Defining wisdom is a tough assignment, as it is such an abstract characteristic, and there really isn’t one set definition for the word. When I hear the word, I usually think of a wise person, someone who has been through life experiences and has gained a unique perspective and view of life because of it. When a person blessed with wisdom is asked to make a decision, they can look back at all the past experiences in their life and make a “wise” decision, a decision that is best for all involved. Wise people are able to make such decisions and statements because they have seen and heard the consequences and benefits of almost any situation in life, and as a result, they can learn from those past lessons when making the next wise move. Because of this, I usually think of a wise person as an older person who has seen everything, some for the better and some for the worse, who is also great at interacting with others and hearing their stories and experiences. By seeing what life has to offer, they gradually get to that point of being “wise.”
This leads me to where service learning comes into the wisdom discussion. By working with people of a wide array of cultures in the Washington neighborhood, both we the volunteers and the citizens we are helping have a chance to become wiser. Many of the residents have been through a lot of experiences living in a cultural melting pot in downtown Dubuque that we haven’t experienced in our lives yet and might not ever. By communicating with them and getting to know them better, we can gain wisdom and have a better outlook on the real world. Since this is the last honors class before graduating, it is a fitting way for us to gain wisdom before entering the real world. Likewise, the residents of the neighborhood will also gain wisdom by associating with college students. The majority of them never went to college and do not have the same perspective on life as college students do. After sharing stories with them about ourselves, they also will come out of this service experience wiser.
Switching my focus to Socrates in the Apology, I think that the meaning from it was a little different than when I read it freshman year. If I remember right, I voted to have Socrates executed after reading it the first time, mostly because I was going along with the majority and not thinking about his actual motive and actions. Socrates truly was a wise man, as he interacted with many humans and had a different outlook on life than everyone else. He was persecuted for it, but he realized that death wasn’t the worse thing in life; rather, death was better than being forced to live with something you didn’t agree with. In addition, he was a humble man and admitted he did not consider himself to be the wisest man on the Earth; although the Oracle did said it, and he even proved it by showing that every other “wise” person was actually ignorant and just believed them to be the wisest. By admitting that he wasn’t the wisest, he actually was wise. This type of thinking and outlook makes me think Socrates was an innocent man who probably deserved to live. The different reaction to the Apology shows that my experience at Loras has made me an individual thinker. Loras has taught me to look past the common group think, in addition to becoming better at analyzing the tons of reading that I’ve done in the past four years. My Loras experience has made me wiser, and I think that the service learning will contribute to this experience as well.
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2 comments:
Hey Russ:
This was a thoughtful and diverse posting… diverse in the fact that you explored other topics, or saw things in a different way than I did. I completely agree on the difficulty of defining wisdom, I had a hard time, too. This took me back to MOI when trying to define justice, don’t you think? Your own definition has the theme of “with age comes wisdom” though out, which is a great point, and one that I have experienced in many ways with life mentors such as parents, grandparents, teachers, advisors, etc.
I was interested and impressed by your wisdom-service connection. I did not think of the fact that we can, indeed, learn from the people we serve, which you expressed so clearly. We can offer different perspectives and our wisdom to each other. I failed to explore the fact that we will intensively interact with people that are much different than us, have gone through different situations, and the wheel of fortune that I consider life might have spun differently than ours.
Switching to Socrates, I also think that he was completely innocent. His apology was understandable, prudent , and successfully defended his points making us see how wise he actually was. Thinking back to freshman year, I also hated him because the rest did (but we didn’t kill him, remember?). Loras College has made us more mature in that sense for sure. As you said, with the amount of reading of these years, we start focusing much more in the meaning of the reading and not only in “completing the assignment” or just following the crowd. With time, again, we do get wiser. Nice post!
Russ
I liked your post as well, especially your basic insight--that to think of wisdom leads us to think of a person. Wisdom is best personified; it's almost like it needs to be imagined into action for it to have meaning. I suppose that one reason we connect it to age is that older people have seen more "action," have had more experiences. Sometimes that's true. Too often, though, it seems like the elderly suffer from a shrinking view of the world, almost a denial of the value of experience. It can be frustrating for those who see the need for change, as we might during this semester in the Wash neighborhood. jw
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