Manu Bhardwaj on Wisdom

"Wisdom is rightfully attributed not to people who know what to look for in life but to people who know what to overlook."

Some people may subscribe to the view that wisdom comes to an individual from identifying what to ignore rather than what to rely on. However, wisdom is such an abstract yet poignant concept that such a stance cannot fathomably support it - in fact, wisdom arises not only from a person's knowledge of what ideas to overlook, but also from his appreciation of those that he does not.

Wisdom and knowledge are, to a great extent, complementary to each other. While knowledge of particular domains, say those of scientists or teachers, imply purely a factual knowledge of their fields of expertise, wisdom thrives on a comparitively higher plane. A knowledgeable person knows his facts; a person with wisdom assimilates his knowledge and creates a realm where he is aware of the *implications* of his knowledge. Wisdom transcends knowledge - the attribute of wisdom in a person indicates his awareness of both his status in society and of his value as an individual. While a newly 'ordained' physician may know all about the functions of the human body, it is the experienced practitioner who, without any greater knowledge base, is the more competent practitioner. The difference is purely in the amount of wisdom they have gained from their knowledge.

Clearly, such a view of wisdom cannot be self-limiting. Wisdom is not limited in its scope - it cannot declare that it will consider some ideas and ignore other others, or vice versa. Wisdom itself implies that both sides of the coin must be valued appropriately before judgements can be made - true wisdom arises from an ability to objectively identify both what is relevant and what is not.

Both overlooking and analysis of ideas in life play very important roles in the quest for wisdom - in fact, they are complementary and cannot serve their purpose without the existence of the other. The first step in a quest for wisdom is to overlook redundancy and irrelevance. By doing so, a person eliminates those ideas that do not help serve any useful purpose. The next step, of course, is to carefully analyse what remains. Elimination of irrelevant ideas only serves to create a pool of ideas that are feasible in their own right - overlooking ideas cannot logically generate wisdom themselves. The remnant philosophies and ideas form a nascent pool from which a person can glean wisdom. A person's quest for wisdom lies within this pool - careful decomposition of the ideas that he considers relevant among these will lead to a sense of wiseness that will help promote his knowledge base into that of wisdom.

One cannot gauge the relative merits of overlooking ideas and analyzing ideas, and state that one is more relevant than the other. If the process of overlooking were not utilized, it would be a pointless exercise to try and gain wisdom. Nothing could be learnt from it, because one would only extract potentially opposing ideas from one's pool of knowledge. It would only serve to be detrimental to one's quest for wisdom. On the other hand, if greater emphasis were placed - like the topic indicates - on overlooking rather than analyzing, then there would be no point in doing so. Overlooking ideas only leaves a large quantity of potential ideas, leaving no route for learning. There is no method by which a pure process of elimination would serve to create more wisdom; one cannot gain if one only ignores. Knowledge requires input of some form, and such an approach suffers from the extreme lack of such input.

The quality of wisdom itself requires an open-minded perspective - a wise person himself would realise that an ambivalent stance is far superior to a partisan one. Wiseness comes from the ability to judge what to look for in life and what to ignore. Both appreciation and elimination of ideas play strong, yet independent, roles in the quest for wiseness, and neither can be adjudged as more relevant than the other. Thus the knowledge that both looking for and overlooking ideas are parallel processes, is thus the primary method by which a person can be rightfully considered wise.