 OK, a good afternoon. It's an honor to be here and to talk this afternoon about character and wisdom. My name is Wouter Sanderse. I am an associate professor at the Fontes University of Applied Sciences, more in particular at the College for Teacher Training. And I would appreciate it a lot if you could close the door, because it's quite distracting, at least for me. Thank you. Well, I have stand for such an intelligent audience before, but I would like to stress your intelligence here a little bit, because I would like to talk about the relationship between intelligence and wisdom, and whether the university is preparing you to become wise, or only to help you to become smart. So who is doing a bachelor's degree at the moment? OK, about, let's say, half, two-thirds? Who is pursuing a master's? And who is doing a PhD or already has one? OK, well, as education level and intelligence are correlated, I think your average IQ must be about 120, 125. That's pretty high, I would say. But if I would ask you the question, who of you is wise? Who dares to raise his hand? No one. Who is foolish? OK, oh, OK. And who is somewhat in between? OK, so I think this already points to an interesting aspect of at least psychological research into wisdom, that people who say they are wise are often foolish. So the foolish people tend to boast a bit and to say that they are more wise, whereas those who are wise tend to be quite humble and will not boast about their wisdom that much. So actually, if you're not raising your hand when I ask you whether you're wise, you might actually be very wise. Well, this is one of the paradoxes, I think, in wisdom research. Anyway, I'll just give a quick overview of what we will be doing this afternoon. First, I'd like to continue talking a bit about the relationship between and the differences between intelligence and wisdom. Then I'd like to look at two sources that have a lot of interesting things to say about wisdom, philosophy. I'm a philosopher myself, but also psychology. I think both have interesting things to say and should ideally be combined in order to help us not only to know what is wise, but also to become it. Then I'd like to offer some advice about how you can cultivate wisdom. And this is not a very easy thing to do, to become wise or to help others to become it. But I do think that the university has a central task in helping you to become wise, or if you're a teacher to help your students to become wise. And I'd like to reflect a bit on something that Steve Jobs has said about the importance of students to stay foolish and what you could have meant by that. So first something about the importance of being smart. Here you see a 21-year-old Indian student. His name is in the back, Ravyeer Meena. He has a bachelor's in technology and he broke one of the records in the Guinness Book of Records. That is, he memorized 70,000 digits of the number pi. And he reproduced them in nine hours and 27 minutes. So that means two digits every second. Well, this is quite an achievement. And if you assume that your long-term memory is part of being intelligent, then we can say that this is an incredibly smart guy. But is this the kind of people that we want the university to deliver? Is that the kind of people that we want the university to give to society? So my question is, can you be smart yet foolish? And what can a university do to make you not only smart, but wise as well? So there are two sources that I'd like to consult. The first is philosophy. If I think about the history of philosophy, there's at least surely one person that comes into mind. So imagine that you're walking around on this campus and there is this strange person who's walking barefoot, who hasn't washed himself or his clothes for at least two weeks, who's hairy, who's profoundly ugly, who has bulging eyes, and who is asking you all kinds of penetrating questions about why you're living your life as you do. That's Socrates. So imagine someone like a homeless person. Imagine someone like him walking around here and doing stuff like that. That's what he did in the fifth century before Christ in Athens. And he's considered to be, let's say, the mythical founding figure of the academic discipline of philosophy and compared to Jesus and Buddha in terms of his wisdom and the ways in which people have tried to emulate him. So what he did is he went up to politicians, to craftsmen, to poets, and asked them about anything that they claimed to know, things about knowledge, about virtue, about piety, about moderation. And everyone who he could persuade to talk with him ended up in some kind of crisis running away, being ashamed, because they couldn't tell what it was that they thought they knew something about. Now interestingly is why would Socrates do such a thing? So he's compared to a get fly that stings people. That's in comparison that he makes himself. Why would he do something like that? Well, actually a friend of his went to the Oracle of Delphi and this Oracle told his friends that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens. And Socrates just couldn't believe it. He thought, well, this Oracle must make a mistake. So he had an idea to prove the Oracle wrong. So what he did is he went up to all these influential and knowledgeable people and asked them questions about what they knew. Well, in the end, he had to conclude that the Oracle was right, because nobody really knew what they were talking about, whereas Socrates at least knew that he knew nothing. So that, we could say, is one ingredient of being wise, that Ah, Socrates is in the room. Or Aristotle who, yeah, it's Socrates. Wow, what an honor that you're. I don't know if this is a coincidence, but I like it. So Socrates, I've just been talking about you and about you being wise. And I think what we can learn from you as a kind of role model for us is what you could call the humility theory of wisdom. So humility means that you know the limits of your knowledge and of your wisdom. And someone is wise. We can derive from Socrates some kind of idea that you recognize your fallibility, that you are reflective, that you are introspective, and that you can deal with uncertainty. These kind of character traits can be associated with the kind of wisdom that Socrates shows. Well, of