Created But Not Destroyed?

The only thing of value on a fundamental level is wisdom.

This is a simple concept with a lot of explaining to do.

What is wisdom really? In a nutshell, it is the artistic creation of process intelligence. Process is the mind that creates on a fundamental level. It does not just create objects and ideas about the surface world, it creates philosophically. It creates at the beginning, at the most basic.

Perhaps that doesn't really do it.

Let me go this direction: For centuries philosophy has assumed that wisdom is proven. As Reid was apt to say, philosophers attempted to create ideas from their own minds and from an armchair. Wisdom is not proven, it is grown.

Wisdom is the production of a process thinker and it is created like a piece of art through different medium - one being dialectic and another being irony. This is why Nietzsche can be considered an artists before a philosopher. Some of the blame for this, however, is that philosophy was hijacked by "provers."

This is why teaching can work. As Socrates knew (he thought of this a few years before I) wisdom is the creation that grows within conversation and dialectic, it can be facilitated by various philosophical techniques. It does not "exist" in one mind and it is not proven by steps set out by one thinker. When a teacher engages a student properly, wisdom is the creation of this and it effects everyone involved. It effects everyone because it is not the property of own "great" thinker. It is an environment and anyone who really steps into it becomes infected by it and, with practice, becomes it.

Socrates basically said that all knowledge was innate. Philosophy conversations merely wake this knowledge up. When this occurs (for Socrates, in the streets, asking the right questions) wisdom appears.

The growth of 17th C empiricism and the atomistic premise, the concept of proven wisdom and proven granules of truth (which were often non-truths, the truth that there is no truth) is a side-track and a dark tunnel into which seemingly genuine thinkers stumbled. Once caught in this darkness, clever philosophers attempted not to rethink their premises, but to continue on and conquer their mistake with clever rhetoric. This is where hyper-critical philosophy comes from. It comes from arduous and tangled rhetoric that serves only the original premise (that wisdom is solitary and independent and solipsistic) when it fact it is social. From an armchair Hume screams, When I search my thoughts I do not find a self, I do not see an "I." What is this even supposed to mean?

The reality is that process thinking leads to wisdom. Wisdom is the product of engagement and interaction. When the artistic creation that we call a philosophy debate emerges and spreads, if proper, it manifests as a "philosophy mind." This "mind" is what begins the process of "becoming" wise. But this is misleading. One cannot become "wise," they can only become good and creating and identifying the art. This is what priority and selection (asking the right questions) is the heart of real philosophy.