Aristotle describes levels of knowledge beginning with what we learn from sensory experience: we learn that certain things are so. He says that “men of experience know that the thing is so, but do not know why.” This is the knowledge of “manual workers.” It contains little wisdom and represents the lowest level of knowledge.

The philosopher’s lack of respect for manual work and the people who do it shines through here, and I think it’s a timely reminder that despite the Greeks’ visual love affair with the human body Greek thought finds the body and its works of little value. Because experience is a result of manual work, experience too has only slight value.

But up the value scale a bit “we think that the master workers in each craft are more honourable and know in a truer sense and are wiser than the manual workers, because they know the causes of the things that are done.” They know the why as well as the what and the how. Experience can become a gateway to wisdom, but it doesn’t work that way every time.

And then to rise to the next level of wisdom we must bring our intelligence to bear. As we reflect upon what we know and gradually abstract general principles from our study of  numerous cases, we rise towards “The wise person [who] knows everything”  (universal knowledge).

That ‘everything’ ultimately has to include the realm beyond the physical world; i.e., the metaphysical. We fly there on the wings of imagination and pure intuition/intelligence. We put ourselves out there until we sense the vibrations of responding intelligences with whom we can establish lines of communication. Once communication is made we can ‘commune’ (become one) with those spirits and that cosmic mind. This is where true, full wisdom is found.

Because we do have an intelligence. There are things that we know without knowing how we know them, things that we say just feel right and true. We don’t know where they come from but we trust them without hesitation, we go with them as we go with our childhood notions of fairness. They ring true. We get hints and hunches we know not from where, we pick up vibes at special locations, we feel presences like someone breathing just behind our backs and when we turn around there’s no one there. But we still know that there is someone there. We can go along with Aristotle and his outsize estimation of the intelligence’s importance to and impact on our lives. We surely would be different creatures without those messages from the intelligence, those intelligences, that reach us from time to time.

Me, I still prefer the feeling of my pick against the guitar string, but I have received intelligences throughout my life, I know what he’s talking about. They may not be the center of my sense of self, but I certainly agree that they can be important, crucial, even life-transforming.