Call it “living wisdom”
We lack a good word in our culture for a reality-based, non-dogmatic, evolving, collective enterprise dedicated to the active practice of humanity's best accumulated wisdom. Maybe 2 words will do.
My current best attempt at finding a good, self-describing name for this overall enterprise — something akin to “science” or “religion” or “performing arts” — is “living wisdom”.
Granted, it’s not great. It doesn’t conjugate easily — there’s no easy equivalent of “scientist” or “scientific” — but there really are no good options, which by itself is a very interesting and revealing observation about our current culture.
“Philosophy” is the closest, and the original sense of the word — in the ancient Greek and Roman sense — is actually exactly it. But what they meant by the word back then is not what the word means to people today. And the current meaning of “philosophy” for most people just isn’t it. If “neo-Hellenistic philosophy” meant anything to people that’d be pretty good — but it doesn’t mean anything to most people, and it’s a hell of a mouthful.
“Spirituality” is also close. In fact, if you define that word the way I do, this project is truly very spiritual, in a secular, inescapable way. But for so many people, “spirituality” implies having something to do with “spirits” or some other disembodied conscious entities that we can be in contact with. Or with the general smorgasbord of New Age “spiritual” beliefs and products. And that’s very much not this.
“Existentialism” would be very good too, except that it has a well established and only partly overlapping meaning in the philosophy world.
“Stoicism” too could be a good banner for this project, since it can very much be considered a resumption of the ancient Stoic lineage. But this term obviously carries a host of misleading meanings and connotations in our culture, so it also gets things off on the wrong foot with people.
So yeah, naming this thing is hard in our culture. “Wisdom” by itself seems like an obvious candidate here. It does have the advantage of implying that we’re talking about the real world, that it’s about living this life in a more graceful, lower-friction, more-aligned way. But the word by itself also seems to sit on a dusty shelf somewhere. “Wisdom” feels static, of the past maybe, or if a trait in a person, a kind of passively possessed quality that one might have sitting reflectively in an armchair. That’s part of this, but this is much more about thriving, about active graceful moral excellence. It’s a recipe for acting more effectively and joyously, harmoniously. It’s what you do when you have the clarity that comes when you’re less enthralled with your own nonsense, freeing up your attention for the world around you, seeing yourself as an integral part of that world and embracing a willingness to fulfill your roles toward others with integrity.
“Living wisdom” carries this idea of a dynamic, growing, becoming, manifesting sort of project. It’s not just what some wise dudes wrote a long time ago. It’s ongoing, a living project. It, itself, can and will evolve over time, as we slowly, collectively learn. We can be less confused, more wise, more sane … but doing so is always a matter of actually doing so. It must be lived, not just known. And it’s about, centrally about, the art of living this strange human life that we all are. To me, “living wisdom” implies all of this as tersely as possible. There’s no 1 word, so we’ll have to use 2. And “wisdom” provides the best foundation to build on among the options above.
Not a brand
Importantly, this is “living wisdom”, not “Living Wisdom” — just as science is “science” and not “Science”. We’re not trying to make a particular brand here. Nobody owns science … any particular institution or person can recognizably and self-consciously be doing science, but science as a human endeavor is not contained by or limited to any of its practitioners or constituent businesses and institutions. This is about trying to give a generic name to a general human endeavor, one that has atrophied in the West since the rise of Christianity, but thrived for a half millennium before that and is recently reemerging.
Having a generic name for the endeavor recognizes it as a different sort of project, with different goals and methods, than the other great and enduring human endeavors — whether music, cuisine, math, or singing .. or yes, religion. It’s not religion, it’s not science, it’s not New Age spirituality, it’s not philosophy in the modern sense, it’s not atheism, it’s not self-help, it’s not just humanism or the humanities (though, like philosophy, the humanities did start off as very much this project during the Renaissance, but has become something different and more academic in modern times). Once we do the work of clarifying how this project is related to but different from each of these, once people have a sense for what living-wisdom is as a shared human endeavor, having a generic term to hang that understanding on saves us from having to redefine the project from scratch every time.
Also, importantly, just as “science” isn’t tied to Newtonian mechanics and “literature” isn’t tied to the novel as a form, living-wisdom is a project that is independent from and outlives its content at any one time. Theories of wisdom, of the good life, can come and go, and assumptions about consciousness or our connectedness to the cosmos can be overturned or deepened. So it’s not a brand even in the sense of being the name for a particular school of philosophy.
Anyway, I know it’s a bit audacious — maybe even quixotic — to propose to name a fundamental human endeavor on the level of art or engineering. But we do seem to be lacking a name for this one in our current culture. Like the old saying about the best time to plant a tree, the second best time to “plant” this name is today.