English · Chapter 13
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
"Knowledge and Wisdom" is a reflective essay by Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), the British philosopher, mathematician, logician and social critic who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950. Russell wrote widely for the general reader on education, war, religion and the responsibilities of science. This essay belongs to his later prose, written in the years after the Second World War and the atomic bomb, when he was deeply worried that human power had outrun human judgement. In it he asks a simple but urgent question: our age has more knowledge than any earlier age, so why is it not wiser, and what exactly would wisdom mean?
Russell opens by observing that most people would agree our age far surpasses every previous age in knowledge, yet there has been no matching increase in wisdom. Agreement ends, however, as soon as we try to define wisdom and ask how it can be promoted. The essay therefore sets out to describe the factors that make up wisdom and then to ask whether it can be taught.
The first factor is a sense of proportion, the capacity to take account of all the important elements in a problem and to give each its due weight. Russell argues that this has become harder because knowledge is now so vast and specialised. A specialist may master one field completely and still be blind to the wider consequences of his work. He illustrates this with medicine: researchers who discover how to lower the infant death rate in Europe and Asia do something clearly good in itself, yet the unintended result may be that the food supply becomes inadequate and the standard of living falls in the most populous parts of the world. Knowledge of the structure of the atom offers a darker case: a scientist may study it out of a pure desire to understand, and in doing so place in the hands of powerful lunatics the means of destroying the human race. Knowledge, in other words, may be pursued honestly and still do harm unless it is joined to a wide view.
Comprehensiveness alone, however, is not enough. Russell says wisdom also needs an awareness of the ends of human life, a feeling for what is actually worth pursuing. His example is Hegel, who wrote about history with great learning, yet whose philosophy encouraged Germans to believe they were a master race, a belief that helped lead to war. Learning without a humane sense of purpose can therefore be dangerous. Knowledge must be combined with feeling.