Emotional Processes in Learning Situations

9Wisdom as the Fruit of a Lifelong Emotional Learning Process?

Sandrine VIEILLARD

DysCo, Université Paris Nanterre, France

From the age of six I had an obsession for drawing the outline of objects. By the age of fifty I had published an infinite number of drawings, but all that I produced before the age of seventy is not worth counting. It was at the age of seventy-three that I understood more or less the structure of true nature, of animals, grasses, trees, birds, fish and insects. Therefore, at the age of eighty I shall have made still more progress; at ninety I shall have penetrated the mystery of things; at one hundred I shall have decidedly reached a degree of wonder, and when I am one hundred and ten years old, in my house, either a point or a line, everything will be alive. (Hokusai, today Gwaikio Rojin, the crazy old drawing man)

The interest in wisdom in psychology has increased particularly in the last 40 years. A search on a database such as Pubmed shows that between 1970 and today the number of annual publications with the term wisdom in the title has increased 21-fold (23 publications during 1970 vs. 492 during 2018). Historically, and before it occupied a growing place in psychology, wisdom was first a favorite theme for philosophers and theologians. The latter placed it at the level of a virtue to distinguish it from the strict accumulation of knowledge about the world. As Staudinger and Gluck (2011) point out, it still represents a daunting theme today as ...