course, Socrates is not the only one. I think it's a great example of wisdom, but the history of philosophy has much more to show. A second author I'd like to say a little bit more about is Aristotle, because he makes some great distinctions between kinds of knowledge and kinds of wisdom. I won't discuss all these kinds of knowledge. But the kind of wisdom that I am talking about here, when I'm talking about whether the university has a task and in cultivating wisdom, I'm talking about practical wisdom. So I'm not talking about Sophia, a kind of philosophical wisdom. Epistema, which is universal knowledge. You can compare that to the kind of scientific knowledge that's being developed here, the knowledge of mathematics, news, intuitive understanding. I'm not talking about Techna either, which is some kind of craft knowledge, but I'm talking about phronises or practical wisdom or prudence, maybe these words ring a bell. So what is practical wisdom? It's the knowledge about what is good or appropriate to do in the circumstances of everyday life. So it's the knowledge to know what is good or appropriate to do in the circumstances of everyday life. I'd just like to give you an example. And I think this example is especially great for teachers but for students as well, because they might realize how much practical wisdom teachers or university professors actually need. So imagine you're grading papers and there are two papers from two students in particular and you have a problem with it because one student is struggling to get a C. Yeah, he has almost an insufficient mark for the course. He has this decently written paper. It's well organized, it's okay, and there's no major misunderstandings of the key concepts. You could say it's a B minus paper, but it is by far the best paper that the student has ever written, okay? That's paper one. Paper two, it's written by the smartest student in your class. The paper is well written, it's well organized and demonstrates fine comprehension, but it has no spark, it lacks originality. This student could have done much better, okay? So the question is, what do you do? Do you A, give grades that papers deserve in themselves? Do you like A, give the grades to the papers or do you grade the papers just by looking at what the paper is worth? But you also encourage the C student to do better and admonish the A student that he could have done better or C, do you grade papers taking students potential into account and saying, well, hey, actually I'm giving you a lower mark because you could have done better and this lacks a spark and that is something that you could have done. So I would like you to discuss this with your neighbor for two minutes. Good luck. Okay, time is up. I would like to hear some of your answers, but there's some other things that I would like to hear your opinion about. So we'll do something like this later. I think what I hope that you realize is can be pretty difficult because the kind of questions Aristotle would say is that you have to ask him these kinds of situations is, for example, what is fair? Okay, that's one consideration. Another consideration might be what is kind? What is the kind thing to do? A third may be what is effective? A fourth may be what are the regulations of the institution that I work in? And then the final question is something what matters most in the situation and how do I balance these different values in this case? And that is what you need practical wisdom for to balance all kinds of different values in the situation and make a decision about what it is that matters most in the situation and then actually act on that. So this just as an illustration of the kind of wisdom or the kind of knowledge that you need in order to make just kind, effective decisions or act in such a way. If I would have to summarize Aristotle's view on practical wisdom in three words, it would be this. Why is it smart and good? Or put differently, wisdom is knowing how to live well. So if you're only smart, we don't know anything about how you implement this knowledge that you have that can be put to use for very trivial matters or it can be used in an immoral way. So you could say if you're only smart you can be some kind of ruthless nerd. On the other hand, if you're only good but you're not smart, you might end up as some kind of naive idealist and not knowing anything about the current state of affairs, all kinds of facts, reasoning well about how to achieve these ends well, et cetera, et cetera. So ideally, in a wise person, being smart and good are integrated. And your intelligence, you use your intelligence to achieve good things and your ideas about what's good are informed by your intelligence. I'd like to give two small examples about what this could mean for you as a student. For example, my brother did a PhD in aerospace engineering at Delft University and worked for Shell, they had a company of Shell for a couple of years. But then after a while he realized that that was not what he wanted because he didn't believe in burning up all the fossil fuels that are left in the earth contributing to global warming and he changed his mind and now he's back in academia doing research about wind energy. I don't want to say here that Shell is a bad company. That's not what I want to say. If you work for the companies like that that you're a bad person. But that's being wise means making up your mind about how you want to use the knowledge that you have and whether the purpose that you use your knowledge for is good or not, that you at least think about these things. Another more famous example, you don't know my brother, but you do know this guy, Albert Einstein. His work had only about E is MC square had only a marginal role to play in nuclear scientific research. But what he did do is that he sent in 1939 a letter to President Roosevelt, warning him that the Germans could develop a nuclear bomb pretty soon and asking him to take action. That's what he did. So my second question to you is, what would you do or what would you have done if you had been in a position like him? Would you warn the president of the United States that the Germans could develop a bomb like that and actually that it would be better for the US to produce one first? Would you have done that or not? Again, two