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You are an academic writing a critique of the conception of wisdom outlined in Peter Starr’s blog at Wiscult.com. What are the principal shortcoming of this conception and how would you suggest rectifying them?
Every writer and artist knows the excitement, and the dread, of sending an article, book, score, or art work off for review by a generally anonymous reviewer, then waiting patiently for a reply. The advent of advanced generative AI tools promises to mitigate the uncertainty in this process by providing nearly instantaneous feedback on our work prior to its formal submission, or to more informal review by our disciplinary peers.
For this epilogue to “Wisdom Matters,” I have asked the newly released Gemini 3.0 Pro to respond to the following prompt as a way both of uncovering potential weaknesses in the project and of testing a state-of-the-art LLM’s ability to serve as a scholarly reviewer.
You are an academic writing a critique of the conception of wisdom outlined in Peter Starr’s blog at Wiscult.com. What are the principal shortcoming of this conception and how would you suggest rectifying them?
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Despite my leaving this academic’s field open, Gemini responded assuming that it was a psychologist. I then changed “an academic” to “a literary critic” and ran the prompt again. In both cases, I also ran the prompts in Gemini’s Deep Research mode. In what follows, I will cite from all of these, adopting the fiction that responses from “an academic” come from “the psychologist” and the others from “the literary critic.” Having already done a good deal of this in “The Wisdom of Fun Home” below, I will avoid the temptation to call out the relatively few times that the AI’s analysis was garbled, internally inconsistent, or simply confused.
My first takeaway from this exercise is that Gemini 3.0 Pro, like most advanced LLMs, is wonderfully adept at enforcing “rigorous” disciplinary orthodoxies, down to its uncanny mimicking of the knuckle-slapping style of some academic reviewers. In other words, the prompt for a “critique” carried with it a narrowing of one’s audience, as if our goal were only to speak to those in a specific discipline and subfield.
Thus the psychologist found my “intentionally broad” conception of wisdom “so ethically and cognitively expansive” as to risk “losing theoretical distinctiveness.” (If anything, I feel that the conception is insufficiently broad in not doing more with conceptions of wisdom in philosophy and the major religions.) Not surprisingly, the path to this recommended distinctiveness passes through a series of established psychological concepts (such as meta-knowledge or life-span contextualism) and models (Robert Sternberg’s Balance Theory, the Wisdom Task Force’s Common Model of Wisdom, Igor Grossman’s Wise Reasoning Paradigm).
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Given the ubiquity of the Aristotelian concept of phronesis (practical wisdom) in contemporary wisdom studies, I was not surprised to find Gemini “defining the pursuit of wisdom as the intentional decision to find ethical solutions to practical problems”—i.e., “applied ethical and professional dilemmas.” Somewhat less expected was its call for the project to explicitly incorporate “training in emotion regulation strategies.”[1] Much as we readers might want to throw the occasional book across the room in frustration, I am not convinced that emotional regulation plays a large role in the reading process. That said, the psychologist was spot on in suggesting that “the Serenity Prayer judgment (acceptance/courage)… requires effective emotional regulation based on a clear assessment of situational controllability.”
Taken as a whole, I found the psychologist’s feedback to be often pertinent and helpful and had revised several passages in “Wisdom Matters” along suggested lines. At the same time, I could not help but find its insistence on “empirical grounding and operationalizability” in the pursuit of wisdom as a “scientifically rigorous construct” as a call for another project entirely.
The literary critic’s critique was, quite frankly, less impressive. In response to its characterization of “Wisdom Matters” as “a noble, if somewhat nostalgic, attempt to re-anchor the humanities in the service of public virtue,” I would counter, as my reading of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton suggests, that the project is timely despite its apparent untimeliness, and that it is the AI’s disparagement of what it calls “instrumentalism” that is itself untimely. At times, Gemini echoes the New Critics of the mid-20th century in wanting me to insist upon “literature’s intellectual autonomy” by recognizing that “the primary contribution of literary study is the cultivation of aesthetic judgment.” At others, it clearly channels deconstruction, as in the claim that wisdom in the literary classroom grows out of students’ ability “to inhabit the aporias (irresolvable contradictions) of the text.”
