Shengren – Chapter 3.3 – Die Weisheit (Wisdom)

Weisheit, das ist praktische Vernunft in der Angemessenheit ihrer dem Endzweck aller Dinge, dem höchsten Gut, völlig entsprechenden Maßregeln, wohnt allein bei Gott; und ihrer Idee nur nicht sichtbarlich entgegen zu handeln, ist das, was man etwa menschliche Weisheit nennen könnte.[1] [Wisdom, that is practical reason in its adequacy toward the final end of all things, the supreme good, totally appropriate measures, lives alone with God; and to not visibly act to the contrary of its idea {that of wisdom}, is what might be called human wisdom.]

– Immanuel Kant, Zur Geschichtsphilosophie

Since the philosopher used the philosophical approach (through sound judgment) to thinking, and the sage used the sagacious approach (through experience) to thinking, the concept of wisdom in sage cultures was different from the concept of wisdom in No Country for Sages. Before the term Philosoph became a German word in the sixteenth century, Paracelsus used Weltweisheit [world-wisdom].[2] The German meaning of Weisheit had to do with a certain lifestyle and way of conduct that is the direct result of evaluating a situation or a people’s intention correctly – no sagehood is required, and that “certain lifestyle” of die Weisen was never truly defined. The Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe (1955) provides the following definition:

Weisheit, wîsheit, wistuom (entspr. gr. Sophia, lat. sapięntia), […] heute allg. die aus der richtigen Einschätzung der Dinge und Menschen entspringende Lebenshaltung und Handlungsweise. […] Weisheit ist nicht gleichbedeutend mit Wissenschaft im Sinne exakter Forschung und organisatorischer Einheit des Wissens.[3] [Wisdom, wîsheit, wistuom (corresponding to gr. Sophia, Latin sapientia), {…} Today gen. the lifestyle and conduct that springs up from the right assessment of things and people. {…} Wisdom is not synonymous with science in sense of exact research and organizational unity of knowledge.]

The definition above is twofold: it says what wisdom is, a lifestyle and conduct, and then what it is not: organized knowledge. The sage is to be wise; the philosopher is to have knowledge:

The West with its philosophical approach put more emphasize on the acquisition of knowledge; while the East with its sagacious approach put more emphasize on the accumulation of wisdom.

The European orientalists saw wisdom as quite un-scientific – a conviction that dated back to Aristotle: “wisdom is a form of goodness, and is not scientific knowledge but another kind of cognition.[4] The “goodness” or kindness or friendliness and hospitality often attributed to Asian societies did not prevent the Europeans though from taking full advantage of their own knowledge-driven ways and their technological superiority. Wisdom “the manifested uncertainty and incompatible multiple truths”[5] seemed vague and rather undesirable to European philosophers and scientists. Accordingly, sagacity or wisdom, whenever it was met in Africa, South America, and Asia, was looked at as the anthropological finding of some rare species or ancient fossil. Wim van Binsbergen, a professor for inter-cultural philosophy, described “wisdom” in modern comparative scholarship as follows: “The word wisdom is often used vainly in academic texts today, to denote, not time-honored modes of knowing complementary to scientific knowledge, but rather, within a given North Atlantic / globalizing discipline (e.g. physics, law, econometrics) the obsolescent conventional approach of an earlier vintage.[6] The semantics in the wisdom-definition and evaluation given above – “not exact research” (Hoffmann), “un-scientific” (Aristotle), and “obsolete and vintage” (van Binsbergen) – made the very term wisdom look rather deserted in any modern scientific discourse, in addition to its already negative association with the archaic and folkloric in fiction.

In German language, Weisheit and the person who embodied it, der Weise, when applied to real people outside the world of legends and fairy tales were both pejorative terms. When the German thinkers met Chinese culture, they could have easily called the Buddhist and Confucian sages die Weisen, but refrained from doing it; and although one could not know what the German thinkers were thinking back then, nevertheless it seemed highly likely that one of the reasons why they did not call the sages die Weisen, ever, and did not translate sheng(ren) as die Weisen, never, was that very reason cited above, namely that die Weisen had such a pejorative ring to it that made the Sino-Tibetan culture look cheap: “not exact research”, “un-scientific”, and “obsolete”. Instead of using a correct translation that sounded pejorative, the Germans used an incorrect yet familiar sounding biblical and philosophical terminology: die Heiligen, die Philosophen, die Berufenen, die Göttlichen, etc.[7] None of these terms could actually be found in the original Chinese Classics – that was far from exact scholarship. But then, who read the original Chinese Classics in Europe anyway? In particular Richard Wilhelm, the great German missionary and sinologist, made no secret about Europe’s mission and duty to Christianize China. He was a wicked and very calculating man who seemed to have lived by the conviction that might was right – whether is was the might of God or the might of European Man:

“So ist denn auch der Typus der grossen Männer, die die europäische Geschichte zumeist bestimmt haben, eine ganz bestimmte Gestalt: halb Krieger, halb Staatsmann. […] Immer neue Schichten drängen sich ans Licht der Geschichte hervor mit ihren Ansprüchen, die zunächst von den herrschenden Schichten bestritten werden, bis sie schliesslich im Verlauf eines längeren oder kürzeren Kampfes anerkannt werden müssen.”[8] [And so is the type of great men that shaped European history habitually a very particular figure: half warrior, half statesman. (…) Ever new layers of society push themselves above the rest, and into the light of history, with their demands. Those demands are initially refused by the prevailing layers. But eventually, after some longer or shorter struggle, those demands have to be recognized.]

Wilhelm was confident that his version of China, the biblical Holy China, even if it made a mockery out of Legge, Loomis, Watters and the other Anglo-Saxons who refused to call Confucius and the shengren saints, would nevertheless mechanically find legitimacy in Europe if only it was promoted boldly and recklessly enough – bold and reckless like all things in war and politics. And it was history that proved Wilhelm right: The German-speaking world to this day indeed calls the shengren Heilige.

Germany itself had no die Weisen, and never saw the need to cultivate any. The columnist Uwe Justus Wenzel in his Űber das Geheimnis der Philosophie (2009) defended German tradition: “Ja, die Philosophie ist selbst weise – und zwar so weise, nicht die Weisheit selbst sein zu wollen” [Yes, philosophy itself is wise – and so wise that it does not want to embody wisdom itself]. Johannes Hoffmeister, chief editor of the Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe (1955), warned about the dangers of wisdom:

Wenn in volkstümlicher Auffassung auch jemand weise sein kann, ohne irgend etwas von Wissenschaft zu verstehen, so muss doch >>der Weg zur Weisheit<< […], wenn er nicht ungangbar oder irreleitend sein soll […] bei uns Menschen unvermeidlich durch die Wissenschaft gehen. [Even if in popular opinion someone may be considered wise without the slightest understandings of science, [nevertheless] >>the path to wisdom<<, if it shall not be impassable or misleading, in humanity inevitable must go through the sciences.]

The Germans only believed in Oriental sages if those sages stayed – like the Greek ones – in the history books and the lands of rumors and legend. Shengren had to be Philosophen or Heilige because those titles – despite being inaccurate – were noble and sensible; and the very concept of sagehood – “dating back to the classical period when”, according to Oswald Spengler (1918): “the truth was still linked to wisdom” – filled no space in the German world and thus remained nameless.

The German nation had no use for sages and sagehood, and sages were nowhere to be found in the ranks of its prominent thinkers. When Germany and the East had no common (sagely) values, their ability for communication on a cultural level was dysfunctional and could only be restored first by tolerance and next by learning from others. China, India, Japan and many other sage cultures wanted to be understood as sovereign civilizations with their own treasures (that, the Germans knew) and thoughts and cultural achievements, although it soon became evident that the Western nations had their eyes on dominating Asia, not to go to school in Peking, Calcutta, or Edo. The German philosopher Edmund Husserl was accurate in his observation that the Europeans “would never Indianize themselves”, and even if they wanted, the German society in particular, as explained in the chapters one and two, was culturally vaccinated against any Eastern tradition and intrinsically fremdenfeindlich against Asian people on top of that.

Becoming Indian would not have been a wise career move for any German, and those who actually did become Indian or Chinese or Japanese in heart and mind, were forced to stay away from Germany or else had to subscribe to a life on the fringes of his society.

The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer physically avoided Asia and lacked experience with Asian traditions, yet he saw and understood something in the East that needed salute and recognition from Western philosophy. Schopenhauer attributed the highest form of wisdom to Indian and Buddhist scriptures, and he used sagely vocabulary like Weisheit, Weise, Weisheitslehre extensively in his The World as Will and Imaginations, with the expected result that his writings borderline with spiritualism and mysticism and thus was often seen as criticism of Europe’s unconditional belief in materialism, progress and modern age:

