Tradition, Scholarship and Practical Wisdom

Abstract

Whatever their fundamental premises may be (monotheistic, polytheistic, Deist, mechanistic or pantheistic), cosmological accounts of our world at some point assign a certain status to man, indicative of his place in the overall pattern of events and growth-processes. These accounts vary widely, since they depend on differing conceptions of man, but in particular they vary according to the degree of active participation that they envisage for man in the ‘world process’.

‘… There is [an] incessant and insatiable urge inherent in the human mind to seek more and more knowledge about the world and about itself which occasionally turns into a pursuit of wisdom, of a global view or experience of reality or of “truth as such”. This pursuit may remain a conceptual one as most systems of philosophy show, but sometimes it overflows into a burning desire to penetrate the whole truth fully, to solve the mystery of existence directly in one’s own heart, but, at the same time, with a degree of validity which could be called universal’.

Karel Werner¹