12 - An essay on wisdom: toward organismic processes that make it possible

Summary

Why to call paths / the wakes of chance? / All travellers are walking, like Jesus, on the sea.

– Antonio Machado

Since man is above all future-making, he is, above all, a swarm of hopes and fears.

– Ortega y Gasset

I give you counsel for I am an old man: / never follow any counsel.

– Antonio Machado

Introduction

In Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1929) and An Essay on Man (1944) Cassirer points to forms of symbolic processing that are mutually contradictory in appearance but jointly needed, as alternative forms of rationality (cf. Krois, 1987), to encode aspects of outer or inner reality. Cassirer lists myth and religion, language, art, history, and science as some of these symbolic forms. Each encodes a different reality found in the complex life of man or woman. A similar claim is made by Habermas (1970, 1984) when he describes alternative modes of science making (e.g., technical-analytic, historicalhermeneutic, critical-social, and reconstructive), each autonomously developed to serve a different kind of interest. As Zubiri (1986) describes it: The human is an animal of realities. Cassirer could have added wisdom as another form of symbolic processing.

As a form or mode of processing, wisdom is concerned with human life as a totality from the perspective of an intelligent and willful coping with it. Wisdom deals with vital reason (Ortega y Gasset, 1980), that is, insightful practical rationality about one's life (vita in Latin) and one's living in all its aspects/realities.