For more than a decade a group of Harvard professors has taught a class about wisdom and its religious, moral, and aesthetic dimensions to undergraduates. The four professors are friends from distinct disciplines: Michael Puett, a historian of religions; Arthur Kleinman, a physician and medical anthropologist; Stephanie Paulsell, a theologian and literary scholar; and Davíd Carrasco, a historian and anthropologist.
Inside and outside of the classroom, they have sought to understand how their own areas of study might relate to the art of living well and seeking wisdom during both ordinary and extraordinary times. Now they have written a book that outlines some of the insights they have shared with students and what they have learned while teaching the class, The Practice of Wisdom: Five Quests. These quests wind through the labyrinthine challenges of caregiving, solitude, self-understanding, and transcendence.
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Wisdom, they note in their introduction, is plural. There are many distinctive forms it can take, depending on the place and time one inhabits and the forms of suffering they face. I spoke with Puett, Kleinman, and Paulsell about how they define wisdom, why one should avoid romanticizing wisdom, what solitude and ritual can contribute to the practice, and what kind of wisdom might be required for our current moment.
I wanted to invite each of you to briefly define wisdom.
Arthur Kleinman: Aristotle said there were three forms of knowledge or wisdom. One was episteme, how we know things. Then there was techne, or craft, the technical knowledge that is so important to our work. But he thought the most important of all was practical knowledge about how to live a life, which he called phronesis.
And that last kind is my definition. I think we went out of our way at the beginning of the book in the introduction to explain that we did not feel that any of us is a master of a particular type of wisdom, nor that we were conveying this wisdom as a truth to students and readers. We believe that wisdoms differ, and people’s use of them would differ. We wanted to offer examples based on our own work that emphasized what we think is a universal process: the quest for wisdom.
Stephanie Paulsell: Yes, we didn’t want to present wisdom as something you could print on a page and say, “This is it,” but to invite our students into practices that would help them figure out ways of living wisely and compassionately in the midst of ordinary life. We presented to them many different writers and artists and musicians in the hopes that they would experiment with these ideas in their own lives.
Arthur tells this great story in the book about watching this other little boy when he’s young and thinking, “That little boy’s a lot gentler than I am.” And he thinks to himself, “Could I be like that person and still be myself?” That’s a kind of quest for wisdom—not taking on wholesale what we’re offering them, but asking, “Could I engage this in my life and still be myself?”
Michael Puett: The piece of it that I was trying to bring in, both in the course and in our book, was from the classical Chinese tradition, where one of the opening assumptions is that, at least to our experience, the world we live in is fundamentally capricious and there are no absolute answers. There are no clear norms that will tell us what to do. And that’s not a metaphysical claim. Maybe there are absolute answers, but we don’t know them. It’s therefore all about the practice, the training of a life. And part of what you’re doing is constantly trying to break perspective, learn to see the dangers of assumptions you’re making precisely by constantly having practices that allow you to rethink them, training yourself to learn to operate in complex situations better.
The book is broken up into five different chapters, and each chapter is about a different kind of quest. What is it about the quest that is so essential to developing wisdom? Are there people who simply possess wisdom by virtue of social position or outsider status, like wise fools or the jesters of Shakespeare’s plays?
Arthur Kleinman: Anyone living through the current period would be very careful to regard fools as wise. Because we have a leader who’s clearly a fool and is not wise.
Stephanie Paulsell: The quest metaphor points to the fact that this is an ongoing, lifelong practice. In quest narratives, you go out hoping you’re going to arrive somewhere. But in fact, the quest usually just keeps going and it changes and surprises you, and you end up in places you didn’t expect to be. So the quest metaphor fits very well what we understand wisdom to be. At different moments in our lives, there are different practices that need to come to bear on what we’re doing.
