Craig Chalquist, PhD, PhD
December 2, 2024
The great problems are to be encountered in the street.
–Nietzsche
Wisdom is not just for elite thinkers up on mountain peaks or secluded in august halls of learning. To remain relevant and vital, wisdom must get dirty, go outside, and bring us together. It must be engaged with the struggles of the day.
The Castalia Crisis
A certain passage in Hesse’s last novel, The Glass Bead Game, always pains me to read. It is Joseph Knecht’s circular letter to the Board of Educators of Castalia, a future institute of researchers, contemplatives, and philosophers. Cloistered from the hurly-burly of ordinary life, Castalians have dedicated themselves to the preservation of the fruits of Mind as distilled into a great synthesis they call the Glass Bead Game. Only the brightest lights can gain admittance to Castalia, and only the brightest of the bright can play the Game.
One of these is Joseph Knecht, who after many years of training and self-cultivation becomes Castalia's leader.
One day, Knecht—whose name means "knight" and connotes service—begins to think about how thoroughly Castalia has cut itself off from the world around it. Castalians are too busy to dirty their hands with politics, finance, economics, social justice, or even history, which to them means Jesus and Bach, Pascal and Plato, not the unending armies, bloodbaths, and upheavals no Castalian could be bothered to upset his detachment by thinking about.
Nor did Castalia have any aims beyond "egotistic enjoyment of its own overbred faculties." The heights and the depths, the pinnacles of spirit, were what concerned Castalia, not boorish tamperings with the here and now. What did the crass outside world have to do with the arts, thought, meditation, reflection, research, or self-development? In this aloofness Knecht recognized the vulnerability and ultimate transience of a beloved institution.
The educators, he realized, needed educating.
So he wrote down his worries, beginning with: "I have begun to doubt my ability to officiate satisfactorily because I consider the Glass Bead Game itself to be in a state of crisis.” He then compares Castalia to a school whose roof is on fire and himself to a resident scholar calling out a warning.
If, now, we regard our Order as a nobility and try to examine ourselves to see to what extent we earn our special position by our conduct toward the whole of the people and toward the world, to what extent we have already been infected by the characteristic disease of nobility—hubris, conceit, class arrogance, self-righteousness, exploitativeness—if we conduct such a self-examination, we may be seized by a good many doubts...The average Castalian may regard the man of the outside world, the man who is not a scholar, without contempt, envy or malice, but he does not regard him as a brother, does not see him as his employer, does not in the least feel that he shares responsibility for what is going on outside in the world.
It is not that the specialized studies and reflective practices shouldn't be done or aren't valuable. They are, even essential. It's that how they are done distracts from concerns on every side. Also, they are performed with a certain arrogance.
....This Castalian culture of ours, sublime and aristocratic though it certainly is, and to which I am profoundly grateful, is for most of those associated with it not an instrument they play on like a great organ, not active and directed toward goals, not consciously serving something greater or profounder than itself. Rather, it tends somewhat toward smugness and self-praise, toward the cultivation and elaboration of intellectual specialism.
Citing the Castalian teachers sent into the world as the only exceptions to this, Knecht continues:
Above all, we forget that we ourselves are a part of history, that we are the product of growth and are condemned to perish if we lose the capacity for further growth and change. We are ourselves history and share the responsibility for world history and our position in it. But we gravely lack awareness of this responsibility...
Knecht points out that although Castalia arose in part as a counter-reaction to days in which things of the Mind served only political or propagandistic ends and rightly safeguards higher learnings against any such mass sellouts of the past, Castalia has come to represent the other extreme: truth, spirit, and culture so detached from the ordinary crudities of life that Castalia has become "ripe for dismantling" by historical forces it does not deign to examine.
He goes on:
A Board of Educators can function without a Magister Ludi. But although we have almost forgotten it, "Magister Ludi" of course originally meant not the office we have in mind when we use the word, but simply schoolmaster. And the more endangered Castalia is, the more its treasures stale and crumble away, the more our country will need its schoolmasters, its brave and good schoolmasters. Teachers are more essential than anything else...That is where the basis for the cultural life of the country is to be found, not in the seminars or in the Glass Bead Game.
Then he resigns, leaves Castalia, and becomes a teacher to the outside world.
For two decades, I have had the privilege of offering deep education, a term I coined to describe this kind of learning, teaching, and practice: depth psychology, archetypal theory, ecopsychology, terrapsychology, dream studies, mythology, qualitative research, consciousness studies, inner work, symbols of transformation, alchemy as a wisdom path. I’ve designed and taught more than forty-five new graduate courses, launched certificates and specializations, mentored doctoral students through dissertation, chaired departments, co-led academic conferences.
