Introduction

Wisdom refers to finalized knowledge. Such knowledge could result when the mind is properly focused. The focusing involves a methodology, epistemology and theory of values (axiology) proper to it.

Cosmology, psychology and theology are all implied together in wisdom. Physics and metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics lie within its scope. In its applicability a vast range of subjects of higher study, such as sociology, economics or politics come naturally within its range. Besides the searchlight of introspection, the worlds revealed to the telescope, spectroscope or the microscope can clarify wisdom and determine its limits or possibilities.

Wisdom knows no distinction of personal attitudes such as optimist or pessimist, liberal or conservative, orthodox or heterodox, contemplative or active, Eastern or Western. The a priori and the a posteriori, analytic and synthetic tendencies harmonize in a central norm in the wisdom-seeker’s way. Ends and means tally unitively and universally when wisdom is fully finalized in terms of a self-happiness which aims at general well-being at the same time.

Having covered certain specified aspects of wisdom, keeping in mind this unitive approach, it remains for us in the present article to sum up the subject-matter and object-matter of wisdom taken together. A scheme of correlation or a frame of reference is here suggested, not to be looked upon as a fetish or magic key for all wisdom, but merely to serve as an aid for the guidance of seekers, so that thoughts may hang together coherently, comprehensively and completely. The apologetic hesitancy of the sceptic is here replaced by the confident hope in the highest possibilities of the Self in Man.

Wisdom which covers both science and philosophy has suffered from excess of departmentalization and specialization in recent years, especially in the West. There is, therefore, a legitimate cry for the unification and integration of the sciences. Some like Russel limit themselves to an empirico-logical attitude. There are others who, like Niels Bohr and Schroedinger, wish to bring both a priori and a posteriori fields under the aegis of a unified science.

Bohr wrote:

“Science is, according to its aims of enlarging human understanding, essentially a unity; above all it may help us to balance analysis and synthesis”.¹

A formula to bring both these disciplines within the scope of one schema is still only vaguely understood at present. Even those who adhere to empirico-logical reason have their orthodoxy which stresses the pragmatic as against the dogmatic predilections of those who can afford to wait longer for results. These lurking rival orthodoxies have to be brought out and fitted into a common frame of reference. This hard task is what we set before us here.

There is no use in rival schools calling one another various names such as solipsists, syncretists or eclecticists. An easy lapse into any of these attitudes would be detrimental to the cause of unitive wisdom.

Besides such labels as optimist, pessimist, hedonist or hylozoist, philosophers have been too easily open to attack by such expressions as pantheist, pluralist, animist, conceptualist, transcendentalist or personalist. These terms in their proper contexts need not necessarily be deprecatory. A unitive outlook would help to view the whole field without mutual mistrust.

When we remember that all wisdom is for man, or even vice versa, and put the human personality in its proper central and neutral position without egocentric evil accruing to our modes of thinking and when we begin to view the whole matter of wisdom from its proper perspective round the normative notion of the Absolute, wisdom can then attain to the open, dynamic and public status of a Science of sciences as against static closed random aggregates of esoteric doctrines, however old or respectable they may be in themselves.

Such an absolutist outlook would reveal through wisdom that high value named Truth—the Truth which shall make us free. Existence, subsistence and values would meet in such a central Value in the name of common human happiness.