minutes. Okay, thank you. Time's up again. I don't want to say that one option is from some kind of objective point of view better than another, but what I do hope that you, what I do want to get across is that it's important to think about these things, that it's not only becoming smart, but to think about what is good and why. So I think these examples, my brother and Albert Einstein, my brother wished that he was something like Albert Einstein, I suppose, are that, okay, developments in technology. I mean, that's one and that's great, but it's another to think about what kind of, how we should use technology, what kind of use of technology is wise and good. Well, these are the kinds of questions that practical wisdom can help us with. Now, the second source I wish to look at is psychology. I think psychology has made contributions to better understanding wisdom. There are different models of wisdom. There's, for instance, the Berlin wisdom model. There's a model, balanced model by Sternberg, by Monica Ardelt and German American psychologist and a number of others. What I'd like to focus on here is the kind of research that psychologists have done into asking people, who do you think is wise and why? People from your personal life and also what do you think the concept of wisdom means? So we get something like a folk theory of wisdom. What do people actually acknowledge to be wise? What you get then is these four things, we could summarize it in this way, that you have a deep understanding and a deep understanding means that you know what matters in life, that you have an idea about what is, what personal and moral values people have, what kind of difficult choices people have to make. For example, when I went on a hike every now and then with a friend of mine, it's about five years ago, I didn't have any children of my own then. My friend was always late when we would catch the train to a place like Groningen to walk the Peterpot. And he was always late and we missed the train and we could start only, I know, half an hour later. So I was quite angry with him, I remember that very well. I think, you know, looking back at it now, I think it wasn't very wise with me. I mean, you know, because I didn't really put my shelves in myself and his shoes and think about, you know, what was, what mattered to him in his life and the, you know, that he had his two small children and his family and all the stuff during breakfast, et cetera. So it wasn't a very wise thing to do. I lacked deep understanding then of some kind of issues that matter to people, like their children. Secondly, it's that you have some kind of reflective capacities that you don't only have deep understanding but you also develop it over time so that you experience things, that you learn from experience, that you think about it, that you take the advice from otherwise people. Third, that you're not only wise, let's say, in your armchair, but you put it to practice. That is problem-solving activities so that you actually act according to the wisdom that you have and you can judge what is at stake in a particular situation. And fourth, that you're motivated to be wise and not only for yourself but that you also help others, that you give some kind of compassionate guidance to other people. So according to this folk theory, it's not only that you are wise, that you can say about yourself that you're wise, but wisdom is also associated with helping other people to develop this kind of wisdom. Then, something I'll skip here. So we could sum this up and say something like the will and the skill to make good choices and help guide others to do so in virtue of a deep understanding of complex human problems. That could be some kind of overall definition of wisdom according to this folk theory. What I'm not going into now is how to measure virtue. I think virtue can be measured and is measured, although the question is always whether you do justice to a phenomena, but if this university would like to contribute to character, including intellectual character and practical wisdom as one of them, I don't think they should shy away from measuring wisdom and to at least look into these possibilities. What I would like to focus on next is also something that psychology has contributed to is an idea about the obstacles for becoming wise. So there are a number of fallacies. I think most of them are pretty familiar to most of us. Sternberg talks about unrealistic optimism. So people who are smart, he says, are more susceptible to being foolish because they think they're wise. Egoscentrism, it's all about me, whereas wisdom has to do something with realizing a common good and thinking what is meaningful for other people as well. A sense of omniscience, I know everything. You know, there's not that much to learn from other people or it's difficult, I don't want to be corrected by someone else. Omnipotence, I can do whatever I want and sometimes combined with a sense of invulnerability, I can get away with everything. Then there's something like the sunk cost, so I've invested so much time and energy in it. I mean, the idea sucks, but I'll go ahead with it anyway. When you play poker, I think you will know what this is like and you go all in because you think I've invested so much already. And ethical disengagement, that is something like ethics is extremely important for other people, but not for me. So these are the kinds of fallacies from a psychological point of view that make it difficult or can make it difficult for smart people to become wise, at least a way Sternberg tries to show that these are not the same and that intelligence doesn't alone save us, but we should be, we should notice that these kinds of fallacies are working on us as well. So finally, that's the last chapter of the talk. Cultivating wisdom. Well, you can see there is a comma behind with age comes wisdom. Oscar Wilde didn't just say with age comes wisdom, but also he added something to it, that is, but sometimes age comes alone. So I think there is some kind of popular idea that the more gray or white hair you have, like a ganda of the gray, you must be extremely wise. As the older you get, the wiser you become. But I think we all know old people who are not wise and I think we also know children or at least young