The Varieties of Wisdom: Contemplative, Cross-Cultural, and Integral Contributions

“…Different cultural traditions established a multitude of wisdom doctrines, each based on their historical context. Walsh (2011, 2015) argues that the wisdom involved in Eastern and Western cultural traditions can be categorized by four subtypes. These four differ not only in their area of application, but also in the cognitive processes that give rise to them.…”

Section: Definitions Of Wisdommentioning

confidence: 99%

A polycultural theory of wisdom based on Habermas’s worldview

Kang

Wang

et al. 2019

Culture & Psychology

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Building on Habermas’s worldview, this paper attempts to construct a theory of wisdom that integrates the advantages of Eastern and Western cultures. To this end, we review previous definitions of wisdom and their problems and analyze the importance of worldview for wisdom. A worldview provided by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas is eminently persuasive. We argue that Habermas’s worldview provides a more suitable basis for a polycultural theory of wisdom. The specific components of the wisdom theory are: (1) a relationalist belief in the universal world; (2) transcendental agency in the subjective world; (3) intersubjective communication orientation in the social world; and (4) integrated principles of certainty and uncertainty in the objective world. Inspired by this theory, people could adopt different principles for their subjective, social, and objective worldviews and coordinate them to deal with the problems of human survival, which would also promote the long-term flourishing of human civilization.

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“…It also opens a more balanced avenue for the development of social theory which tends to oscillate between premises and fashions of strong conceptual integration and disintegration (Bendle 1996). The wisdom required to imagine, articulate, claim, and practise weak integration is very likely having demanding prerequisites in individual cognitive, social, moral, spiritual, and self development (see, for instance, Reich 2002;Sternberg 2004;Walsh 2011). The question is, accordingly, whether today weak integration can appeal to the many or only to the few; or, more specifically, as for any programmatic proposal, in which contexts, by/for whom, and how it can actually be translated into practice.…”

Section: Markus Molzmentioning

confidence: 99%