“You can use other people’s knowledge, but you can’t use other people’s wisdom”

In My Humble Opinion
21

I use “wisdom” differently. I would express it like this:

You can use other people’s wisdom, but you can’t use other people’s intelligence.

22

There was an old saying about James I of England, that he was “the wisest fool in Christendom”. There’s obviously a distinction there.

23

Cf. Lord Rochester’s mock-epitaph for Charles II:

Here lies our sovereign lord the king,
Whose word no man relies on;
He never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.

24

I use other’s intelligence all the time, along with the wisdom of others. I don’t see the point of these statements other than to differentiate between knowledge and wisdom.

25

Exactly.

And while of course there is a difference between knowing things, and knowing how to effectively apply what you know and how to effectively learn more, the implicit premise is self/ego … individual … centered, devaluing the social nature of humanity, the fact that individually we ain’t shit, that our knowledge and our wisdom and our intelligence are all intergenerational group efforts.

If we couldn’t use the skills of others we’d still all be scrabbling in the dirt.