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To praise and recommend philosophy as an activity worthy of your attention just for its ability to enhance your skills of analysis, assessment, and argument is a bit like praising brain surgery by saying that it’s a good thing because it cultivates the hand-eye coordination of the surgeon. Philosophy can seem like aerobics for the intellect and weight training for the soul. But its most important feature is the one built into its name. As the Roman Lawyer and Stoic philosophy Seneca put it: “Wisdom is the perfect good of the human mind; philosophy is the love of wisdom and the endeavor to attain it.”

Philosophy is one of the noblest activities in which we can engage because it promotes wisdom in our lives. And wisdom brings with it two benefits: depth and practicality.

Wisdom is first and foremost simply insight about living. Insight itself is a sort of perceptiveness or clarity of judgment that penetrates beneath appearances and latches onto realities. Wisdom cuts to the core.

In the ancient world, Seneca referred to wisdom as “the only liberty.” The poet Juvenal called wisdom “the conqueror of fortune.” In the pages of the New Testament, Jesus once remarked, “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” Wisdom involves knowing the truth about what really matters in life. It is glimpsing the foundations and comprehending at least some of the significance of all that’s around us. And it goes beyond knowledge to involve an ongoing sense of discernment and perspective that can enhance your life in many ways.

A wise person does not readily fall prey to false appearances. Wisdom isn’t easily spooked or unhinged. It sees the hidden side of almost any situation. It tends to be patient and measured in its responses. Wisdom is neither unduly rushed nor stampeded into foolish action.

A wise person has depth. In his 17th-century manual on success, The Art of Worldly Wisdom, the Spanish Jesuit thinker Balthasar Gracian wrote the following concerning this quality of mind:

  You are as much a real person as you are deep. As with the depths of a diamond, the interior is twice as important as the surface. There are people who are all facade, like a house left unfinished when the funds run out. They have the entrance of a palace but the inner rooms of a cottage.

A wise person is never just surface without substance. Any veneer is backed by a stronger reality. A wise individual sees things in proper context and so does not easily make big mistakes about value. Your wisdom will grow by learning to ask the right questions about the world and yourself, and then finding how to use well the perspectives that those questions can provide.

Superficial living has too often become the way of the world. People suck the foam off the beer of life and never drink deeply of the real brew. Philosophers, on the other hand, insist on depth. To quote La Rochefoucauld, “Wisdom is to the soul what health is to the body.” Superficial living is ultimately unhealthy living.

Wisdom is, above all, practical. It gives both guidance and guardrails for living well. That’s why its pursuit is worth your time and effort. The great philosophers are just people who’ve sometimes done extraordinary things in this pursuit. Many of them got some things badly wrong in their conclusions. But many also found deep truth. Even those philosophers who went wrong in their own conclusions can often bring you into the neighborhood of great insight by showing you how to find your own new paths of discovery concerning important issues.

This is not to say that all philosophers pursue practical questions and create points of view that can help with your day-to-day life. The Greek philosophers who lived before Socrates most often asked questions of cosmic import that were not directly related to daily life. Those philosophers who came before Socrates, cleverly known as the Presocratics, seem to have been concerned mostly about the nature of the universe in which we live, and less about how best to live in it. And they came up with some pretty wild answers, as the following samples indicate:

 Thales: Everything is made out of water.

 Anaximander: Everything is made out of The Boundless.

 Anaximenes: Everything is made out of air.

 Heraclitus: Everything is always changing.

 Pythagoras: Everything is made of numbers, and you shouldn’t eat beans because they’ll do a real number on you.

 Parmenides: Nothing ever really changes, and appearance in the physical world is always illusion.

These thinkers sought an understanding of the broader universe. And they engaged in remarkable feats of intellectual discovery, not always involving such strange-sounding conclusions. In a sense, they were doing scientific cosmology without having yet developed the technical equipment and method necessary to explore and uncover the physical secrets of the natural world. And yet much of what they did launched the process of intellectual inquiry that led eventually to the rise of modern science.

For many centuries, philosophy was not sharply distinguished from what people now think of as many other domains of thought and knowledge. The early philosophers were proto-scientists, mathematicians, and psychologists doing the work of those areas for investigation before such separate intellectual disciplines as biology, chemistry, zoology, physics, math, and psychology existed. Even now, some of the academic professorships of science in England and Europe are still called “Chairs of Natural Philosophy.” Philosophy’s domain was for a long time nearly limitless.

But the philosophy that began in earnest in ancient Greece with Socrates and Plato and Aristotle — the focus on wisdom we can also find in the writings of Confucius, Lao Tsu, and many other ancient Eastern thinkers — resulted in the tradition of philosophical inquiry that we follow today, a tradition that seeks, at its best, both depth and usefulness in matters concerning our lives.