Photo: ChatGPT 5.2
Before moving on, I would like to address five ways in which contemporary readers—and academic readers most especially—might be uncomfortable with wisdom as an optic for literary analysis.
These are:
- The longstanding argument that wisdom cannot be taught;
- The (not entirely unwarranted) perception that to read for wisdom is to read naively;
- The kitschification of wisdom;
- Wisdom’s traditional association with religion and spirituality; and
- The use of wisdom to justify a canonicity that favors dead white men.
Teaching for Wisdom
It has often been argued that wisdom cannot be transmitted in the way that knowledge can. Consider the following three variants on this contention. Building on the concept of phronesis in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe argue that
wisdom is learned but cannot be taught—at least not didactically. This means that wisdom is the product of experience. One becomes wise by confronting difficult and ambiguous situations, using one’s judgment to decide what to do, doing it, and getting feedback. (“Practical Wisdom” 388)
In much the same vein, Joan Erikson once argued that wisdom
comes from life experience, well-digested. It’s not what comes from reading great books. When it comes to understanding life, experiential learning is the only worthwhile kind; everything else is hearsay. (qtd. in Stephen Hall 240)
In his essay “Of Pedantry,” Montaigne appears to agree when he states that “[e]ven if we could be learned with other men’s learning, at least wise we cannot be except by our own wisdom” (122).
I grant that wisdom cannot be transmitted in the way knowledge can, in part because, as my late colleague Dallas Willard once wryly noted, “exhortation is not the only, nor the most effective, way of teaching.” To set oneself up as a font of wisdom to be imparted to one’s students, to believe that wisdom can be taught “didactically,” is almost invariably to play the fool or the pedant, in no small measure because wise action is so context specific. But to claim, as Erikson does, that “what comes from reading great books” is only “hearsay” is to go too far.
Although often quoted as if he too were drawing a hard and fast distinction between “other men’s learning” and “our own wisdom,” Montaigne is actually making a cannier point. As an inveterate sampler from great works of the past, Montaigne is arguing for a skeptical incorporation and transformation of prior learning, against the pedants who would simply take that work upon trust. “What good does it do us,” he asks, “to have our belly full of meat, if it is not digested,… if it does not make us bigger and stronger” (122). I trust it goes without saying that, unlike digestion in our satiated bodies, this form of digestion involves considerable intelligence and effort.
Photo: BareRuinedChoir (Montaigne’s Library)
In the end, Erikson’s position misses the many ways in which we can leverage such a process of incorporation in teaching for wisdom. Robert Sternberg, the strongest recent proponent of this approach, rightly contends that, while we cannot teach wisdom per se, we can and must “provide the scaffolding for the development of wisdom and case studies to help students develop wisdom” (“Balance Theory” 230). As I will elaborate in a later post, teaching for wisdom as I understand it entails five key strategies:
- Teaching our students to acknowledge and appreciate complexity, in both its cognitive and ethical forms;
- Helping them to see how the actions and values of individuals—be they historic, contemporary, or fictional—have been shaped by their social, cultural, economic, and/or religious contexts;
- Fostering in our students an empathic care for the other;
- Promoting modes of decision-making informed by a deep-seated sense of social justice and a concern for the common good; and
- Modeling intellectual humility, both inside and outside the classroom.
‘Naïve’ Reading
Those of us who are privileged to teach literature need to insist that the reading of literature is a practice—no doubt different from experiential learning per se, but no less central to the project of teaching for wisdom. Among other things, this means acknowledging and examining our students’ empathy for (or aversion to) specific characters as those characters, to echo Schwartz and Sharpe, face difficult and ambiguous situations, judge what best to do, do it, and evaluate the results of their action.
To think of literary pedagogy in this way is necessarily to embrace a ‘naïve’ form of reading. Since the so-called theoretical turn of the mid-1960s, and arguably long before, the professional study of literature has sought to go beyond the natural tendency of readers to treat characters in novels, films, and plays as if they were real. As an undergraduate many years ago, I will confess to having had my interest in literature sharply renewed by the discovery of theoretical work that foregrounded the literary text’s status as a construct, to be unpacked with tools from philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory, linguistics, and the like. As a result, my first book—Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory After May ’68—is so theoretically dense that my sister and brother-in-law quip that they make a habit of periodically taking it off the shelf, reading a sentence at random, asking one another whether they understand that sentence, and replacing the book on the shelf, concluding—generously, if perhaps not accurately—that “Peter is very smart.”
Photos: Lapham’s Quarterly (Barthes), Dailynous.com (Kristeva), New York Times (Foucault), Law and Liberty (Lacan), Goodreads (Cixous), Contemporary Thinkers (Derrida)
As evolutions in thought are wont to do, however, the theoretical turn overshot its mark. What felt at the time as a liberation from the blather that so many of us had experienced in high school English tended to obscure one of the great pleasures and benefits of literary reading, for professionals and amateurs alike—the reader’s vicarious experience of possible lives and life choices through the lens of specific characters. More recent work on the role that emotion and empathy play in literary reading and on literature’s relation to wisdom has brought that benefit back into focus, though it is worth noting that some early theorists—most notably, Roland Barthes and Hélène Cixous—never lost sight of the power and pleasures of ostensibly naïve reading.
