Wisdom and emotions: towards a relational – sociological perspective

The study of wisdom has been growing exponentially over recent years. No longer seen in exclusively philosophical or theological terms, there is now a wide-ranging and multidisciplinary ‘science of wisdom’ emerging. The dominant approaches to wisdom currently seem to come from cognitive science, psychology, neuroscience, education, and gerontology. Increasingly, there seems to be a shift towards the operationalization and measurement of wisdom where psychometric approaches, coupled with cognitive-psychological conceptualizations of wisdom and its elements (including emotion), are to the fore. However, it is puzzling that, given this growth, and the widespread, albeit often passing, acknowledgment of the importance of ‘social’ considerations within this literature, that the sociology of wisdom remains almost entirely absent from this emerging. The exception is the work of Ricca Edmondson (2005, 2013; Edmondson & Wörner, 2019). Moreover, while the importance of emotion to the practice of wisdom is also widely acknowledged, from a sociological perspective, this treatment is often problematic. For instance, in most models where it is included as a dimension or component of wisdom, emotional life is reduced to ‘emotional regulation’ or ‘emotional intelligence’, or core emotions associated with wisdom, such as empathy, sympathy, and compassion, are often conflated, confused, or remain vague. In this paper, building on the sociocultural approach advocated by Edmondson, and arguing from specifically (emotions-) sociological perspective that draws on relational sociology, I aim to theoretically explore the practice of (practical) wisdom in terms of the ‘wise habitus’, the ‘wise situation’, and cultural, emotional, and symbolic capital.