With Only One Eye

In the class I attended last weekend, we discussed how data, information, knowledge and wisdom form an information hierarchy where each layer adds certain attributes over and above the previous one. I have a concern here as I believe wisdom encompasses far more than data, information, and knowledge. Wisdom requires being aware of when and how to apply knowledge. It also requires experience and intuitive understanding and more.

Among the Sioux there is a saying, “The white man ….sees with only one eye’. That is because the white man is taught to see only with the mind—facts—and he forgets to combine or add that imaginative and moral aspect of nature which alone makes facts meaningful and beautiful to human beings.

From: Bunge, R. (1987). Language; the psyche of a people. In Our Languages, Our Survival. University of South Dakota: Bismark, Vermillion, S.D.