The Kitschification of Wisdom
An Amazon search for books on wisdom yields a hodge-podge of offerings—many growing out of the Judeo-Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, and shamanic traditions; others exemplifying a New Age spiritualism that seeks to make readers more at home in their minds and bodies; still others adopting a psychological or social theoretical frame. Many understand wisdom to reside in aphorisms, as presented in engagement calendars or daily mediations. And a few are just plain weird, like the book by Pearl, a “dead squirrel who knows everything [and] has been sharing her psychic wisdom with her human disciples for years, delving into topics as varied and complex as love, money, work, health, and etiquette” (Pearl and Spelvin).
Of course a book devoted to the self-help ministrations of a dead squirrel is but the reductio ad absurdum both of a long tradition of self-help literature (nicely surveyed in Beth Blum’s recent The Self-Help Compulsion) and of our modern consumer society’s tendency to reduce wisdom to kitsch. The best examples of kitschification for the purposes of this project are the many keychains, coffee mugs, and tea cozies one can find emblazoned with Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, though kitschification is also very much in evidence in what ChatGPT came up with by way of a lead image for this post.
Photo: Etsy
Easily one of the most thoughtful offerings from what I am tempted to call today’s wisdom industry is Oprah Winfrey’s The Wisdom of Sundays, a compendium of excerpts from Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday conversations with an impressive array of experts and public figures. But even this offering, from a woman who routinely figures on personal lists of wise contemporaries, suffers from the sin of brevity. Wisdom, as I understand it, is not received but earned, through a long and sometimes painful process of changing and adapting to the world we live in. Nuggets of wisdom like those in The Wisdom of Sundays are indeed the fruit of valuable personal experience but, as nuggets, they do not lend themselves to internalization in the way that direct experience or experiencing the travails of literary characters can. The same of course holds for those lists of wise but radically decontextualized sentences and passages that one finds on simply googling “wisdom” and an author’s name.
Religion and Spirituality
The struggle to attain wisdom is a central feature of nearly all of our world’s major religions. In the Judeo-Christian world, the very phrase “wisdom literature” refers to nothing so much as to the Old Testament’s books of Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes, often supplemented by the Song of Songs, Psalms, Ecclesiasticus, and the Wisdom of Solomon.
Photo: Job Rebuked by His Friends, William Blake, National Gallery of Art
With the exception of two forays into novels that give pride of place to Buddhist ideals and another that engages Islam, however, the conception of wisdom I will be working with here is resolutely secular, more focused on what individuals can attain through their life in community than on what they receive from a divine source, either directly or as mediated by tradition. That said, most of the major religions foreground key concepts central to this secular understanding—most notably, compassion, justice, and humility. And even Christianity, which insists that pure wisdom comes first and foremost from the Godhead, emphasizes our struggle as individuals to live up to that wisdom. Here is the former Cardinal Timothy Dolan, Archbishop of New York, speaking at the January 2025 Presidential Inauguration:
God of our fathers, in Your wisdom, You set man to govern Your creatures, to govern in holiness and justice, to render justice with integrity. Give our leader wisdom, for he is Your servant, aware of his own weakness and brevity of life. If wisdom, which comes not [sic] from You, be not with him, he shall be held in no esteem. Send wisdom from the heavens, that she [i.e., wisdom] may be with him, that he may know Your designs. (Drumm)
Misguided Canonicity
Finally, no recent work of literary criticism better exemplifies wisdom’s association with traditional canonicity than the late Harold Bloom’s Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?
Bloom’s wide-ranging analysis repeatedly surfaces instances of undeniable wisdom in his subject texts, be it in Ecclesiastes’ skepticism around our ability to gauge God’s purposes, Montaigne’s insistence that self-knowledge leads us to treat others well, or Shakespeare’s teaching the acceptance of natural limits (110, 159, 5). What sticks in the craw for contemporary readers, however, is Bloom’s insistence that his “quest for wisdom [be] fused with aesthetic supremacy,” as exemplified by the Hebrew Bible, Saint Augustine, Homer, Plato, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Samuel Johnson, Emerson, Nietzsche, Freud, and Proust. Bloom’s understanding of “wisdom literature” is not only narrowly canonical and stunningly androcentric, it is further vitiated by his diatribes against what he calls “our current ideologies of Resentment, which have now pretty well destroyed aesthetic education in the English-speaking world” and his “elegiac sadness at watching reading die” (202, 297). I will argue here that wisdom “shall be found” in a far wider, more diverse range of relatively contemporary literary texts—some already canonical, some not—the aesthetic quality of which nonetheless remains very, and sometimes exceptionally, high.
