Life-course meaning: insight and wisdom

Through most of recorded history, insights gathered in the course of a human life, or over the history of a people or society, have been associated with the idea of wisdom. This term has been interpreted in ways that vary along key dimensions, such as the capacity for judgement associated with wisdom, or the question of what sort of person can be expected to be wise. In work associated with ageing, commentators over the centuries have associated wisdom with a capacity for tolerance, for accepting uncertainty and for contributing to the common good. Ancient writers such as Aristotle or Cicero approach the concept with realism, pointing out that developing wisdom demands both hard, continuous effort and a degree of material well-being and good fortune. Nonetheless they treat wisdom as, in principle, not impossible to achieve. This chapter explores interpretations of ‘wisdom’ relevant to the lives of older people today; not in the spirit of imposing blanket expectations, against which Haim Hazan (2009) rightly warns, but in the search for language that works in opposition to the denigration of older people that makes it impossible even to perceive their capacities and potential.

Any reading of a newspaper will produce a range of uses of the terms ‘wise’ or ‘unwise’, not least in obituaries but also in connection with any difficult field, from child-rearing to wealth distribution or foreign policy. These daily usages have been relatively unsupported in the academic world, even though, in reflection on insight and meaning in work relevant to gerontology, ideas associated with wisdom arise more often. Frankl uses the term ‘wisdom’ in connection with love as the goal of life (1964: 36). Erikson describes a possible final life-stage as one of wisdom (for example, 1986: 37, 72). Moody urges older people to embark on ‘a path toward greater wisdom’ (2003: 139); MacKinlay (2005) refers to a search for enhanced wisdom as an aim for later life. The US ‘sage-ing’ movement is associated with arguments by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (1995) about the special role of wise older people in interpersonal life and in dealing with problems concerned with how to live in society.