Wisdom Hunger
Tomorrow’s events:
Wake Up! 6-Day Chant and Meditation Challenge w/ Willow Monastic Academy. October 12th-17th @ 5:00 AM ET. RSVP here.
Collective Journaling w/ Peter Limberg and Co-Hosts. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Playing The Flow Game: Sharing Questions, Vulnerability, and Wisdom w/ Amanda Zamparo. October 14th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP Closed. 120 mins.
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October 13th, 2021
After tweeting about today’s session at The Stoa on “doing philosophy,” our friend Vince Horn responded with...
What were philosophers doing before they started doing philosophy?
Vince is a Buddhist, so maybe he was suggesting that they were doing some kind of meditation practice. Or perhaps he was dropping some Buddhist koan. I do not know, but I responded with...
I suspect the proto-philosophers were experiencing a wisdom hunger.
Wisdom hunger. I sense this phrase has potential and I am surprised it is not a concept used more. I did a search on the phrase and only came across a website about executive coaching and leadership training that promises to deliver measurable ROI. Scrolling through that page totally increased my own sense of wisdom hunger.
I sense wisdom hunger could be a useful psychological construct to orient one’s journey around. There are qualities many of my conversational partners in my philosophy practice have: a sense of “stuckness” with life or having a nebulously bothersome problem that they cannot put their finger on. They have an uneasy sensation associated with not knowing what to do, along with an urgent need to do something.
That urge to do something can easily slip into some kind of bypassing: spiritual bypassing, psychotherapy bypassing, self-help bypassing, and a bunch of other forms of bypassing. There is no such thing as wisdom bypassing though; as I argued before, wisdom is the thing that may lead to everything else, hence when in doubt of what path to choose, choose the path of wisdom.
Perhaps the starting point of this path is to understand that the unclear pain many of us feel, associated with the longing for some vague notion of clarity, is best understood as a wisdom hunger. If true, here is a suggestion of what the first ingredient of the delicious life could be: be aware of your own wisdom hunger.
In the pangs of my own hunger, I felt so much pressure to read every wise book, to know about every philosophy, and engage in all the practices that were admitting a scent of wisdom. Eventually I realized the folly of such an aim, that my time was limited, and that often the wisest thing to do was something practical.
Attempting to unconsciously satiate my wisdom hunger, perhaps in a foolish way, did afford me a decent knowledge base, along with some decent capacities: a meta-awareness of the active philosophies roaming the noosphere, a transperspectival capacity to dance with them, and an intellectual humility, which oddly shines light on the intellectual arrogance of these philosophies.
That being said, there is so much for me to know and so many capacities for me to cultivate. This is why I fucking love this place called The Stoa - it attracts people with a wisdom hunger similar to mine, but their unique journey has lead them to different knowledges and capacities than my own.
None of us can be perfect sages; that is the myth of self-help, not philosophy. Rather, a recognition of our limits and a sense of where our limits are allows us to be attracted by the slices of wisdom found behind others' limits.
In short, we need each other and our wisdom hunger leads us to one another. Once we experience enough bypassing fatigue and realize figuring life out on our own is a futile exercise, we begin to “find the others,” which many of us have started to do.
People are talking about needing a wisdom commons. I agree, we do need one. The beautiful thing is that a wisdom commons is already here, becoming aware of itself.
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