people who are wise. So I think that doesn't, that's not true. So what is it then about age? I think this idea by Oscar Wilde is also expressed by the German American psychoanalyst, Eric Ericsson. He said and I quote, wisdom is a likely but not inevitable byproduct of growing older. So it's not just about time, you know, you can sit in your room and sit and sit and sit and wait, but you will not get wiser. So what's necessary is not just time but experience. Okay, but experience, you might make the same mistake twice. So you're making a lot of mistakes along the way, but you make the same mistake over and over and over again. That's not really wise either. So it's not about experience, but it's about learning from experience. Then we can continue about what kind of experience are you talking about? Well, this Monica Ardelt has argued that it's in particular about negative experiences. So it's not time, but experience. It's not just experience but learning from experience. It's not just learning from any experience but learning from negative experiences in particular. Trying to overcome these kind of negative experience, whether it's you lose your job or you become ill or whatever. But trying to overcome them without despair or without becoming completely devastated. So she says and I quote, negative experiences can be the teachers that help you to develop wisdom. Okay, so what can the university do about this? I think if you focus on experience, then you understand that let's say a separate module, a philosophy module for every student is not going to do the work. Okay, it might be an element because for example, they can tell you about some wisdom traditions like, I've just been talking about Socrates and Aristotle, but these kind of modules only give you some theoretical ideas just as my talk is doing now. Some theoretical ideas about wisdom and being wise includes more. So these are the kinds of things that I would recommend the university to do. There are only three, there are many more things to say but because of limited time I'll emphasize these three. One is that you focus on the development of the whole person or students whole characters. So wisdom is not simple, it cannot be reduced to propositional knowledge. It's a kind of knowledge that you integrate in who you are that is related to your values and your virtues, things like humility, tolerance, openness and compassion and care for other people. These are, if we look at the philosophical tradition and the psychological traditions, these are elements that are associated with being wise. So if you're talking about wisdom, that means that you get the rest of someone's character as well, moral character traits like the ones that I've just mentioned. Second, I don't think that, I think that character and wisdom in particular should first be caught and then taught. I don't say that it should only be caught and that it cannot be taught but I think it should first be caught and then taught. What I mean is the importance of having teachers who are role models with regards to wisdom. So if you take wisdom seriously, you invest in hiring people who are not only smart but also wise and display their wisdom in the classrooms and talking about wisdom and talking about character will definitely not do the work. So I can talk a lot about character and wisdom here but if I do very foolish things out there, I don't see a reason why you would take me seriously. That doesn't mean that observing role models and trying to emulate them in your own way is everything. I think you could do much more to try to develop wisdom in students but it's nevertheless a very fundamental thing. Thirdly, my suggestion would be is that you try to develop wise judgment in every module. So there should always be room for discussion about questions like what kind of scholar or what kind of scientist do I want to be? Do I want to be some kind of Albert Einstein who by the way regretted later that he sent this letter to President Roosevelt? What is good about this idea that I have or this particular invention that I've discovered? How do I use the knowledge that I have for the good and what is this good anyway? So I think these are the kind of questions that can be asked and should be asked in every module, whatever it is. And there are also some kind of things that work better than others in developing wisdom. For example, when you have to make a decision in some kind of life affair, what you could do is think about what a role model would do. That's one thing that has been proven to work that people make wiser decisions if they first think about what a role model would do. A second one is that you imagine yourself on a cloud traveling across the globe, that you do that kind of exercise first. These kinds of exercises lead to wiser judgments. And there are of course a number of others options that you could use. Finally, I promise to say something about Steve Jobs. I don't know, who knows this speech he gave at Stanford University in 2005? Okay, almost half. I think it was a very wise speech. He had some very wise words. I mean, talking about, let's say, death and the importance that you really do things that you care about. It was 10 years, I think, before he actually died, but still, it's a very wise speech. And so I didn't really understand why he said at the end, the famous words, stay hungry, stay foolish. Why be foolish? If you know that, while he was talking these wise words, it's worth looking at the speech, you can find it online. What he says, and I quote from his speech, is your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Okay, so if I take this seriously, you should stop listening to me, because these are the results of my thinking and of other people's thinking before me. But anyway, so I think that he wanted to say that you should follow your heart and listen to your inner voice and don't have the courage to make mistakes and learn from them and try again and keep on trying and keep on trying. So I think I agree with him. I agree with what he said about this message that he wanted to get across these students, but I disagree with that you would call that foolishness. I would rather call it wise. So I would prefer to say stay hungry, stay foolish, and that's what I wish for you. Thank you.