Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience; it is the ability to see again what most of us have forgotten how to see, but now fortified by the ability to translate some of that vision into words, however inadequate.―David Bentley Hart

A three-year-old meets a tree as immediate presence—texture, light, movement—before language shrinks it to “tree” and familiarity compresses it into background furniture. Experience builds scaffolding that helps us function but hardens perception. We navigate by seeing less.

Wisdom reverses this. Not by discarding knowledge, but by recovering the capacity to perceive beneath it. Husserl’s epoché, Zen’s beginner’s mind, the Taoist uncarved block, “becoming as little children”—each tradition points toward pre-conceptual awareness regained through practice, not lost through forgetting.

The “far end of experience” matters. Recovered innocence differs from innocence never lost. A child sees directly but cannot sort what matters from what doesn’t, cannot recognize patterns, cannot share what was seen. Wisdom adds discrimination. Experience teaches which perceptions matter; wisdom remembers how to perceive at all.

Language pulls against perception. Vision precedes and exceeds words. Words categorize, and so distort. Yet putting perception into language tests it against structure, opens private insight to collective refinement, connects what I see to what we can share. The gap never closes. The attempt still matters.

Neuroscience confirms this. Beginners process with conscious effort. Experts become automatic and lose awareness of how they do it. Masters regain awareness while keeping expert performance—Dreyfus’s fifth stage. The pianist who recovers feeling in a familiar piece, the physicist who rediscovers wonder in equations: expertise reconnecting with the immediate rather than vanishing into abstraction.

You cannot skip to the far end. Innocence preserved through avoidance—a refusal to enter experience—lacks wisdom’s discrimination. Only those who have lived inside conceptual frameworks can see beyond them while still using them to navigate.

Sources:

  • Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology (1913)
  • Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus, Mind Over Machine (1986)