural anthropology away from an encounter with others, to an encounter (and critique) with ourselves through an encounter with others. But the “selves” it was (and is) concerned with were social selves, lives in a public sense. Reflection and reflexivity did not take on the the encounter with “the self,” instead it was concerned with the deconstruction of the ethnographic author in terms of the society and culture s/he was writing within. Maybe the issue of the social self is amenable to discussion in the usual idiom of academic language, whereas the idiom in which relflection on “the self” would take places is not accorded similar authority? Wow, sorry for the overlong comment, thats a lot more verbiage than I intened to spill, I guess your post has really got me thinking Rex!
how can grappling with the question “what does it mean to be human” not touch upon the ethical? likewise, answering the question “what does it mean to teach” requires moral inquiry and not simply figuiring out which part of the canon to engage.
Hi Rex,
1) The Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences still publishes humanities stuff, incl. a now-infamous Dead Sea Scrolls volume in which two philologists get caught using other philologists’ Scrolls work without acknowledgement, using philology to catch them.
2) What do you mean by wisdom? I can easily see this getting into so many areas that all translate to “non-technical, sort of cool,” that I would really like to know what Ames means by Chinese wisdom.