Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

An exploration on two contradictory yet powerful quotes.

One of my favorite book titles (and favorite books) is Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? This is a 2005 classic from the late Yale professor Harold Bloom that explores what we can learn from various schools of wisdom: The Hebrews, Greeks, Shakespeare, Emerson and more. Something I think is so brilliant about Bloom’s work is that he lays the foundation for the book using the story of Job, highlighting that in order to understand wisdom we must also recognize our human limitations and the reality that there will be some things in this life that we won’t fully understand.

The space between black and white understanding is what has been most interesting and meaningful to me, which is why I love exploring the different wisdom schools with Bloom. While in many cases the different schools will contradict each other, there is something meaningful and valuable in each.

For me, no two quotes capture the dichotomy of individual wisdom more than these two, one from American writer Mark Twain, and the other from Prussian-German politician Otto Von Bismarck:

Twain said “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way” while Von Bismarck proclaimed “Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”

There is something in us that resonates so deeply with Twain’s observation. We all know the powerful feedback loop that can come from learning from our own experiences - whether as a child touching a hot stove for the first time, or in our relationships when you handle a situation particularly well, or poorly. When your mind has real evidence of something that worked, or didn’t, there is a powerful stickiness from the experience.

On the other hand, as Von Bismarck highlights, there is a wealth of knowledge that our species has accumulated over thousands of years and by leveraging it, whether through books, friends, mentors or formal education, we can accelerate our learnings and help us avoid some burns (literal or figurative) along the way - you don’t have to do it all by yourself, and you shouldn’t.

We need to attempt to balance the wisdom from both Twain and Von Bismarck, even though we will fail at times in the process. There are some things that we will fundamentally lack the depth of understanding necessary from conventional wisdom to avoid making the mistake ourselves. Procrastination and self-sabotage stand out to me. In David Brooks’ The Road to Character (2015) he shares wisdom from Saint Augustine that captures this perfectly. Augustine muses “What sort of mysterious creature is a human being, who can't carry out his own will, who knows his long-term interest but pursues short-term pleasure, who does so much to screw up his own life?”.

Earlier this fall, I had the chance to visit a Texas State Penitentiary alongside Dallas based non-profit The Urban Specialists and community leader Antong Lucky (Tuesdays with Morrisey Podcast Episode), and share these two quotes to a group of 200 inmates. I was impressed with the men I met at the prison, they seemed to be doing courageous emotional-spiritual work to heal from past experiences and prepare themselves for life on the outside, even if for some of them their release date was still decades away. I found this environment to clearly demonstrate the value of Twain and Von Bismarck’s words. Each of these individuals had carried the cat by the tail in some form or fashion, and there is value to the lived experience, albeit tragic for their lives and others. Yet at the same, there is a tremendously rich opportunity for them to learn from the experiences of one another.

Where shall wisdom be found? Let me know your thoughts and reflections.

Adam