What makes a person wise?

The question was asked of me, "What makes a person wise?" My response? 

Two main sources:

  1. Strong self-ownership of the consequences of all one’s own acts through time. The consequence of this is acknowledgment of own fault and error, which practically automatically hones aim going forward in wiser ways.
  2. Strong acceptance of others’ consequence, of others’ acts, seeing what follows and taking the lesson of the others’ outcomes to heart.
    1. Subset: reading. Reading widely and wildly of realistic fiction or accurate nonfiction amounts to the same thing, if we take what we read to heart and weigh and check it there.

      For both 1 and 2: contemplative rumination upon consequence, our own or others’, tends to be a must for us to fruit the experience to forward-honed and applied “wisdom.”

Both 1 and 2 are the same thing: personal experience. File under “personal experience.”


What of the mythic, guru-on-the mountaintop “special insight” type wisdom?

This typically proceeds from a lifeload of #2. The person was attentive. Didn’t make the same mistakes, so didn’t sow what others’ reaped from their own sowing. So?

So it goes.


We call it “wisdom” when:

  1. We immediately receive and understand as true the statement another makes, yet…
  2. We cannot in that moment discern how they arrived at this knowledge. So we credit them with some mythical mental property which, in fact, no one actually has.

HUGE CAVEAT! Often what people mean when they speak of “wisdom” is simply “emotional or interpersonal/social (i.e. intersubjective) intelligence.”

That is something everyone has, yet it goes by degrees, and the one who lacks it hard tends to act unwisely in consequence.

Comments