Wisdom helps us live fully in the moment, but with the guidance and support of deeper understanding and meaning. Wisdom serves a pragmatic function, directing our actions purposefully, but without interminable self-reflection. Wisdom is an organization of life experiences where knowledge and understanding are integrated with an awareness of culture and human nature.

Wisdom acts as a decision-making heuristic that leads to Flourishing. A heuristic is a mental construction that streamlines thinking, reasoning, and decision-making. Our wisdom heuristic is adaptive because it is tied to our well-developed sense of purpose and meaning, yet it remains flexible, reflecting the contingency of our lived experience. With a wisdom heuristic, we can trust our intuitive judgment to make appropriate assessments and responses to the meaningful and critical choices we face.

Wisdom is built upon numerous heuristics that we have acquired in the course of our growth and development. Things we have learned from important people in our life as well from art, literature, religion, philosophy, and culture in general, are all subsumed by the wide focus of our wisdom heuristic.

At The Max Plank Institute for the History of Science, Paul Baltes conducted research that examines the development of wisdom as a meta-heuristic that guides our choices and behaviors, directing them towards virtue and excellence. As a meta-heuristic, wisdom is the integration of numerous heuristics representing disparate parts of mind. This meta-heuristic helps us make decisions based on our best judgment and widest interests. Wisdom is a judgment-facilitating heuristic that integrates context, values, and meaning, as well as knowledge.

By examining what people manifest when being wise, Paul Baltes and the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm have identified the components that underlie manifest Wisdom. Wisdom serves to help us with the pragmatics of living life.

“The fundamental pragmatics of life include knowledge and judgment about the meaning and conduct of life and the orchestration of human development towards excellence while attending conjointly to personal and collective well-being. With fundamental pragmatics, we mean knowledge and judgment about the essence of the human condition and the ways and means of planning, managing, and understanding a good life,” writes Paul Baltes.

Culture is a critical and influential source of guidance in the development of wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to manage the pragmatics of life in an exemplary manner from a given cultural perspective. Wisdom is having the ability to act in the world so as to manifest Flourishing within your culture.