At the same time, I’ve kept one foot planted in the soil outside higher ed: workshops, study groups, public programs, public lectures and discussions, civic and business presentations, corporate consulting, retreat center offerings, continuing ed, outreach to activists, volunteering, podcasts, panels, and interviews. I’ve spoken to organizations as far apart on the political spectrum as Harvard Radcliffe and Modern Day Riflemen. Neither of my PhDs included any instruction on how to bring what I had learned into the world. I had to figure it out.
As I’ve done all this, publishing books and chapters along the way, I’ve watched the schools and programs I worked in succumb to bureaucracy, political infighting, overregulation, and self-constriction. Most transformative programs lie along the political left of the spectrum, and the left’s knee-jerk response to being attacked by anti-intellectual bigots is to contract into defensiveness: more rubrics, more evidence, more stringency, all to convince people who won’t ever be convinced of the value of what we do because it frightens them.
I have even had to fight for my faculty to use books more than five years old. There are courses we can’t teach—and wisdom we can’t offer—because certain books were never published as e-texts. In one of them, the great Sufi philosopher Ibn 'Arabi is quoted as saying that hardened doctrines are a form of idolatry.
Many of these transformative programs have fallen into the same trap that damaged the Human Potential Movement: overfocus on individual enlightenment and simultaneous underfocus on the collective concerns of the day. As though journaling and meditation could heal the world all by themselves. This smacks of an omnipotent fantasy mixed with denial and more than a dollop of narcissism.
And so programs that could be radically transmutative—and are at the individual level—die off one by one.
What Is Wisdom?
Wisdom is easier to recognize than to define. We can all think of people we consider wise, but what makes them so? They seem to have an extra dimension to them, a depth of knowledge beyond the technical or academic. We might define wisdom as insightful, holistic, and deep knowing: true understanding in contrast to avidya, or ignorance, which is different from simply not having been taught something. Avidya rather is more like clinging to biases we won’t let go of, or persisting in illusions, or refusing to be mentally flexible enough to change our minds.
Robert McDermott’s definition links wisdom to ethics: “Wisdom is deep or uncommon knowledge essential for living and a foundation for right action” (Philo-Sophia). It requires no wisdom to build an atomic bomb or let loose AI on an unsuspecting public. Wisdom asks, “Why do this? For whose benefit? What might be the consequences?”
Wisdom for Aristotle is a fuller kind of knowing that includes prudent practicality (phronesis). In the Bhagavad Gita, wisdom is a precious space of refuge to be sought. In the Katha Upanishad, wisdom is a seeing through to the forms and forces below appearances. In the Quran, wisdom is a seed in the heart that needs nourishing, as when wise humans align with the essential nature of humanity (al-fitra). The word “sage” shares etymology roots with the “sap” of living trees. In the Book of Proverbs, wisdom (Chochmah) is the “master builder” of everything.
The world’s folklore contains many wisdom figures, usually depicted as goddesses and wise feminine beings. A mythic definition of wisdom would be having a conscious relationship with Sophia. “You don’t believe in Wisdom,” says Rabbi Rami Shapiro, “you engage with her.” She has many archetypal sisters: Ma’at, Hellenistic Isis, Pronoia, Athena, White Buffalo Calf Woman, Star Woman, Saraswati, Amaterasu, Fatima, Nuwa, Nzambi…
Jung spoke of a Wise Old Man archetype, but the imaginal wisdom-giving figures he writes about in his journals identified themselves as wizards. In Islam, God’s essence (al-Daht) is a feminine term. In myth, gods who bring wisdom were usually taught it by goddesses.
Wisdom is related to depth: seeing below surfaces and appearances, as depth psychology does, to the imaginings, images, dreamings, mythic motifs, and other organizing structures below events. Wise people tend to be deep people.
The wisdom we tend to picture should perhaps be called Castalian wisdom: cloisered, specialized, difficult to access, and owned mostly by specialists who deploy technical vocabularies. What else is available?
