This is an association of people sympathetic to the idea that academic inquiry should help humanity acquire more wisdom by rational means. Wisdom is taken to be the capacity to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others. It includes knowledge, understanding and technological know-how, and much else besides. Friends of Wisdom try to encourage universities and schools actively to seek and promote wisdom by educational and intellectual means. At present, Friends of Wisdom communicate with one another in the main by email (JISCMAIL). If you wish to join, click HERE, and then click on "join or leave the list", or email: nick [at] knowledgetowisdom.org
Copyright Nicholas Maxwell All Rights Reserved
We need a revolution in the aims and methods of academic inquiry. Instead
of giving priority to the search for knowledge, academia needs to devote
itself to seeking and promoting wisdom by rational means, wisdom being
the capacity to realize what is of value in life, for oneself and others,
wisdom thus including knowledge but much else besides. A basic task ought
to be to help humanity learn how to create a better world.
Acquiring scientific knowledge dissociated from a more basic concern for
wisdom, as we do at present, is dangerously and damagingly irrational.
Natural science has been extraordinarily successful in increasing knowledge.
This has been of great benefit to humanity. But new knowledge and technological
know-how increase our power to act which, without wisdom, may cause human
suffering and death as well as human benefit. All our modern global problems
have arisen in this way: global warming, the lethal character of modern
war and terrorism, vast inequalities of wealth and power round the globe,
rapid increase in population, rapid extinction of other species, even
the aids epidemic (aids being spread by modern travel). All these have
been made possible by modern science dissociated from the rational pursuit
of wisdom. If we are to avoid in this century the horrors of the last
one - wars, death camps, dictatorships, poverty, environmental damage
- we urgently need to learn how to acquire more wisdom, which in turn
means that our institutions of learning become devoted to that end.
The revolution we need would change every branch and aspect of academic
inquiry. A basic intellectual task of academic inquiry would be to articulate
our problems of living (personal, social and global) and propose and critically
assess possible solutions, possible actions. This would be the task of
social inquiry and the humanities. Tackling problems of knowledge would
be secondary. Social inquiry would be at the heart of the academic enterprise,
intellectually more fundamental than natural science. On a rather more
long-term basis, social inquiry would be concerned to help humanity build
cooperatively rational methods of problem-solving into the fabric of social
and political life, so that we may gradually acquire the capacity to resolve
our conflicts and problems of living in more cooperatively rational ways
than at present. Natural science would change to include three domains
of discussion: evidence, theory, and aims - the latter including discussion
of metaphysics, values and politics. Academic inquiry as a whole would
become a kind of people's civil service, doing openly for the public what
actual civil services are supposed to do in secret for governments. Academia
would actively seek to educate the public by means of discussion and debate,
and would not just study the public.
These changes are not arbitrary. They all come from demanding that academia
cure its current structural irrationality, so that reason - the authentic
article - may be devoted to promoting human welfare.
For more detailed
presentations of the above argument see the following by Nicholas Maxwell:
"Can
Humanity Learn to become Civilized? The Crisis of Science without Civilization",
Journal of Applied Philosophy 17, 2000, pp. 29-44.
Is Science
Neurotic?, Imperial College Press, London, 2004.
From Knowledge
to Wisdom: A Revolution in the Aims and Methods of Science, Blackwell,
Oxford, 1984.
Second edition, additional material, brought up to date throughout, new introduction and three new chapters,
Pentire Press, November 2007.
See also the website www.nick-maxwell.demon.co.uk