Die lebendige Erkenntniss der ewigen Gerechtigkeit, des Waagebalkens, der das malum culpae mit dem malum poenae unzertrennlich verbindet, erfordert gänzliche Erhebung über die Individualität und das Princip ihrer Möglichkeit: sie wird daher, wie auch die ihr verwandte und sogleich zu erörternde reine und deutliche Erkenntniss des Wesens aller Tugend, der Mehrzahl der Menschen stets unzugänglich bleiben. Daher haben die weisen Urväter des Indischen Volkes sie zwar in den, den drei wiedergeborenen Kasten allein erlaubten Veden, oder in der esoterischen Weisheitslehre, direkt, so weit nämlich Begriff und Sprache es fassen und ihre immer noch bildliche, auch rhapsodische Darstellungsweise es zulässt, ausgesprochen; aber in der Volksreligion, oder exoterischen Lehre, nur mythisch mitgetheilt. […] in den Veden, der Frucht der höchsten menschlichen Erkenntniss und Weisheit […][9] [The living knowledge about eternal justice, the scale that balances the malum culpae and the malum poenae, requires the rise above {our} individuality and the possibility of its [the individuality’s] principle; that [living knowledge] just like the related pure and clear knowledge about the essence of all virtue will always remain inaccessible to the majority of the people. That is the reason why the founding fathers of the Indian people had expressed the highest human knowledge {Erkenntnis} and wisdom directly – as far as figurative and rhapsodic presentation was possible- in terms and language only in the Vedas and esoteric wisdom teachings that were accessible to the three re-born castes. For the folk religion and exoteric teachings on the other hand, they {the founding fathers} had expressed {that living knowledge} only in form of myths.]

Schopenhauer’s use of sagely vocabulary in the above quote needs close examination, because it gives some insight into the German philological context of Weisheit: ewig (eternal), Waage-, malum culpae (evil of fault), malum poenae (evil of punishment), Ur- (ancient-), Weisheitslehre, Religion, esoterisch, exoterisch, mythisch, Frucht (fruit, Old Testament), and Weisheit (wisdom). All these words are either biblical or mythic-archaic terms. Consequently Schopenhauer’s description of Eastern cultures felt like walking back in time. It evokes biblical and mystical images to a German readership. On the other hand, the Hindus who lived in Vedic India and grew up with the sage tradition, no matter how old the Vedas, felt their culture alive and modern just as the Europeans felt philosophy to be alive and modern despite its proven antiquity. Language could be a prison, indeed.

The Europeans, when not using the foreign terminology like rishis or shengren, were effectively talking about biblical saints or holy men or European philosophers whenever they talked about Oriental sages. They would do the same to foreign thinkers, if they found some on the moon, because every people whose original names can be suppressed and re-modeled into European currency, in theory could give ever more leverage, prestige, and power to the Europeans, while diminishing the leverage, prestige, and power of the assaulted people.

Disappointment and misunderstandings were the results of language imperialism: Calling Confucius a saint is just a categorical blunder like calling let us say Saint Nicolas a bodhisattva; the only difference was that the Confucius-saint has been tried by the Europeans while the St.-Nicolas-bodhisattva by the Asians had not yet, which raises the question of when – if at all: When will be the time Eastern sage cultures systematically return the favor. If China could convincingly explain to the Germans why Goethe was a shengren, or India could convincingly explain why he had the qualities of a rishi one day the Germans too may call Goethe einen Weisen. Such a fundamental shift in thought in Europe was deemed necessary already by the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz some 334 years ago:

Die Urweisheit des Menschengeschlechts wird nicht von den Begebenheiten in Galiläa verdrängt werden. Hingegen ströhmt Indische Weisheit nach Europa zurück und wird eine Grundveränderung in unserem Wissen und Denken hervorbringen.[10] [The ancient wisdom of the human race will not be displaced by the events in Galilee. By contrast, Indian wisdom will flow into Europe and will bring a fundamental change in our knowledge and thinking.]

In Christian societies the highest wisdom was reserved for the omnipotent God. In scientific societies, wisdom was never the currency – knowledge was. The other, non-scientific wisdom, the folkloric one (e. g. Volksweisheit), was seen as a state of mind that wallowed in naïve, only spatial attainable and therefore short whiled Glückseligkeit (felicitousness).[11] True, folk wisdom seemed to be a force of goodness.[12] Common sense has it that anything that causes great harm to others would not be called “wise”, therefore wisdom begets peace, too. But who in Europe spend money on peace? German Weisheit certainly was related to harmoniousness, as Leibniz called it: “Rücksicht auf harmonische Zusammenstimmung”[13] [lit. Regards for harmonious togetherness]. Goethe added: “Das Verhältnis zu seinesgleichen und also zur ganzen Menschheit”[14] [The relation between oneself and all men]. Those German definitions were all materialistic; they all applied to the abstract concept of wisdom: a philosophical term. They were not, however, permanent attributes that could be easily assigned to a real person: One could regard the harmonious togetherness; one could not be the regarding the harmonious togetherness. Weisheit was not a full-time job, not a profession, and certainly not a man’s calling. Philosophy, on the other hand, was precisely all that in Germany.