Michael Puett: In the chapter of the book that I wrote, which is about the quest for the self, I’m building on an amazing Chinese tradition, where the idea is we’re all born messes, just messes with different energies, desires, emotions. What you become over life depends on how you live, your practices, the relationships you form. You can either just float along not trying, in which case you will end up deadened as a human being, without wisdom. Or you can devote your life to practices of trying to get better. And it’s absolutely a lifelong process. You never get there. But you can train yourself to become better and better by breaking out of your perspective, seeing other possibilities.
One way of doing this according to the Chinese tradition, which might seem counterintuitive to Western audiences, is ritual. In modern America, we often think that ritual is bad because ritual tells us what to do. Well, in the Chinese tradition, the practices of ritual are about breaking perspective….I discussed this one ritual where a father and a son enter the ritual space. They switch roles. And so each is forced to see the world from the opposite point of view. It’s not that this in itself will give you wisdom, but when you leave the ritual space, you realize, hopefully, the patterns you’ve fallen into, including the dangerous ones, and that opens up more possibilities for changing broken relationships and altering the way we live.
Is there ever a danger that rituals of this kind become rote themselves and lose their magic and if so, how do you avoid that?
Michael Puett: Absolutely. The danger is always that our rituals can become conventions that don’t in any way change how we live our lives. We don’t train ourselves through them. The constant work is how do we make our conventions into rituals? It’s always doable, but it is absolutely a conscious project.
I noticed that most of the different approaches you describe in the book for seeking wisdom ultimately circle back to caring for others and relating well to others. Even Stephanie’s chapter on solitude is ultimately about how solitude can lead to solidarity, which seems pretty counterintuitive. What’s going on here?
Stephanie Paulsell: I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. If your other people are your fraternity brothers and Chi Phi at Cornell, some solitude would probably do you some good, give you some space to listen for what you really think is right inside yourself. To explore the subject of solitude, I picked out these three thinkers, Evagrius Ponticus, a fourth century desert monk, the 19th century poet Emily Dickinson, and Howard Thurman, a great African American pastor, theologian, and thinker from the 20th century. For all of them, solitude was really important as a practice of reorientation toward themselves and toward God and toward art making, but above all, toward freedom.
Evagrius chose solitude because he was trying to get free of his passions, like anger and resentment. If you carry them with you and you try to pray, it’s like pouring water into a bucket with holes in it, he says. If you’re saddening other people, it’s just not going to happen. He started his life as a cosmopolitan guy in Alexandria, and he gradually moves further and further and further out into the desert. And he does become a person who’s understood to be wise, although I think he would say he never got to the end of that quest.
Emily Dickinson, of course, engages in a very performative solitude as a woman in the 19th century to be able to write her poetry. She dresses in white and she listens at doors and she does all these things that amaze people. But out of that solitude, she writes 2,000 poems.
And Howard Thurman was really important to me in the pandemic because he talks about certain forms of emotional contagion. His grandmother was enslaved before the Civil War, but he talks about how her dignity was contagious or how love can be contagious.
At a time when we were all trying to stay out of each other’s way, he made me think a lot about what you would want to put in circulation and how to do that, like a virus. He lived almost the entire 20th century, so through the worst of Jim Crow, a lot of white terrorist violence against his community. And for him, solitude was not some elite practice for people with a lot of time and leisure on their hands to enjoy. For him, it was a matter of life and death. Without that rich inner life that really belongs to you, you become much more vulnerable to the manipulations of power, he says, when other people try to tell you who you are.
Thurman said everyone has inside of them an inland sea, and on that sea is an island, and on that island is an altar, and you have to protect it with everything you have, and set an angel with a flaming sword in front of it. He’s very clear about solitude as a double-edged sword. It can be a very damaging practice when you’re put into prison and put into solitary, that’s a very cruel punishment, tantamount to torture. The solitude that was enforced through segregation, he writes a whole book about that. He’s very clear on how damaging solitude can be when it’s forced on us. But he also says, “Without the practice of solitude as a humanizing practice, we won’t be able to feel the shape of our own minds, and we won’t learn to hear the sound of the genuine in ourselves, without which we can’t hear the sound of the genuine in others.”
