Philosophy comes from the ancient Greek words filia, meaning “friendship, affection, or love,” and sophia, meaning “wisdom.” Philosophy, then, is “the love of wisdom.” But what is wisdom? Wisdom is a level of awareness one reaches through experience and rationality to properly apply principles and insights through action in any given context. Wisdom consists of a constellation of virtues: courage, compassion, intelligence, empathy, and many others. Wisdom is largely gained through first-hand experience, but words enable us to rationally reflect upon our own experiences more closely. Words also let us experience the world through the eyes of others, past and present. This is why the wisest among us learn not only from their own experiences, but also—through the written and spoken word—from the experiences of others.

Since the wisest learn in this way, wisdom and words share a close connection. Drawing inspiration from Socrates, I’d like to argue that: The beginning of wisdom is the definition of words. This makes sense considering that, without words, learning is much more difficult, and learning is essential to the cultivation of wisdom. Ayn Rand wrote: “Definitions are the guardians of rationality, the first line of defense against the chaos of mental disintegration.” Aristotle taught us that humans are the rational animal and that rationality is essential to our unique ability to work in large, flexible groups across boundaries and guided by shared agreements. For instance, a troop of chimps can never exceed a few thousand chimps, but a nation of humans organized under the shared agreement of a single flag can number into the billions. Words are tools that allow us to collaborate at scale, and therefore a precise, shared agreement on the definitions of words is paramount for words to work properly.

In Proverbs 9:10 in The Bible, we read “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom: and the knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.” God is perhaps the most disagreed-upon word in human history, as it carries transcendent, theological, and supernatural connotations. Without paying attention to any of these aspects of God, we can understand the word God,
or the Holy One, as a word representing “that which is beyond words.” Like the number zero, which is a number representing the lack of number, the word God (for our purposes here) can be understood as a word for that which cannot be communicated in words. In other words, for purely linguistic purposes, we can say: God is the word for all that is ineffable. In Proverbs 9:10, the word fear could equally be translated as “awe or reverence,” and when we combine this translation with our definition of God above, we arrive at something like “Awe for that which is beyond words is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of that which is beyond words is understanding.” Paradoxically, by striving to know that which we cannot know, we can come to know, and love, wisdom.

So, if the beginning of wisdom is the definition of words, and since all words are defined by other words, aren’t we stuck in a circle looping from the beginning of wisdom (the definition of words) back to the beginning of wisdom (the definitions of the words which define the originally defined word)? No, because with God, we are free from this infinite loop. God represents all that is beyond words, so God is the end of wisdom in the same way properly defined words are its beginning. But God is not the only aspect of existence that is beyond words. We are all familiar with the adage: “Actions speak louder than words,” which could be interpreted in one way as words necessarily carry less signal than actions do. So like God, all of our actions, along with all the actions and phenomena occurring in the world around us, are necessarily beyond words, too. Imagine trying to communicate the full experience of a single sunset—fully detailing the scenery, the layers of sounds surrounding you, the complex social context in which it occurred, etc.—solely in words and you will quickly encounter the limitations of natural language. Although words are indispensable for our mapping of the many complexities of reality, as Alfred Korzybski explains, the map can never be the territory. Every map must exclude certain aspects of its underlying territory and emphasize other aspects: this is the purpose of a map as a navigational tool. In any given social context, words are necessary for the effective navigation of both the territory of natural phenomena and the territory of human action.

