Wisdom and Meaningful Aging

Ricca Edmondson addresses the significance of wisdom for dealing with challenges and adversity in later life and highlights contributions that wisdom traditions may offer to understand later life as a focus of meaning, insight, and creativity for individuals and society. She observes that contemporary understandings of wisdom frequently stress personal characteristics connected with wise behavior, whereas classical traditions emphasize intricacies of deliberation and virtue. In addition, essayistic and literary accounts emphasize how wisdom features in people’s experiences of their lifetimes. These traditions illuminate how values and commitments can evolve throughout human life in connection with ethics and caring for others. Edmondson pleads for “transactional “wisdom, which depends on forms of give-and-take between people and is associated with human interdependence and interpersonal commitments to others during the course of life. Transactional wisdom is an “inter-human” project demonstrating how older people can resist declining pressures. Thus conceived, wisdom can contribute to debates on loneliness, isolation, the communication of value, and hope.