In the final section, there is an interview with Indologist and scholar of Sanskrit and Indian textual traditions Wendy Doniger, who explains why she so badly wanted to go to India when she was a young woman. She just felt it was much wiser than New York City where she was at the time. What do you all think about that? Are some cultures wiser than others?
Arthur Kleinman: I would say no culture in any kind of objective sense is wiser than another one. There’d be no basis for saying it. But at certain moments in one’s life, one will be more moved, more inspired, and more challenged in a powerful way by different traditions that might have arisen in various cultures. And so part of our goal was to introduce students to a number of these, some of which might not seem very powerful or interesting to a certain student at a certain moment. And yet 10 years from now, it might suddenly become incredibly important.
What about our current moment though? It does not seem particularly wise.
Stephanie Paulsell: Every culture that we’ve studied, every culture has wisdom in it, has its particular forms of wisdom, ways of knowing, ways of questing for wisdom. I don’t think they have to be universal for that to be true. But it’s striking just how different our current moment is from a year ago when we gave this book to Harvard University Press, to say nothing of how long it’s been since we originally wrote those essays.
There are so many more questions to be addressed about how we seek wisdom in this technological moment, in this political moment. I keep going back to Thurman and my own thinking. How do you learn to listen for the sound of the genuine when it’s getting harder and harder to tell what’s genuine? And what’s artificial intelligence and what’s real intelligence?
Arthur Kleinman: Michael and I are anthropologists, and in anthropology, the idea is that as you travel and do field research, you’re uncovering difference. You’re uncovering the different ways there are of being human. One of the weaknesses in my view of anthropology has been that earlier anthropologists also asked the question, “What do we find when we go into ethnography that are human universals?” But I do think that some kind of quest involving serious concern for meaning in life is a universal phenomenon. I don’t know of an ethnography that has not in some way implied that if not said it directly. That’s closely tied, obviously, to religion, and it’s also closely tied to moral life, and it’s closely tied to aesthetics. And those were the domains we tried to evoke in the book. It’s not just a quest of reading classical texts, but that certainly is important.
There’s a wonderful book called The Innocent Anthropologist, by a fellow in the 1960s who really wants to be an authentic anthropologist, and he is doing work in Burkina Faso. He gets a toothache and he says to the local people, “I got this terrible toothache.” And they said, “Yeah, let’s take you to the city where there’s a dentist to take care of you.” He said, “No, no, I’m an anthropologist. I want to do it the way you do it here. And they said, “Well, you know, if we have the resources, we go to the city.” “No,” he said, “How do you do it here?” The villager said, “Well, there is a healer down there, but be careful with him.”” And so he said, “That’s where I’m going. I’m going to the local healer.” And he goes to the local healer, and as he comes up, the local healer knocks him to the ground and takes the pliers and pulls out his two front teeth.
This is a true story. This is a story about a problem in anthropological knowledge that’s also a problem that we had to confront when we wrote the book, which is the romance of wisdom, the idea that there’s an authentic wisdom that lies in people who are quote unquote “authentic” to their tradition. And that you can get this wisdom and it will magically change things.
You can be sure this anthropologist who wrote The Innocent Anthropologist never again went to an indigenous shaman to treat his toothache.
I wanted to make sure, at least in my writing, that I wasn’t simplistic and romantic about wisdom, because I think there is a lot of that in American society. We have the most simplistic understanding of the self. So we wanted to encourage transformation, but not a romanticized, magical version of it: here’s the herb, there’s the mushroom, and now you’re wise. No, it’s a practice.
Is wisdom a purely human thing or is AI, which has been trained on all of humanity’s literature and philosophy, capable of wisdom?