Wisdom in Germany was an abstract concept; a personification of wisdom was abstract too. What was the ‘personification of wisdom’, ein Weiser, supposed to do in German society? Everyone could be wise in that short whiled moment of bliss; but a fixed source for wisdom? – Highly suspicious. Oh English, you had it better! The English language (and the French etc.) did not need to participate in the German discourse about wisdom; it could sidestep wisdom, that term, in Oriental studies with synonyms like sages, sagehood, sagacious, sagacity, sageness – all derived from Latin: sapientia. The Germans, on the other hand, met Oriental cultures and instantly suffered from sagacious conceptlessness. Victor von Strauss in his Lao-Tse’s Tao Te King (1924) admitted this problem when he talked about the incommensurability of the Chinese terminology: “die Unanmessbarkeit der chinesischen Wortbegriffe gegen die deutschen, ja gegen die europäischen überhaupt.”[15] This observation, of course, did not stop Von Strauss from continuing the German tradition of calling all Chinese thinkers “Heilige” or “heilige Menschen”. [16] Old habits die hard.

Let us go back to Leibniz and his wisdom being Glückseligkeit. The philosopher devoted an entire chapter in his Deutsche Schriften (1677) to German Weisheit (wisdom), which of course to him and by extension of the German mind was also humanity’s Weisheit, too, for two reasons: first because all European thinkers saw themselves at the center of the world, and second because philosophy was about sound judgment which – once it was demonstrated soundly – was always universal with regards to that philosophizing. Leibniz was not a sage, and was never called ein Weiser. But in the chapter mentioned he described the effect that – ideally – a spiritual being of the highest (human) wisdom would have on its surroundings: It was all about communicating goodness. On a preliminary remark, the following description would not befit any philosopher, and Leibniz carefully avoided biblical language and reference to holiness altogether because the wisdom described in the following was (supposedly) entirely of human nature:

Erscheint also die hohe Glückseligkeit hoher und dabei erleuchteter Personen daraus, dass sie zu ihrer Glückseligkeit so viel thun können, als wenn sie tausend Hände und tausend Leben hätten, ja als wenn sie tausendmal so lange lebten, als sie thun. Denn so viel ist unser Leben für ein wahres Leben zu schätzen, als man darin wohltut. Der nun viel wohlthut in kurzer Zeit, der ist dem gleich, so tausendmal länger lebet; welches bei denen statt findet, so machen können, dass tausend und aber tausend Hände mit ihnen wirken; dadurch in wenig Jahren mehr Gutes geschehen kann zu ihrem höchsten Ruhm und Vergnügen, als sonst viel hundert Jahre nicht bringen könnten”.[17] [The highest felicitousness of the highest and most enlightened people appears in such a way that they are capable to act upon their felicitousness as if they had a thousand hands and lived a thousand times. A real life’s worth is measured by the amount of good done in that life. He who did much good in little time appears as if he had lived a thousand times longer. Those [people of the highest felicitousness] make it look as if thousands and thousands hands contributed, and they can – to their pleasure and for highest glory – achieve more good in a few years than otherwise could not have been done in many hundreds of years.]

Leibniz did not supply a term for “hoher und dabei erleuchteter Personen”. In China they said shengren, in Japan sējin, in India rishi, and in the English-speaking world they said sages, but in Germany they had no term for it. The old German word and correct translation for “sage” was Weiser, which was derogatory. No one rose above it. Not a single German philosopher or thinker has been called a Weiser.

[1] Kant, 1939, p. 46

[2] Inwood, 1996, p. 220

[3] Hoffmeister, 1955

[4] Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics: 1246b, 35

[5] Van Binsbergen, 2009, p. 5

[6] Ibid., p. 5

[7] Gützlaff, Schott, Wilhelm, Haas, Biallas, Darré, Stange, Feifel, Schwarz, von Wedemeyer, Goepper, Jaspers, Wei, Roetz (see appendix, table 4 ‘Shengren translations’);,, google.translate,, Brockhaus Lexicon, Kramers, Flad, Schwanfelder (see table ‘Online sources’); Wikipedia entires in four languages (see table ‘wikipedia entries’)

[8] Wilhelm, 1922, p. 33

[9] Schopenhauer, 1819, p. 726

[10] Schopenhauer, 1819, p. 730

[11] Leibniz, 1677, p. 649

[12] Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics: 1246b, 35

[13] Leibniz, 1677, p. 649

[14] Goethe, 1821, chapter 2

[15] Von Strauss, 1924, p. xii

[16] Ibid., pp. 10, 17, 28, 35, 53, 55, 133, 136, 163, 259, 314, 330, 343 ff.

[17] Leibniz, 1677, p. 491