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Simple Wisdoms

Table of Contents: Simple Wisdoms Overview

Simple wisdoms are practical, daily useful things. that stand up as reasonable on their own merit. They need not be taken on faith. They need no intricate scientific proof and no high technical schooling. Their value is accessible to common people.

Responsibility to Act

They also help others who, in turn, might help me.

Thoughts Only Map Reality

The way things are
Sense of what is possible
Fantasy and reality
The boundary between fantasy and reality must be well-defined and well-understood.
Insofar as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not.
Facades and the map of reality
If you refuse to deal with me in terms of what is important to you, I am uninformed about you. You cause me extra effort and require me to deal with a facade; to deal with contrived hilarity or good humor, for instance.
Style versus substance
Guard against taking for strength what is only nice phrasing, or for solid what is merely acute, or for good what is only beautiful.

Humility -- The possibility you might be wrong

Once the possibility that we made a mistake is recognized, it is up to us to resolve not to make the same mistake again.
We color how we look at the past
Historiography, the history of the study of history, examines the ways people have looked at what they have done. It studies those colorations we discover that we applied subconsciously in our mind's eye to things we thought we saw clearly at the time.
We color what we see today
Why should our observations of the past be accurate when those of previous historians were not?
Constant re-evaluation is required
What other people say may not be truthful. Your own ideas may not be correct. The everlasting validity of things that may now be true cannot be assured. The process of revaluation is a constant process. Such is the understanding the possibility that you just might be wrong.
There can be no unthinkable thoughts
There may be actions that are unable to be done, but that doesn't mean the actions cannot be thought about and talked about.

History has value

The real value of history comes with the realization that other people have tried to solve problems similar to our own.

Ideas stand apart from the people who think them

Recognizing that an idea just might be wrong or that a value given particular concepts may be misjudged, the process of re-evaluation must be preserved and encouraged. Worthwhile lessons can come from anywhere.
The other man's wisdom
We often act as though if one side is right, the other side is wrong. Debates, editorial and op-ed pages, pro & con – all suggest no middle ground. As Montaigne said, "I'll run to the truth and embrace it as soon as I see it coming." "Even when walking in the company of two other men, I am bound to be able to learn from them. The good points of the one I copy; the bad points of the other I correct in myself."
How much is too much
It seems in one's best interest to learn as much as one can, but it may not be fruitful to study exclusively in one particular direction.
Consistency
Where others seek the reputation for an active and ready mind, I would be praised for my steadiness; what others aspire to gain by some brilliant and noteworthy deed, I claim for the uniformity, consistency, and moderation of my opinions and conduct. `If there is one quality truly admirable, it is a uniform consistency in our whole lives and in our several acts; and this cannot be maintained by imitating the natures of others and neglecting our own.[Cicero, De Officiis,I,31.]

A sense of perspective

When nature granted all the other animals a simple passage through life, she was not so unfair to man as to make it impossible for him, for him alone, to live without all these skills. Nature demanded nothing hard from us, and nothing needs painful contriving to enable life to be kept going. We were born into a world in which things were ready to our hands; it is we who have made everything difficult to come by through our own disdain for what is easily come by. Shelter and apparel and the means of warming body and food, all the things which nowadays entail tremendous trouble, were there for the taking, free to all, obtainable at trifling effort.

A sense of otherness

You are to you as I am to me.
Living acutely

One person lives as acutely as the next person.

Confucian Golden Rule

Don't do unto others what you would not have them do unto you.
Confucian Golden Mean
The Confucian golden mean is similar to the Greek idea of wholeness where classical Greeks admired the well-rounded person. Balance suggests perspective, not mediocrity.
Simplicity
We perceive no beauties that are not sharpened, pricked out, and inflated by artifice. Socrates sets his mind working with a natural and ordinary motion. A peasant says this, a woman says that.

A sense of time

You, as an individual here and now, are as now as people in the past were as now to themselves then, or as people in the future will be to themselves.
A sense of death
Some day I will be as close to death as the clock is close to striking the next hour. This is another expression of the sense of time and one's place in it.

A sense of honor

The moral man refrained from a given act because he was afraid that somebody might be looking; the man of honor refrained from the same act for the simple reason that it was beneath his ideas of what constituted human dignity.

Table of Contents: Simple Wisdoms Overview

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