Wisdom as a Form of Intellectual Maturity

Abstract

The article reveals the problem of wisdom in philosophical psychological discourse. The author interprets and generalizes various theoretical approaches to the given above phenomenon. Wisdom is considered to be a person’s intellectual talent, intellectual maturity including balanced attitude to life and to be open to a new experience. It’s mostly pointed out that the category «wisdom» is closely related with a person’s attitude to himself, to the world and to all around him. It is not only about the person’s gained experience but about his/her «quality of life» concerning his ability «to exist», to develop, to accept, to enrich knowledge and to implement them in real practical life. Hence, there are the following conditions helping a person to integrate his life effectively as an individual’s successful covering the crisis and conflicts, his developing adaptive personal abilities, his ability to get useful lessons of the passed failures, his ability to accumulate energy potential all passed stages. Wisdom promotes a person’s success, makes his life more full, mature, harmonious.

Based on the theoretical analysis of the author’s found problem, there have been made the empirical study, in particular, a comparative analysis of interpretations of the given meaning between different aged groups by future psychologists (students), in particular, and elderly aged people. The study showed that with the age the contextual meaning of «wisdom» includes more ethical components of personality associated both with personal characteristics and a person’s aim, i. e. belief, spirituality etc. That proves that with the age a person starts to need an association, communication, relations. Having lost social relation, doing parental duty of growing up children who have started their own families, wishing to transfer their experience leads to start feeling in need, in relation, in love, which imprints on elderly people’s understanding the given above meaning.

Further on the author intends to study gender-role differentiations by interpreting the a category «wisdom», studying ethno-graphical material in folklore studies, ethnography, where the given above meaning was widely represented (especially in fairy tales) as a personal character, moral virtue etc.