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"A perfect knowledge of all things that mankind is capable of knowing, both for the conduct of life and for the preservation of health and the discovery of all manner of skills." p. 105
"Wisdom, in other words, was knowledge." p. 105
"To be wise, you need understanding as well as information, or knowledge; but understanding is so much harder to pin down." p. 112
So, wisdom results from understanding. And, as Mason describes understanding as the following:
"To understand is not to know, and any reduction of understanding to knowledge could only impress in the most restrictive of contexts." p. 107
"By no means all understanding is practical...understanding may be contemplative, passive or visionary." p 107
"To understand may be both to see or realize (passively), and to possess a linguistic capacity (actively), though how far both interpretations could be maintained, liberally, at the same time may be debatable." p 109
At the end of the chapter i was confused as to how wisdom, understanding, knowledge and truth interacted with one another. Does one lead to another that leads to another? Are they all interconnected or completely separate? And, without using a simple definition (as Mason claims that this provides no real understanding) what exactly do they all mean in our daily lives? Furthermore, is an understanding of all our pertinent to a successful, meaningful life or "understanding" of ourselves?
I share your frustration with Mason's style of writing. He seems to be the great descriptor of the concept of understanding, without advancing any particular theory of understanding himself. So with wisdom. Wisdom "could" be x,y,z...I think Mason saves himself on the very last page of the book, relating knowledge, wisdom, and understanding to philosophy.
ReplyDeleteWhen he closes the book saying, "It is in seeing how understanding can be seen that we can understand how variously philosophy can be understood", we get a glimpse at the point of the whole book. By explicating many theories of understanding, with both their successes and failures, we come to have an appreciation (or understanding) of the philosophical tradition in all its muddiness.
So, what the hell is wisdom? It "can" be seen, or understood, in a number of contexts, and whether we can nail down "wisdom" with one or many definitions, what we gain from Mason's book is a recognition that there are myriad approaches to understanding, and if wisdom is a product of understanding, the it is achievable in myriad ways, though "it" may be indefinable as an ideal.