Here are a few things I learned
Nine modest pearls of wisdom that might be useful moving forward
A few weeks ago I turned 60. One of those entirely arbitrary hallmarks in a human life that nevertheless, despite ourselves, make you look up and pay attention. To celebrate the occasion, my lovely daughter and wife organized a sumptuous dinner in a nice restaurant in Salvador (Bahia, Brazil), where we were staying for a brief vacation. And the celebrations went on a few days later, by way of spending a late evening sipping whiskey at a really cool jazz bar in São Paulo.
Inevitably, I’ve taken the occasion of entering the 7th decade of my life as a good excuse to reflect a bit about what I’ve done so far, what I’d like to do moving forward, and what I’ve learned in the meantime that should inform my future decisions. I hope you will indulge me in this post, which is really a kind of manifesto to myself for how I’d like to live whatever (hopefully long and especially healthy) time is left for me on planet Earth. Who knows, the resulting musings may be useful to others as well.
What I’ve learned
I don’t think I’ve learned much, as it turns out, but perhaps enough. I’m not talking about straightforward knowledge, of which, thanks to multiple stints in graduate school and two academic careers, I have actually accumulated quite a bit, if in very specific fields like plant gene-environment interactions and the philosophy of pseudoscience. I’m talking about wisdom, a department in which, I’m afraid, I’m still woefully deficient.
A good way to grasp the difference is by way of the so-called DIKW pyramid, where the acronym stands for: D => data, I => information, K => knowledge, and W => wisdom. The idea is that information depends on data (i.e., facts), knowledge is constructed out of information, and wisdom is derived from knowledge. Reasonable enough, though the tricky part is exactly how one passes from one level of the hierarchy to the next one. Perhaps a more sober and apt way to put it is a poem by T.S. Eliot which is often referenced as the very origin of the idea of a DIKW pyramid in the first place. It goes like this:
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?(The Rock, 1934)
Be that as it may, what pearls of wisdom do I think I’ve learned during 60 years of existence? Here are the major ones that come to mind:
(i) There is a fundamental distinction between what falls within my agency and what does not, and my life is always noticeably better whenever I keep this distinction firmly in mind and act accordingly. Which means focusing my efforts on the things that are under my control while developing an attitude of equanimity and acceptance towards everything else.
I’m sure the Stoic-minded among my readers have recognized the source of this: it’s right at the beginning of Epictetus’s Manual for a good life:
“Some things are up to us and some are not. Up to us are judgment, inclination, desire, aversion—in short, whatever is our own doing. Not up to us are our bodies, possessions, reputations, public offices—in short, whatever isn’t our own doing.” (Enchiridion, 1)
(ii) There is another fundamental distinction that is very useful to keep in mind at all times: that between judgments and opinions (which are internally generated by us) and facts or events (which are outside of us). Again, this is Epictetus, a bit further down in the Manual:
“People are troubled not by things but by their judgments about things.” (Enchiridion, 5)
Indeed, Epictetus goes on immediately afterwards: “Death, for example, isn’t frightening, or else Socrates would have thought it so.” If people can disagree about whether death should be frightening or not, then they can disagree about pretty much everything. People can have different opinions about it, but death itself remains a mind-independent fact of life.
(iii) Relationships are by far the most important thing in a human life. There is plenty of good science backing up this insight, but as usual the idea is much, much older:
“Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship; but when you have decided to admit him, welcome him with all your heart and soul. Speak as boldly with him as with yourself.” (Seneca, Letter 3.2)
Human beings, the Stoics maintained, are fundamentally social animals capable of reason. From which they inferred that a good human life is one in which we use reason to make this a better world for everyone. And I mean everyone, hence their notion of cosmopolitanism.
Friends are, of course, one of a number of types of relationships that we engage in, and the ancient Greeks had several terms to express in what way we love different people, and even ideas: there is agápē, which means love that comes with an aspect of charity, in the sense of benevolence, embedded into it. This is the sort of love we have for our children, but also for our spouse or partner. Then we have érōs, which in part does mean, as the modern word “erotic” indicates, sexual attraction for someone. However, Plato expanded the concept to indicate, after personal maturation and contemplation, love for beauty itself. There is philía, which describes a sense of affection and regard among equals. Aristotle uses this word to characterize love between friends, for family members, or of community. And finally storgē, meaning affection, especially (but not only) of the kind one has toward parents and children, which includes a component of empathy of the type felt naturally toward one’s children. Storgē was also used to indicate love for a country, or even a sports team, and—interestingly—in situations when one has to put up with unpleasant things, as in the oxymoronic phrase “love for a tyrant.”
However we think of it, love for other people is crucial for a life worth living.
(iv) When people disagree about things, often the disagreement isn’t so much about what it appears to be, but about more basic, unstated assumptions. Consider:
“Imagine arguing with someone about whether a movie is good. This goes on for a while, with both of you quarreling over details. Then it occurs to you to ask: What is a good movie, anyway? What makes one better than another? You realize that you’ve been arguing about a particular movie—the question in the foreground—because you have different opinions about those larger questions in the background. The background questions are what you should be arguing about.” (W. Farnsworth, The Socratic Method, ch. 17)
Yes! You have no idea how much of my life has been wasted debating what Farnsworth, on the basis of Socrates, calls foreground questions, while in fact the real disagreement concerned a background question that both I and my interlocutor had taken for granted and had not even contemplated bringing to the foreground. Need to do better moving forward!
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