Human action is defined as the purposeful use of means to pursue valued ends. Broadly considered, means are tools that enable certain actions. Words are especially useful for engaging in argumentation and self-reflection—acts proper to the work of rational animals such as ourselves. Although individual words cannot transmit knowledge that is total or complete in any final sense, they can be used to construct statements that are irrefutable. For instance, the statement “Two parallel lines never touch” is true by definition, because parallel is defined as “equidistant at all points,” which implies that parallel objects never touch. Such a statement is axiomatic, meaning that it is self-evidently true or unquestionable. Axioms are foundational to the deductive aspect of rationality: it is from a few basic axioms of Euclidian geometry that all of its theorems are provably deduced. Similarly, the axiom of action formulated by Ludwig von Mises states that “human action is purposeful behavior.” The axiom of action is irrefutable, as any attempted refutation is an act, meaning that it is an attempt to use the means of argumentation to the end of refuting the axiom, thus proving the axiom in demonstration despite the contents of its explication. Again, actions speak louder than words. Words are useful tools because they enable us to interconnect our minds and cooperate to pursue ends that would otherwise be unobtainable. But in the sphere of human action, there is no tool more universal in its utility for pursuing ends than money.

Similar to words or the human hand, money is among our most effective multi-purpose tools. Money is an instrument of economic rationality in that it allows us to perform economic calculations on the many enterprises humans embark upon. However, money is notoriously difficult to define, probably because, like action, it speaks louder than words, as evidenced by the adages “talk is cheap” and “put your money where your mouth is.” Indeed, one of the best definitions of money is the language of human action. What a word is to an idea, money is to action: each is a tool for communicating about an underlying reality. Words and money are both indispensable to rationality, which again is the uniquely human faculty that enables us to work collaboratively at a scale achieved by no other animal. As we act more rationally, we naturally become less coercive and more productive. Since humans are capable of accomplishing greater results with less effort by working collaboratively, words and money let us expand our rationality and productivity by engaging in free trade with one another.

Words and money are also safeguards against the irrationality of violence. A primary purpose of free speech is to afford people a means of letting their ideas go to battle and die so that their bodies don’t have to. The purpose of money (and private property more generally) is so that we can resolve disputes over scarce resources through a peaceful market process rather than through physical conflict. There is nothing more irrational than violence, as it inhibits our ability to carry out rationally formulated work projects. Words and money also let us pass the products of our efforts forward in time to later generations and give our children a better world than we were born into. In building a better world, one populated with more rational people and more useful tools and technologies, we can give our children an invaluable inheritance of knowledge and freedom. Equipped with these treasures, they will be maximally free to develop their own virtues, cultivate their own wisdom, and then pass their efforts onto their own children, and so on. This is the process of civilization and the process of learning to love wisdom.

Action is the end of wisdom, meaning that wisdom is a means to the end of acting less foolishly. And as we said earlier, God is also the end of wisdom, because God liberates us from the infinite loop of definitions defined by definitions defined by definitions. Does this mean that action is equivalent to God? I don’t think so, but I do know that they both share the quality of being beyond words, and they both involve faith. Faith is an act of openness to the unknown, the unknowable, or God. We can never know whether the outcome we intend to create by engaging in action will come about, just as we can never articulate that which is beyond words. In other words, faith is a deeply held respect for the limitations of knowledge available to us about the future or through words: a radically internalized realization that knowledge can never be total and that humans can never touch the horizon of the unknown. No matter how much knowledge we gain, there will always be more to attain. Totalized knowledge is the essence of totalitarianism: ideas so “good” and “true” and “scientific” that they must be imposed by force. Faith entails an intrinsic distrust of totalized knowledge and, therefore, is a safeguard against totalitarianism. Other humans are forever unknowable to us in their entirety—their thoughts, their motivations, their psychological dispositions—yet we must have faith in individuals if we are to nurture the process of civilization. Such a faith means leaving people free to speak their minds, own the things of value they justly acquire, and trade with one another without restriction.

Human collaboration is maximized and human conflict is minimized when we place our faith in the natural, individual freedoms of “life, liberty, and property.” And this collaborative process that is civilization requires free speech and honest money. The alternative path is quite grim. Unless we rediscover that words, money, and rationality are the best tools for individuals to peaceably deal with one another, then, as Ayn Rand says, “men become the tools of men.” A loving pursuit of the wisdom found in the notions of God, words, rationality, ideas, money, action, freedom, civilization, faith, and virtue forms the essential philosophy explored in depth here on The “What is Money?” Show.