Pronoian Wisdom
Fortunately, there is plenty of wisdom beyond the ivory towers, and its teacher-practitioners are legion. A few names that come to mind are Kwame Scruggs, Amanda Leetch, Kathy Stanley, Matthew Cochran, Susan Grelock, Kimmy Johnson, Lali Mitchell, Michael Meade, Jeanine Canty, Betsy Perluss, Joanna Macy, Victoria Loorz, Corrine London, Sandy Hessler, Linda Buzzell, Kelly Carlin, Boston Blake, Kelly Moore, Shmee Giarratana, Minerva Arias, Jun Wang, Melinda Coles, Ryan Hurd, Charles Burack, Bruce Alderman, Amy Logan, Britt Wray, Akila Rayapuraju, Jan Edl Stein, Garret Barnwell, Jurgen Kremer, Sigmar Schwarz, Lisa-Marie Persaud, and many others. Some do work in academia, but not only there.
Pronoian wisdom is when we foster mutually transformative encounters between wisdom and public concerns in service to enlightenment, community, justice, healing, and humaneness. Inner and outer are not split. The ultimate goal is to become fuller and more mature human beings in our dealings with ourselves, each other, and our troubled homeworld. This wisdom is visionary, grounded, metanoic, creative; Jupiterian rather than Saturnian in flavor.
Mythologically, Pronoian wisdom invokes the goddess Promoia, who for the Greeks was the wife of foresightful Prometheus. She saw what was coming. Later, she appears as a Gnostic goddess similar to wise Sophia. In this form, Pronoia repeatedly descends into human life to nourish those who seek her counsel. What she brings comes before intellectualizing or abstraction: her name means "before mind." "Pronoia" psychologically is the opposite of paranoia. We might say "pronoiac" wisdom, but "pronoian" suggests membership in a community.
My own attempts in this direction bring in imagination as a wisdom path, the flesh to embody it, and the heart to make it all real.
Why do we need wisdom in the streets and outside the hallowed halls? So entire misled populations don’t elect dictators. So people can be empowered to demand limitations on industries that harm the planet and its creatures, including us. So we can get at the underlying factors and motivations for our worst choices and make changes instead of relying on easy explanations that go nowhere. (“Fathom” originally meant “embrace,” then “depth”: getting to the bottom of things.)
So we can educate wise leaders instead of malignant narcissists who care only about themselves. Unwise leadership is killing us.
So politics, religion, finance, industry, medicine, agriculture, education, technology, and other contemporary institutions and forms of organized power can serve us and the world instead of reducing us to the distracted parts of a machinery of disheartening soullessness.
So we can raise boys to respect women, women to reject abuse, and everyone to respect the fluidity and diversity of gender and sex and ways to love.
So we can be free of the forces that oppress us from the inside out.
There is a kind of refusal to serve power that isn’t a revolt or a rebellion, but a revolution in the sense of reversing meanings, of changing how things are understood. Anyone who has been able to break from the grip of a controlling, crippling belief or bigotry or enforced ignorance knows the sense of coming out into the light and air, of release, being set free to fly, to transcend.
–Afterword from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu
To accomplish all this, wisdom must go outside.
Yes, inner work is necessary. So are all our special depth studies. Now, however, given the state of the declining world, we must apply those learnings where they can do the most good. The hermit hiding in a cave is not the resource we need today. That kind of wisdom, though valuable, isn't enough now.
The traditional Jungian side of the wisdom house (to use them as one of many examples) has been particularly resistant to showing up. Fights about who belongs in Jung’s lineage and who doesn’t. Condemnation of any kind of advocacy or activism as inflated rescuing or acting out. Self-development as a panacea for cultural change. I had to teach Gnosticism privately to analyst candidates because their institute wouldn’t allow it from anyone who wasn’t a Jungian analyst. In a depth psychology program that eventually went under, I was replaced by an analyst who didn’t know how to teach. More recently, I was told that discussing American politics during my online Jungian course was too political. None of this was personal: other depth instructors have similar obstacles to deal with.
Separating inner from outer, surrendering to unconscious forces, succumbing to elitism, getting stuck in archaic imagery to the exclusion of new possibilities, and keeping deep wisdom out of public view aren’t wise. They exhibit splitting, denial, a “narcissism of small differences” as Freud put it, shortsightedness, and sheer lack of realism. As a result, Jungian programs wither while the work of evolving Jung’s thought instead of enshrining it goes on elsewhere: in bold Friends of Jung circles, in artists’ studios, in film, in literary clubs, in dance, in innovative therapies.
All these creatives are dancing with Pronoia. She is like her archetypal sisters Sophia, Athena, Nuwa, Saraswati, White Buffalo Calf Woman, Star Woman, Hellenistic Isis, Ma'at, Nzambi, and Sri Lalita, the goddess who preceded and created Triumurti, the three big gods who run the cosmos, in some Hindu tales. Lalita's name means “She who plays.”
Pronoian wisdom dances with them.
So important. Thank you.