Nine Virtues: Wisdom

Wisdom: good judgment, the ability to perceive people and situations correctly, deliberate about and decide on the correct response (ADF Publishing 15).

 

Wisdom is the state of being wise.   It is gained by a combination of knowledge, experience, and intuition, and using this combination to make decisions and act in situations.   All actions feed into the totality of experience that affects wisdom, but not all actions are wise ones.   Unfortunately, there is not a nice equation that reflects proportions of knowledge, experience, and intuition that result in wise actions.  Wisdom is not easily obtained, and generally one recognizes true wisdom after the fact.  I know that I don’t normally go around spouting sage advice, but when I have been considered wise, it is because I looked into the totality of the situation.

 For the most part, I am in agreement with Wisdom as a virtue, but I dislike the definition, wisdom doesn’t always mean the ability to perceive people and situations correctly, sometimes wisdom can come from looking at a situation completely different perspective, but it does not always mean that it was correct.  Copernicus was a great astronomer, who reasoned out a heliocentric model of the universe at a time when a geocentric model was definitive.   He was, however, partially incorrect, and it would take Kepler a couple of hundred years later to determine.   This does not mean Copernicus was any less wise, it meant that he was dealing with incomplete information which can affect us all.    Therefore, I might redefine wisdom as the ability to perceive people and situations correctly at that given moment; deliberate about and decide on the correct response. 

Works Cited

Publishing, ADF. Our Own Druidry. Tuscon: ADF Publishing, 2009.