In most of the ancient philosophical communities, the figure of the sage was held up as the ideal to which a budding lover of wisdom should rightly aspire. This was true of Confucianism, Pythagoreanism, Stoicism, Buddhism, Taoism, Pyrrhonism, Epicureanism, and the various "schools" inspired by the example of Socrates, including the "think tanks" and voluminous works of Plato and Aristotle.
Two questions immediately arise, which I've been pondering for years:
These questions might be unanswerable, but the lifelong endeavor to answer them might itself constitute part of what sagacity is all about.
Following Aristotle, I might say that sagacity is something like "wisdom plus". By wisdom I mean phronēsis, often translated as "practical wisdom": at root, a combination of good judgment and good character. However, as hinted in my post the other day about private philosophers, sagacity seems to be more than action-oriented wisdom, since it involves a deep understanding of the human condition for the sake of sheer awareness and insight. Clearly there is a great deal to unpack here and I don't claim to fully grok the nature and significance of sagacity in human life, but this is my provisional conception.
Can a person attain sagacity? The Stoics, for instance, thought that almost no one could become a sage (perhaps once in a hundred or a thousand years a sage would appear). I'm more optimistic, but that's because I don't think sagehood requires absolute, Platonic perfection without any minor slip-ups in thinking, feeling, or action. Yet just because sagehood might be achievable doesn't mean it's a reasonable ideal - certainly not for everyone, and perhaps only for a few.
To provide a more personal perspective (because, after all, I'm pretty much a personalist), sagacity has long been one of my overarching goals in life, perhaps ever since I stopped believing in god half a century ago when I was nine years old. Of course, I might not be a reasonable person, but the quest for sagacity has been thoroughly enjoyable and fulfilling for me, so I don't plan to ever give it up.
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Wisdom.)
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