The third and final part of Stephen L. Hall’s Wisdom series is here! If you need a refresher you can click Part 1 and Part 2.
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While the first parts of this series sought to introduce the reader to some ancient concepts which still affect us every day based on ideas which have come down through the ages, I’d really like to wrap this up with a more personal perspective and history as I have found aspects of philosophy from experience and observation.
When I started law school I was quite fortunate to find the apartment that I did, not that it was a luxury apartment or anything along those lines.
It was a small apartment built on a hillside all the way on the other side of town from the law school. It had a side entrance, the bottom apartment of a duplex with an reverse set-up beside it. It was sort of like a cave.
But is had a small four by six patio on the back with sliding glass doors, but the duplexes were set in an curve so that you really did not see the neighbors from the patio. The top apartment had a balcony directly above supported by posts on the patio.
Down the hill from this back patio, about a hundred yards away, was a residential house, one of many on the street at the bottom of the hill. In their back yard was one large tree, but the rest of that expanse of hillside was mostly grass. Being on the outskirts of town in the West Virginia hills, most of the view was of trees and hillside.
This view is why the choice of apartment was fortuitous, I was just looking for someplace cheap. Because starting my first year of law school, while learning to read case law and distinguish facts, holdings, reasoning, and dicta, I would sit on that back stoop in the late afternoons and evenings to study.
The patio was just deep enough that where I brought a chair I could prop up my feet upon the post, and with a cup of coffee or a beer in one hand, occasionally a cigar, a highlighter in the other and a law-book in my lap, I would read those cases.
Many of those cases were written hundreds of years ago. The first year covers basic topics and principles in law, so many of those cases you study are some of the oldest. It was thanks to this rustic setting, a gentle breeze, the taste of beer, that helped me place in context those ancient cases, to see the world in a manner not too detached from those jurists of olde.
See, it was not merely the rules to be extracted from those cases, but the tenor of the language, the cultural context of the reasoning, but also the time and distraction to absorb the greater meaning contained within the texts.
Yes, I meant distraction, and I know that sounds odd. To read the case, stare off into that lone tree down the hill, take a puff off of the cigar, and you could almost picture yourself in that fifteenth century courtroom. That would not have been possible staring at the book with the television or radio playing in the background.
Most of your first year of law school is spent with professors trying to press upon you the competitive nature of your education making you believe that the dropout rate is higher than it is, repeating at you constantly that you should not let the stress get to you, overloading with as much work as possible.
All of this is designed to induce, not alleviate stress. It is a test of how well the student can deal with overload and pressure. I never felt that pressure. For one thing, I already had an MBA, so not getting the law degree would not have been the end of the world. Another thing is that I am just not the type of person to stress. But I watched with a certain bemusement those professors engage in the concerted effort to try to panic the students.
But, there was always that relaxing influence of that back patio, to study surrounded by nature, not the bustle of downtown or cramped living.
It again might seem odd to the reader that the reason I went to law school was less to study law than to advance my understanding of economics. It worked. I learned a great deal about economics; true economics, that is to say economic philosophy rather than the modern economic modeling and forecasting.
After law school, I set about actually attempting to get a PhD in Economics, but only spent one year there before deciding that they really did not know economic philosophy, and did not really care about it.
What I did observe was the same phenomena in the Ph.D. program as I saw in that first year of law school, the high pressure needless complexity designed to stress people out only to impress upon them the difficulty and intellectualism of their field.
But it wasn’t.
They introduced a number of complex equations, employing differential like processes to model economic behaviors as a basis for economic predictions. However, when one took a step back to look at the models themselves, they were designed in such a manner to come to a foregone conclusion, or the professors posed questions concerning the behavior of the model which undermined the very principles and assumptions upon which the model was based.
The students were kept too busy to notice. That was the whole point. The objective of the advanced post graduate education at top universities is designed to promote cleverness, intelligence, and problem solving. But it does not promote wisdom.
Those highly intelligent students are kept too busy thinking, to contemplate; to busy problem solving to understand the problem.
It was in a bio-ethics seminar in law school where I had mentioned the classical economic perspective when another student expressed her fear that such a free market would lead to a nation of “kings and slaves”. Her comment disturbed me, not because she was wrong that was obvious, but something nagged at the back of my brain. It took me three months to realize what had disturbed me. It was that the system she advocated would lead directly to what she feared. She had not thought it through to the consequences.
A quick wit and gift of rhetoric can be a great asset in the field of law, to solve the puzzle and win the argument. It is the makings of a gifted Sophist. True understanding is never quick, neither is it a matter of intelligence. Understanding requires time, contemplation, and sometimes an odd thought or analogy which springs to mind from some unforeseen happenstance.
We have created a system of scholarship and hectic competency designed to promote the educated fool, not wisdom. We tell students, “here, solve this problem, now this one, now another one,” et cetera. We do not ask them why or whether the problem actually needs to be solved in the first place.
Law, for example, is built upon a series of principles, not case holdings. The study of cases and their holdings is supposed to teach the law student those principles, but in the hands of Sophists, it tends to teach that there are no real principles.
Once upon the history of law, those principles were refined into legal maxims, statements of the principles of law. Often these maxims were expressed in Latin, to make them sound more prestigious and ancient. Thus lawyers were thought to know Latin when what they really knew were those legal maxims and phrases.
The Socratean approach would have the students debating those principles and maxims, not arguing both sides of case law. It would have economic students debating the moral principles for public policy not calculating the movement of predictive formulas assuming various elasticities of demand.
Regardless of the field you find yourself employed, or what social station of life, the important extraction in my experience is whether you have the capacity to contemplate and reflect. It is the calm mind which achieves understanding. The more you concentrate and try to solve problems, the more you get caught up in the minutia and details of the complexities.
I have found in my pursuits of knowledge and wisdom, that the more complex the problem, the more difficult and arduous the conundrum, the simpler the solution. True sound principles are simple; understanding those principles takes great effort but a calm mind. Wisdom requires time and serenity. A smooth scotch and a good cigar don’t hurt either.
