May a Thousand Wisdom Commons Bloom

From the ethereal vantage point of The Stoa, I have come across places where “seeds” of a wisdom commons, a place that makes wisdom more common, have been sowed: 

Ken Wilber’s Integral Life Practice

John Vervaeke’s Vervaeke Foundation

Bonnitta Roy

’s The Pop-Up School

Soryu Forall’s Monastic Academy

Michael Taft’s The Berkeley Alembic

These places take form under the guidance of individuals with philosophical positions shaping the essence of their approach to nurturing a wisdom commons. Nathan Vanderpool from the Respond Network calls these individuals “scholarchs.” While the scholarchs are fellow travelers, acknowledging the common affliction of a “wisdom famine,” they diverge due to their philosophical differences and the practices that unfold from them.

Nathan and the Respond Network team are doing good work, artfully getting the scholarchs into a collaborative relationship. However, while of great value, I do not believe the scholarchs or resolving their differences will not be the source of making wisdom more common. There needs to be a different source. That source is you. 

It is time to stop looking outwards for wisdom. Though the scholarchs guide you on your path, the answers you seek are not with them. Within you resides profound wisdom, enormous and untamed, eager to be freed through the loving embrace of real connections. A wisdom commons is already here, between you and who you live for. 

It is incumbent on each of us to plant the seeds of our wisdom commons, and the people we need to do it with are right in front of us: they are our partners, children, parents, friends, neighbors, and pets, especially if you named your pet Socrates. 

Relationships are guided by a philosophy, often unexamined, borrowed from the culture (aka “doxa”). It is better to have an examined philosophy. I do not recommend adopting an examined philosophy of someone else, especially a scholarch, who has high verbal and general intelligence; chances are, you will get stuck under their spell, lost under the weight of all their intellectual architecture. Instead, create a “minimum viable philosophy,” one bespoke to your relationships, lean enough to get you moving through the world together. 

In a 2018 philosophical report,

Conor Barnes

and I had a section on “emancipating philosophy,” the love of wisdom: 

Due to technological innovation, industries are being disrupted the world-over, from the sharing economy to AI developments. We suggest that it is time for philosophy to endure similar disruptions. In Disabling Professions, Ivan Illich argues that professionalization can have a damaging effect on society, as expert culture induces knowledge-distance, blindness, and reliance on experts by non-experts. While Illich’s focus was the medical establishment, this also applies to philosophy, which has been inaccessible to most non-professionals for decades. This has in turn led to a sense of philosophy’s irrelevance amongst non-academics.

The wisdom commons I am eager to midwife has a philosophy that does philosophy in an accessible way, especially for those trapped in doxa. We concluded the section with an aphorism from R.J. Hollingdale: “If we thought more for ourselves we would have very many more bad books and very many more good ones.” Similarly, if we philosophized more for ourselves, we would have very many bad wisdom commons and very many good ones.

This is a good thing because even bad wisdom commons are better than what we have now, and without risking creating a bad one, there will be no good ones.

May a thousand wisdom commons bloom.

If you’d like to join us at Collective Journalling, you can become a paid subscriber. The description for Collective Journalling is below, and the Zoom link is behind the paywall. 

What is Collective Journalling? It is a communal practice that started in May 2021 during Rebel Wisdom’s Becoming a Live Player course, continued to live on at The Stoa, and will now live with Less Foolish. The sessions happen via Zoom and are 90 mins, with check-ins in the chat at the beginning and an opportunity to connect with fellow journalers in breakout rooms at the end. You do not have to stay the whole time. If you are in an antisocial mood, you do not have to interact with anyone, yet you can still enjoy the coffee shop-esque communal vibe. The session concludes with an optional sharing of a passage in the chat. Most of the time is spent in silence together, individually inquiring about what matters most. A lovely group of people has formed around this practice. The practice occurs on weekdays @ 8 AM ET.