Living life with wisdom includes having a deep awareness of our circumstances, obligations, and goals. It includes understanding the nature and force of social conditioning in shaping our values, knowledge, and desires. Also, wisdom includes apprehending the importance of the spiritual or ineffable dimension to our existence.
Wisdom neither is holding strong focused beliefs, nor is wisdom a tolerance and acceptance of anything goes. Wisdom is the integration of details and context, and the ability to see the broad context that defines any fact, belief, or action.
The field of positive psychology has identified three foundational capacities held by individuals manifesting wisdom. All three of these attributes share the common element of being able to hold a very wide view of things: a wide view, not a vague view.
The three main components of wisdom are:
Contextualism, Relativism, Uncertainty
Contextualism
Contextualism is being aware of the multiple factors that contribute to our perspective. Contextual intelligence reflects the capacity to comprehend the diversity of influences on a situation and the ability to understand their impact.
The most influential context on our perspective is our life circumstances. Psychology generally refers to this as lifespan contextualism. Paul Baltes writes,
“Lifespan contextualism is meant to identify knowledge that considers the many themes and contexts of life (e.g., education, family, work, friends, leisure, the public good of society, etc.), their interrelations and cultural variations, and in addition, incorporates a lifetime temporal perspective (i.e., past, present, and future).”
Wisdom includes appreciating that all our thoughts, feelings, and actions arise from our total life circumstances. We are each rooted in our developmental stage and chronological age. Erik Erikson in the mid-twentieth century began to study individuals throughout the course of their entire life. His results are not explicated in tables of statistics and meta-data, but are presented as narratives that distill into specific life stages. At each stage in life we have a unique motivation, need, or goal. Wisdom requires that we remain deeply connected to how our needs and motivations are driven by where we are in our life.
Relativism
Wisdom requires being able to see that truth is relative. This view is not a relativism that says nothing is true, but a relativism that sees contextualism and perspectivism as more than mere subjective differences. Being able to see truth as both objective and subjective requires a mental flexibility beyond common postmodern acceptance of diversity. Pragmatic Humanism is a cognitive stance that views truth as defined by what is objectively most fitted to the circumstances. Truth is adaptive not explanatory.
Research indicates that relativism of goals and values is foundational to wisdom.
“Relativism of values and life priorities is a specific meta-criterion, the acknowledgment of and tolerance for value differences and the relativity of life priorities. Wisdom, of course, is not meant to imply full-blown relativity of values and value-related life priorities. On the contrary, it includes an explicit concern with the topic of virtue and the common good in contrast to exclusively considering one’s own personal good,” writes Paul Baltes.
Wisdom includes the capacity to reflect upon our own goals and values as relative. Wisdom requires that we are able to embrace what we hold as true, while also embracing that our truth is based on our sensibilities. Wisdom helps us accept the origin of the self is not fixed or predetermined. The mental flexibility inherent to wisdom accepts that our thoughts are shaped by our culture, our socio-biological and evolutionary psychological restraints, as well as our personhood.
Uncertainty
Wisdom is being able to recognize, as well as mange, uncertainty in the world. In wisdom, uncertainty and not knowing is met with curiosity and wonder. When the unknown is not a threat, it can become an opportunity for growth and change.
The complexity of the world requires the capacity to work with uncertainty. Technological advances and cultural metamorphism arise with such rapidity that uncertainty is a near given. Complexity theory is based on the law of dissipative structures that states, when a system is far from equilibrium it will continue to reorganize in ever more complex states — it does not fall apart. The uncertainty inherent in complexity does not portend collapse, but rather reorganization at higher and more adaptive levels of complexity. Wisdom embraces this possibility.
Positive psychological research has done much to uncover the nature and limits of human information processing.
“The recognition of and management of uncertainty is based on the ideas that the validity of human information processing itself is essentially limited and constrained. Individuals have access only to select parts of reality and the future cannot be fully known in advance. Wisdom-related knowledge and judgment offer ways and means to deal with such uncertainty about human insight and the conditions of the world, individually and collectively,” writes Paul Baltes.
Wisdom requires that we understand uncertainty in our personal values, goals, needs, and identity. In wisdom, we can hold the attributes of self lightly and can maintain a sense of self even in the face of deeply penetrating ambivalence. Wisdom requires that we can appreciate the inherent limits to what we know, value, and believe. In wisdom, we can accept the multiplicity of our personal truths and the illusion of the unitary sense of self.
Wisdom includes being able to embrace the uncertainty inherent to our continually unfolding, ineffable existence. In wisdom, we can appreciate our human need for meaning and purpose. We are able to value moral and transpersonal needs in ourselves and in others, and to look at spirituality and religion with respect and wonder.