Recognising our own finitude is the key to wisdom

In Recalibrating Wisdom for the 21st Century we saw how accepting our own ignorance is an essential pre-requisite for growing in wisdom. But most of us find this difficult. We’re normally so wrapped up with maintaining our own bubbles of certainty that it can be hard to cultivate a genuine acknowledgement of “knowing that we know nothing”.

In this article we introduce a very simple starting point for realising just how much we really do not know: recognition of our own ‘finitude’ (“the state of having limits or bounds”). From there, we can easily expand understanding of our own limitations ever outwards, uncovering enough of our personal ignorance to create a space necessary for wisdom to flourish.

1. Limited by our finitude

As far as we know, each human being has just one life. Not only are we limited by time and space, but we only get the one chance. (“We only live once, hashtag.”)

Though it may sound obvious, these two constraints on us as human beings have important implications:

• We are only capable of being present at a single point in time and space – which means that we cannot personally experience, observe or interact with most points in time and space.
• We each have just one, relatively short lifetime to fit everything into – which means that we can never personally learn or experience everything in the universe ourselves.

Already we’re beginning to see the tremendous scale of our own personal ignorance. This is good. Just as we need plenty of oxygen to breathe in, wisdom requires plenty of personal ignorance to flourish in. The reason for this is simple: if we already believe we know everything there is to know, where is the space for “knowing that we know nothing”, pre-requisite for growing in wisdom?

2. Limited by the path not taken

Because we cannot personally be everything, everywhere, all at once, our own perspective is intrinsically limited. But more than this:

1. We each have to make choices throughout our single lifetime as to how we’ll personally utilise our own finite time and energy.
2. Some possibilities and some opportunities will never be experienced personally by ourselves.
3. We must depend on others to tell us what we’re personally missing.

It’s as if the universe wants to keep us humble and dependent on one another. This too is good: if we’re trying to develop the multiple-perspective knowledge characteristic of wisdom, we’re going to want to listen to others, especially those who see things very differently to us.

3. Limited by not being ‘someone else’

Each human being has to make their own choices and sacrifices according to the hand life deals them—and in accordance with their personal value system.

As a consequence, someone else’s life experience (and motivations) will be very different from our own. We simply cannot know why another person thinks, feels or believes the way they do. We can only guess. This is especially noticeable when comparing one generation with one another (“Does their generation really think that?!”), or cultures different to our own.

Though there may be overlaps with our own perspective—especially if we have some things in common (e.g. shared language, shared memories, shared values, shared personality traits, shared experiences)—we are otherwise ignorant about what has brought another person to this time and this place… with this particular perspective.

So another human being’s inner life is something we simply have no access to. We are completely ignorant of it… unless that person chooses to reveal it to us through their words or actions.

If we’re always talking at them, or judging them for their actions, we prevent them from revealing themselves when we’re around.

4. Limited by our inability to read minds

Whilst we can make observations about another person’s words and actions, it still won’t tell us anything concrete about their inner life. That remains hidden from us, even though we may try our damnedest to ‘interpret’ their words, actions and intentions in a way that makes cohesive sense to us. But our interpretation will always be shaded by our own personal experience, our own personal value system, and our own personal conclusions about how the universe works.

To see things as another person does, we’re going to have to earn the right to access this inner life of theirs. That means walking in humility and empathy so that we create the opportunities for other people to open up.

5. Limited by not being there

Even if we happen to be the world’s best ‘mind-reader’ (a claim many people make but rarely live up to), we still cannot know what another person does or says when we cannot directly observe or interact with them.

True, we could rely on a third party to relate their observations of another person or their interactions with them. But can we really assume that such reports will be free from their own errors and biases? Why do we believe that their ‘mind-reading’ skills will be any more correct than ours?

We currently share the planet with around 8 billion people. Yet out of all these individuals, there is only one person whose inner life we can know without them revealing it to us, and that’s our own.

If we want to grow in multi-perspective thinking, we’ll need to create opportunities for connecting with more of our fellow inhabitants, especially those we wouldn’t automatically associate with, in contexts where they can be themselves.

6. Limited by our place in time

If we are ignorant of the inner lives of almost everyone alive at the same point in time as us, how much more ignorant must we be of all the people who ever lived on earth before we were born?

Most estimates place the number of human beings who ever lived above 100 billion. That’s a tremendous number of people we are personally unable to observe or interact with directly, which may or may not be influencing how things are today. Anyone who has ever attempted to trace their own family tree will recognise how frustratingly limited our knowledge is about most of these individuals, each with their own lifetimes of choices and experiences.

Even then, we only ever get to know about a tiny fraction of their lives, either through actions that have stood the test of time, or their writings (and what they choose to reveal), or other people’s (potentially shaded) reports of their words and deeds.

7. Limited by scale and complexity

Our ignorance doesn’t stop at other human beings. Because we cannot be everywhere all at once, we are also ignorant of anything in existence that is too large, too complex, or too abstract for us to observe, directly measure, record, or unambiguously define.

Examples of this include:

• Culture – except for the fragment we personally experience ourselves. We can never fully appreciate what it is like to grow up in a different country (or family) under a different world-view, even if we speak the same language.
• Origin and development of life – though we may have our theories or ideas, none of us were around to witness it happen. Even if we were, could we have observed all that was happening and how it was interacting? We’re looking at a crime-scene where the trail has gone cold, relying on fragments of circumstantial evidence and attempting to fit what we discover into some logical or ideological framework based on our current understanding.
• The meaning of ideas like consciousness, reality and free-will – we ‘know’ they exist because we experience them, but once we try to define them reductively or analytically, they disappear like the shadows cast by a flickering candle exposed to sunlight.
• Morality – how we personally define what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ depends heavily on nested (often conflicting) value systems which have evolved over multiple generations, and over the course of our own short-but-idiosyncratic lives.

We could go on. Such concepts are simply too expansive for any single person to comprehend. Yet our beliefs about them serve to influence and motivate the behaviour and destinies of individuals and entire societies, resulting in repercussions across time and space. Many of these repercussions are seemingly non-deterministic and upredictable, yet they narrow or expand the possibilities for the future accordingly.

In short, there’s a lot we do not know. There’s a lot we cannot know. Which makes the universe an exciting place, ripe for new discovery. Some of it we can discover alone. But for most of it, we’re going to need each other.

Conclusion

Wisdom begins by recognising the limitations of our own individual perspective. We recognise that any one person’s perspective—whether it is our own or someone else’s—will always be limited by their own finitude as a human being. Though we may believe that we know more than the next person—and maybe we do—in the scheme of things, it’s less than a drop in the ocean.

Which puts us all in the same position.
We need others. They need us.

And so we treat each other with patience and respect because others may not have the information or experience we personally possess. But likewise, we practise walking in humility and empathy as we seek to understand them better, recognising that they may have information and experience we do not personally possess.

Imagine if all of us were to live in recognition of our own ignorance (instead of trying to point out everyone else’s). How much wiser might our species become?