I have been doing some professional rebranding recently – I have renamed my practice and purchased a new domain, darewisdom.com. I was never comfortable with using my own name for the domain and the practice. Anyone who is small business owner with a website will likely understand what a challenge it can be to find a name that reflects your product or service AND your values. With ‘Dare Wisdom’, I think I have managed to find something that reflects all these things. As I will explore in this (and later) posts, the practice of counselling and psychotherapy is meaningless unless it relates to the pursuit of wisdom. And this implies that the pursuit and promotion of mental health is necessarily connected to the pursuit of wisdom. I am convinced that wisdom and human flourishing are two sides of the same coin. And so, I am also convinced that healing from anxiety, depression, trauma, and other forms of mental suffering involves becoming a wiser person.
While this post will concentrate on the history behind the phrase ‘dare wisdom’, and explain its connection to the practice of counselling, psychotherapy and coaching, other topics will continue to explore wisdom in its philosophical, spiritual, and scientific contexts—to name a few. There will also be a post on wisdom in psychotherapy. So stay tuned for more!
The phrase Dare Wisdom is a reference to the Latin phrase sapere aude (‘dare to know’ or, more loosely translated, ‘dare to be wise’), and derives from these lines by Horace:
A task begun
is half done: dare to be wise: begin! The man who postpones the hour
for right living is like the countryman waiting for the river to stop
flowing: but on it glides and shall glide, rolling its waters for all time.[1]
The phrase was later adapted by the philosopher Immanuel Kant as the ‘motto of enlightenment’. Kant wrote:
Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding![2]
Together, then, Horace and Kant express some of the essential points regarding psychotherapy: it is a serious undertaking (by both patient and practitioner) that requires daring (or, as Kant puts it, ‘courage’) it is intimately connected to knowledge, understanding, and wisdom as a path for both individual and collective development.
The question of daring wisdom, or daring to be wise, ought not, however, to be reduced to the mere exercise of the intellect. While it is certain that the existence of wisdom is hard to imagine without knowledge and reason,[3] it is also important to recognise that intellectual brilliance cannot be equated with wisdom. (One only has to think of brilliant young mathematicians, who are, for all their intelligence, very far from being wise, to understand the distinction.)[4]
So, while the phrase ‘dare wisdom’ wholeheartedly evokes Kant’s famous essay, and the Western philosophical tradition in general, there are other versions of wisdom that I regard as of crucial importance as well. One of these is the modern psychotherapy tradition that begins with Freud’s development of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, and by extension the entire psychotherapeutic tradition that follows it, cannot accept a vision of wisdom that is reduced to the use of reason alone because this would consign wisdom entirely to consciousness, whereas Freud’s great contribution was to systematically prove the importance of the unconscious. Psychotherapeutic wisdom must, therefore, extend beyond the courage to use one’s own reason to include the courage to let the unconscious (unreason, the irrational, that which resists understanding) speak.
Freud, despite his pessimism, remained an enlightenment thinker who believed in the advance of science, and wanted to advance what he considered that youngest of sciences, psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis facilitates the articulation of the unconscious to make it accessible to consciousness, and thereby to reason. Psychoanalysis is not antithetical to reason, but only to the naive use of reason that doesn’t consider the unconscious mind. It does battle against the censoriousness of the conscious mind: ‘My patients were pledged to communicate to me every idea or thought that occurred to them in connection with some particular subject’.[5] The patients were, in other words, mandated to speak without the prejudice of reason: to permit themselves to say anything, no matter how apparently unreasonable. (Freud was, in an important sense, a free speech absolutist.) This liberation of the subject from reason permits ‘innumerable ideas [to] come into his consciousness of which he could otherwise never have got hold’. Of course, this liberation of the unconscious is, finally, in the service of reason, a radicalisation of reason, forcing it to consider the unconscious grounds of subjective being. We might say that psychoanalysis helps to complete reason by forcing it to consider that which would otherwise be ‘beneath’ reason.
The spiritual view of wisdom may be regarded as that which is beyond reason. Ken Wilber’s metaphor of the three eyes is a useful epistemological schematisation in this regard: the eye of flesh (empirical science), the eye of reason (philosophy and mathematics), and the eye of contemplation (spiritual practice).[6] Writing about metacognition in the context of attachment, Daniel P. Brown and David Elliott assign wisdom to the category of ‘advanced metacognitive skills’ and include it in their highest stage of metacognitive development, the ‘[h]ighest-order metacognitive skills such as spacious freedom and wisdom’.[7] I share this view of wisdom. For me, health and wellbeing are correlated with ‘advancement to and stabilization of higher levels of adult cognitive development’.[8] As coherence of mind advances, so too does the subject’s proximity to wisdom.
‘Dare Wisdom’ is a motto of personal and professional significance. It is a call to walk a path oriented towards wisdom. To walk this path requires courage, perseverance, and humility.
[1] Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Satires and Epistles, trans. John Davie, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
[2] Immanuel Kant, ‘An Answer to the Question: “What Is Enlightenment?”’, in Kant: Political Writings, 2nd edition (Cambridge England ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54–60.
[3] I am not respecting Kant’s technical conception of the Understanding and Reason in what follows.
[4] Lisa M. Osbeck and Daniel N. Robinson, ‘Philosophical Theories of Wisdom’, in A Handbook of Wisdom: Psychological Perspectives (New York, NY, US: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 61–83, https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511610486.004.
[5] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (First Part), vol. 4, 24 vols, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953).
[6] Ken Wilber, Eye to Eye: The Quest for the New Paradigm (Garden City, New York: Anchor books, 1983).
[7] Daniel P. Brown and David S Elliott, Attachment Disturbances in Adults: Treatment for Comprehensive Repair, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016).
[8] Daniel P. Brown and David S Elliott, Attachment Disturbances in Adults: Treatment for Comprehensive Repair, 1st ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2016).