Stephanie Paulsell: I think our understanding of wisdom is something humanizing and humanistic—and human. There’s wisdom in nature. There’s wisdom in non-human things. But I think the wisdom that we’re very concerned with are practices that support and elevate human dignity. AI can say some smart things to you, for sure. And maybe it’ll cure cancer. That will be fantastic. Maybe it will destroy itself. Maybe the robots will kill us and that won’t be so great.
Michael Puett writes in the book that we live in the world of Han Feizi today, a world governed by extraordinarily strong institutions and technologies that leaves us stuck in rote patterns, and yet with a population fully convinced that they live in a world of free individuals. But you also write in the introduction that the quest for wisdom is almost always undertaken in the face of real threat. Could the existential threat AI poses to humanity potentially shake us out of our oblivion, and accelerate a collective quest for wisdom?
Michael Puett: I would say that one of the dangers when we were writing this book, looking back a few years, was complacency. The sense that things are working out fine, that we didn’t need to worry too much. The attitude was that we had a system that generally worked. Sure, there was climate change, but our system would develop some people who could figure it out.
That is certainly not the case now. I don’t think people are complacent. And getting to your point, there absolutely is a sense of a crisis. Now, is this good? Is this bad? It depends how we respond. One can respond to a crisis by turning to authoritarian popular leaders who will give seemingly easy answers by scapegoating peoples and claiming that’s the response.
Sadly, that has proved historically to be a very successful response to crises in the sense of getting a great deal of popular support with obviously just horrific implications. Have there been moments in world history where it’s been the opposite, where a crisis has led to a rethinking of everything in incredibly opening and powerful ways? I’m happy to say the answer is absolutely yes to that. How are we going to respond right now to the current crisis? I think it is completely unpredictable. I don’t think complacency is the problem. But I do think the problem now is how do we respond to this crisis? So far, not all of us are doing a great job. But, needless to say, there’s still hope. And one of the many reasons that we hope this book will have an impact is we would like to think some of these wisdom traditions from throughout history might open up possibilities that would otherwise be lost.
Has the class or the book changed how any of you live your daily lives?
Stephanie Paulsell: I have grown older as we have taught this class, and things have happened to all of us as we’ve taught this class. I do think it gave me a way to think about my experience through the lens of wisdom. I’m 63, and I feel wiser than I did when I was 43, but I wish I had known then what I know now. You always hear students say this: “I wish I knew what I know now when I was a freshman. I would’ve done my whole college career differently.” Or I would’ve done my life differently, with more attention. I would have been less frantic and understood that the franticness wasn’t getting me anywhere. It’s a tender thing because you can’t live your life over. But you can sit with students and raise these questions and talk about these experiences. Some things you just can’t know until you know them. You can’t know how final death is until you have lost someone you love. It’s hard to tell somebody that. But I do think this course gave me a community with which to talk about these things. And this course slowed me down a little bit, helped me move a little more deliberately. I’m grateful for that.
Michael Puett: My answer is absolutely, yes. Part of that is the content that I learned from my fellow teachers and from working with these incredible students. But part of it, too, is watching how Arthur, Stephanie, and David live their lives, as human beings—the seemingly mundane things, the ways they’ve all wrestled with incredibly difficult moments.
Arthur Kleinman: I can point to one very practical thing that I came to terms with during the course, and hadn’t had a full understanding of before. And that’s the caring of memories, that’s what I’m working on now. I’ve come to realize that forgetting can actually be, at some points, a wise way of caring for memories. Through the course and through what was happening to me at the time, I came to understand a concept that psychologists call distributed memory. That is, the memory’s not necessarily here in the brain, it’s triggered.
Stephanie Paulsell: The last time I taught the course, in the last couple weeks, my father died. And Arthur said to me, “It’s going to be really important to care for your memories.” That was so helpful to me because it was just such a different way to say it. He didn’t say, “It’s gonna be important for you to remember your father.” He said, “It’s gonna be important for you to care for your memories.” And that just gave me a different way of approaching my memories that I still think about all the time and have shared with my mother and my sister. It’s become family wisdom now.
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