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Knowledge
and Wisdom
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872-1970),
who was born in Monmouthshire, England, was one of the great
philosophers, mathematicians, liberal political theorists,
and authors of the twentieth century. His works, comprising
more than sixty volumes, range from abstract explanations
of mathematical theory to fascinating memoirs that record
British culture in the early years of the twentieth century.
From the early Principles of Mathematics (1903) through
An Inquiry Into Meaning and Truth (1940), to his three-volume
Autobiography (1967-1969), Russell demonstrated his
multi-various talents as a writer, socialist thinker, and activist.
He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. In 1955
he received the Silver Pears Trophy for work on behalf of
world peace. In this essay from Portraits from Memory
(1956), Russell argues that as we advance in knowledge, wisdom
becomes an increasingly necessary quality in peoples and cultures.
Most people would agree that, although our
age far surpasses all previous ages in knowledge, there has
been no correlative increase in wisdom. But agreement ceases
as soon as we attempt to define "wisdom" and consider means
of promoting it. I want to ask first what wisdom is, and then
what can be done to teach it. There are several factors that contribute to wisdom. Of these
I should put first a sense of proportion: the capacity to
take account of all the important factors in a problem and
to attach to each its due weight. This has become more difficult
than it used to be owing to the extent and complexity of the
specialized knowledge required of various kinds of technicians.
Suppose, for example, that you are engaged in research in
scientific medicine. The work is difficult and is likely to
absorb the whole of your intellectual energy. You have not
time to consider the effect which your discoveries or inventions
may have outside the field of medicine. You succeed (let us
say), as modern medicine has succeeded, in enormously lowering
the infant death-rate, not only in Europe and America, but
also in Asia and Africa. This has the entirely unintended
result of making the food supply inadequate and lowering the
standard of life in the most populous parts of the world.
To take an even more spectacular example, which is in everybody's
mind at the present time: you study the composition of the
atom from a disinterested desire for knowledge, and incidentally
place in the hand of powerful lunatics the means of destroying
the human race. In such ways the pursuit of knowledge may
become harmful unless it is combined with wisdom; and wisdom
in the sense of comprehensive vision in not necessarily present
in specialists in the pursuit of knowledge. Comprehensiveness alone, however, is not enough to constitute
wisdom. There must be, also, a certain awareness of the ends
of human life. This may be illustrated by the study of history.
Many eminent historians have done more harm than good because
they viewed facts through the distorting medium of their own
passions: Hegel had a philosophy of history which did not
suffer from any lack of comprehensiveness, since it started
from the earliest times and continued into an indefinite future.
But the chief lesson of history which he sought to inculcate
was that from the year A. D. 400 down to his own time, Germany
had been the most important nation and the standard-bearer
of progress in the world. Perhaps one could stretch the comprehensiveness
that constitutes wisdom to include not only intellect but
also feeling. It is by no means uncommon to find men whose
knowledge is wide but whose feelings are narrow. Such men
lack what I am calling wisdom. It is not only in public ways, but in private life equally,
that wisdom is needed. It is needed in the choice of ends
to be pursued and in emancipation from personal prejudice.
Even an end which it would be noble to pursue if it were attainable
may be pursued unwisely if it is inherently impossible of
achievement. Many men in past ages devoted their lives to
search for the Philosopher's Stone and the Elixir of Life.
No doubt, if they could have found them, they would have conferred
great benefits upon mankind, but as it was, their lives were
wasted. To descend to less heroic matters, consider the case
of two men, Mr. A and Mr. B, who hate each other and, through
mutual hatred, bring each other to destruction. Suppose you
go to Mr. A and say, "Why do you hate Mr. B?" he will no doubt
give you an appalling list of Mr. B's vices, partly true,
partly false. And now suppose you go to Mr. B. he will give
you an exactly similar list of Mr. A's vices with an equal
admixture of truth and falsehood. Suppose you now come back
to Mr. A and say, "You will be surprised to learn that Mr.
B says the same things about you as you say about him," and
you go to Mr. B and make a similar speech. The first effect,
no doubt, will be to increase their mutual hatred, since each
will be so horrified by the other's injustice. But, perhaps,
if you have sufficient patience and sufficient persuasiveness,
you may succeed in convincing each that the other has only
the normal share of human wickedness and their enmity is harmful
to both. If you do this, you will have instilled some fragment
of wisdom. The essence of wisdom is emancipation, as far as possible,
from the tyranny of the here and the now. We cannot help the
egoism of our senses. Sight and sound and touch are bound
up with our own bodies and cannot be made impersonal. Our
emotions start similarly from ourselves. An infant feels hunger
and discomfort, and is unaffected except by his own physical
condition.
Gradually, with the years, his horizon widens,
and, in proportion as his thoughts and feelings become less
personal and less concerned with his own physical states,
he achieves growing wisdom. This is, of course, a matter of
degree. No one can view the world with complete impartiality;
and if anyone could, he would hardly be able to remain alive.
But it is possible to make a continual approach towards impartiality:
on the one hand, by knowing things somewhat remote in time
or space; and, on the other hand, by giving to such things
their due weight in our feelings. It is this approach towards
impartiality that constitutes growth in wisdom. Can wisdom in this sense be taught? And, if it can, should
the teaching of it be one of the aims of education? I should
answer both these questions in the affirmative. We are told
on Sundays that we should love our neighbour as ourselves.
On the other six days of the week, we are exhorted to hate
him. You may say that this is nonsense, since it is not our
neighbour whom we are exhorted to hate. But you will remember
that the precept was exemplified by saying that the Samaritan
was our neighbour. We no longer have any wish to hate Samaritans
and so we are apt to miss the point of the parable. If you
want to get its point, you should substitute "communist" or "anticommunist", as the case may be, for
"Samaritan." It might
be objected that it is right to hate those who do harm. I
do not think so. If you hate them, it is only too likely that
you will become equally harmful; and it is very unlikely you
will induce them to abandon their evil ways. Hatred of evil
is itself a kind of bondage to evil. The way out is through
understanding, not through hate. I am not advocating non-resistance.
But I am saying that resistance, if it is to be effective
in preventing the spread of evil, should be combined with
the greatest degree of understanding and the smallest degree
of force that is compatible with the survival of the good
things that we wish to preserve. It is commonly urged that a point of view such as I have been
advocating is incompatible with vigour in action. I do not
think history bears out this view. Queen Elizabeth I in England
and Henry IV in France lived in a world where almost everybody
was fanatical, either on the Protestant or on the Catholic
side. Both remained free from the errors of their time and
both, by remaining free, were beneficent and certainly not
ineffective. Abraham Lincoln conducted a great war without
ever departing from what I have been calling wisdom. I have said that in some degree wisdom can be taught. I think
that this teaching should have a larger intellectual element
than has been customary in what has been thought of as moral
instruction. The disastrous results of hatred and narrow-mindedness
to those who fee them can be pointed out incidentally in the
course of giving knowledge. I do not think that knowledge
and morals ought to be too much separated. It is true that
the kind of specialized knowledge which is required for various
kinds of skill has little to do with wisdom. But it should
be supplemented in education by wider surveys calculated to
put it in its place in the total of human activities. Even
the best technicians should also be good citizens; and when
I say "citizens", I mean citizens of the world and not of
this or that sect or nation. With every increase of knowledge
and skill, wisdom becomes more necessary, for every such increase
augments our capacity for realizing our purposes, and therefore
augments our capacity for evil, if our purposes are unwise.
The world needs wisdom as it has never needed it before; and
if knowledge continues to increase, the world will need wisdom
in the future even more than it does now.
(From The McGraw-Hill Reader, 1988)
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