Intelligence and Wisdom.

Titu Barua
Watsuthivararam
Yannawa,sathorn.
Bangkok,10120
Thailand.
What do we mean when we say a person is clever? Usually someone who thinks well, with subtlety and profundity, who is able to speak convincingly and precisely, and who suits his actions to present and future circumstances. Intelligence is an adequate reaction to a situation. A clever person is capable in any circumstances of coming to grips flexibly with events, of finding his place and asserting himself. He says no more than the situation and the circumstances demand, but is not at a loss if something of importance to the matter in hand needs to be said. Intelligence should be clearly distinguished from various other gifts, for example, talent, when a person because of his resourcefulness, the vitality of his intellect or phenomenal memory, his gifts of spoken or written speech is able to brilliantly interpret or convey something that has already been achieved by humanity, that is available in the general experience and to perfect it in certain ways. However, a talented person may not be clever, astute. These are different forms of human ability and they do not always go together. A talented person may be careless, unorganised, and unmotivated. He may be carried away by some idea, forget about everything else and even appear absurd to those around him, forgetful of the world, impractical and in general "have his head in the clouds". A clever or astute person has a well-ordered mind, is diplomatic in his words and actions. He may be quite untalented or possess only a small talent. But his chief advantage is his ability to make maximum use of even small gifts for the sake of achieving his aims, particularly those of a practical or organisational nature. The clever person does not suffer from the carelessness of the talented.
The highest expression of the gifted personality is genius, an unusually powerful gift of nature, moulded and polished by education and upbringing. History places on men of genius the tremendous and extremely responsible mission of pioneering new paths and, by the power of their mighty reason, advancing science, art, technology, and social and political life. Destiny endows the genius with strong wings for his great flights of imagination. They are capable of carrying him high in the realms of thought and in the world of public affairs. But anything that flies very high is extremely vulnerable to the lightning! And an essential feature of genius is courage. Very often these luminaries of humanity are martyrs on whose shoulders human culture rises to new heights.
Both talent and genius are not only a gift of nature, not only the product of education and upbringing; they are also achieved by extraordinary diligence, which is a crucial component in the structure of talent. In analysing talent, genius and intelligence, I have no desire to contrast them. It would be absurd to speak of the genius being stupid. The stupidity for which humanity has as yet found no remedy is characterised by a primitive and muddled way of thinking. The judgements of the foolish person are poorly thought out, disordered and vague. He is always being diverted from the chosen direction of his thought and with the greatest difficulty struggles out of the jungles of his own vagueness and muddle. Foolishness comes from the inability to concentrate attention on anything definite and consists in a constant flitting from one object to another. Foolish people are a great burden to those around them. They are the embodiment of intellectual chaos and empty chatter.
The measure of human intelligence and its effectiveness is determined by the degree to which things, events and their• transformation conform to logic. To a certain extent intelligence depends on experience, on knowledge. But an intelligent person is not merely someone who knows something. Much knowledge, as most people realize, does not necessarily make a person clever. Goethe's Faust was a person of great erudition but he was a split personality. With horror he sees in a mask features that are not characteristic of his true self. But he can do nothing about it. The metaphor fully expresses the common destiny of his contemporaries and this serves as some consolation to the hero. Finally, however, comes the moment of enlightenment. This is my real face and that which I believed to be my real face is, in fact, only a mask. There the mask is the symbol of adaptation to circumstances, the symbol of alienated impersonal forces that impose their laws, their way of acting and style of thinking on the personality. All their lives people perform roles, and yet preserve the stamp of their individuality, which itself, in essence, is a variation of the socially typical. We move freely within the framework of the role we have chosen or that has been chosen for us, and this frame has both its center and its periphery. Some people may take efficiency to the point of bureaucratism or convert liberalism into anarchy, while others do their work intelligently, reasonably and even wisely. Role-playing demands discipline. But if it fetters the creative principle in the personality, it loses its reasonable proportions and evokes a natural protest.
The choice of a role in life and its performance are, in effect, the whole of our life. And it is a bitter feeling when neither role nor performance are what we would have wished, what our true self desired and needed. In later life a person may ask himself bitterly, "Hasn't it worked out that the whole of my conscious life has been 'not what it should be'?" So intelligence is not merely knowledge in itself, but the ability to realize that knowledge, to apply it in practice. Intelligence is not simply a characteristic of thought but a special feature of the personality that is able to behave properly according to the circumstances.
When we wish to stress the highest expression of a person's intelligence we call him wise. Cleverness may be bound up with egoistic centres, with narrow personal expectations and everyday interests. Wisdom, on the other hand, has a rich moral content. Socrates associated wisdom with virtue, maintaining that one could not consider a person wise who possessed knowledge but lacked virtue. The clever person may turn out to be an adventurer, a criminal, and, as a criminal, the cleverer he is the more dangerous he may be. This cannot be the case with a wise man. The immoral and everything connected with the narrow egoistic centres of cold rationalism is incompatible with the very essence of wisdom. As a personal characteristic of perfect knowledge, wisdom presupposes the ability not only to apply one's knowledge, but to apply it skilfully and behave with dignity and consideration, in accordance with the objective logic of things and the interests of the matter in hand. The wise man has the ability to grasp the very essence of events, to solve problems that seem insoluble. The characteristic feature of wisdom is the achievement of maximum results with the least expenditure of means, the ability to grasp even the most confused situation and to find the best way out of what seems to be a hopeless situation and, while doing so, to maintain coolness and restraint.
A person who has true wisdom cannot live by the purely private interests of the philistine. This is the lot of stupidity, of self-satisfied and comfortable stagnation. A truly wise person is one who possesses knowledge of what really matters in life and behaves in accordance with the situation and the objective tendencies of its development, who would not spare even his life to have these tendencies realised. Wisdom is bound up not only with intellectual and emotional culture but also with moral culture, the ability and desire to use it in life, to bring good to others. The truly wise person lives by the principle: we are forever indebted to one another.
Wisdom is often reduced to the notion of carefulness, caution, the ability to trim one's sails to the wind. But this is a great mistake. If everyone in society were that kind of wise" person, progress would slow down sharply. There would be no revolutionaries, burning with the desire to transform life in the interests of humanity, of the people. As a rule, this can only be achieved at the cost of suffering or even life itself. Wisdom, of course, presupposes not only knowledge but also a reasonable way of life, which cannot however be identified with moderation, obedience and certainly not with mere adaptability. "Wisdom for a man's self is, in many branches thereof, a depraved thing. It is the wisdom of rats, that will be sure to leave a house somewhat before it fall. It is the wisdom of the fox, that thrusts out the badger, who digged and made room for him. It is the wisdom of crocodiles, that shed tears when they would devour".http://feeds.feedburner.com/TituBarua