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This pressure to pull the analysis back toward recognizable literary orthodoxy leads the AI to suggest that my focus on the Serenity Prayer “should be reframed as John Keats’ Negative Capability: the capacity of ‘being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” There is much of negative capability in my project’s insistence on respecting cognitive complexities and cultural difference, and in its privileging of inherent tensions over simplistic judgments. But with its call for the wisdom to distinguish—and courage to change—that which can be changed, the Serenity Prayer clearly represents a step beyond the artist’s aesthetically-driven suspension of fact and reason.
The peril of disciplinary orthodoxy is most evident, however, in the ways these two critiques are at cross-purposes with one another. For example, the psychologist’s call for literarily-acquired wisdom to be tested through concrete actions in the world is the apotheosis of “instrumentalism” for the literary critic. Whereas the psychologist insists that wisdom “must be defined by its efficacy in resolution, not just its capacity for nuanced analysis,” the literary critic counters that “[w]isdom in literature is not the solution to the conflict, but the ability to sustain the tension of the conflict without collapsing it into a moral platitude.” This tendency of our virtual academics to pursue contrary goals not only suggests the limitations of strict disciplinary orthodoxy in the study of a phenomenon as multi-faceted, often amorphous, and yet vital as wisdom; it can also—indeed, should also—be seen as an invitation to explore the tension between them.
Beyond this tendency to pull the “Wisdom Matters” readings toward a disciplinary center, Gemini 3.0 Pro is quite strong in its tracking of what one says, less so in evaluating what one has actually done. Reading through the various responses, it felt as though the AI had seized on several critical concepts or precepts—e.g., intellectual humility, the Serenity Prayer, and “holding the self lightly”—without attempting to analyze how they actually functioned in the readings on the site.
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Three quick examples.
First, wisdom’s dependence on the “acquisition of rich factual and procedural knowledge concerning human nature, development, and interpersonal relationships” is inherent to my discussion of the Bildungsroman and its contemporary variants, as well as to my analysis of how specific works of fiction sensitize readers to cultural and ethical differences. Without a grounding in the more foundational reaches of the data/information/knowledge pyramid, wisdom is, in Morrison’s words, “just a hunch” (Source 307).
Second, although my reading of Achebe’s Arrow of God does not refer specifically to Sternberg’s Balance Theory or to the Common Model of Wisdom, it is all about the need to balance personal and collective interests in the linking of wisdom to the common good.
Finally, the literary critic’s claim that the “wisdom of a work isn’t just what it says about empathy (thematic content), but how it says it (formal technique)” ignores my consistent privileging of more formally inventive works (such as those by Bechdel, Morrison, Marker, McEwan, Ozeki, and Le Guin) over those that simply thematize wisdom (Albom, Coehlo, Hesse).
While I clearly have answers to each of these critiques, they nonetheless point to one or more ways in which I have now usefully tweaked the analyses below.
Photo: Nano Banana Pro
Above all, the AI tends to run ahead of our current ability to fully theorize the process of wisdom acquisition. There is no question but that my work lacks what the psychologist calls “the empirical metrics necessary to test or track the development of wisdom in students” and would benefit from “a clearer articulation” of how the reflective process triggered by the reading of certain novels “transforms into superior decisive judgment in real-time, high-stakes ethical conflicts.” Likewise, I fully accept the literary critic’s argument, drawing on the work of Suzanne Keen, that there is “scant empirical evidence” that fiction’s acknowledged ability to provoke an empathic response translates directly into “pro-social action,” as well as the related point that narrative empathy risks becoming a form of “’passive empathy’, where the reader feels virtuous for weeping over a fictional victim while ignoring the real suffering of their neighbor.”
As several recent surveys of psychological work on wisdom suggest, however, experimental work on wisdom continues to be bedeviled by marked variations in the characteristics tested, the foreshortened time frame of most experimental studies, an overreliance on college-age subjects, the inherent fallibility of self-reporting, and an unproven assumption that responses in a lab translate to actions in the world. Assuming that one could devise and fund a study that overcame all of these hurdles, the process of theorizing wisdom’s acquisition in the case of reading for wisdom in literature would remain difficult inasmuch as the effect of subjects’ reading on their actions in the world is inherently indirect. Some will reject the very premise of this project on that account. In its favor, I believe there is too much accumulated wisdom behind it—across the centuries and in radically different cultures—and far too much at stake today to do so.
[1] Throughout this post, text in bold was bolded by Gemini.
