The great blurred distinction between knowledge and wisdom has been a contemplation for roughly the last ten years of my life. In philosophical circles, where the morphology (philo sophie, "love of wisdom") implies a wisdom that should be present with its adherents, you find little sagacity and a lot of reactivity. That is, the philosopher is more often than not a brilliant collection of complex and stimulating concepts able at any moment to respond in Pavlovian style, but he lacks the mystique of someone who has touched with life and learned its lessons firsthand. That is, he often lacks the wisdom his very name implies.
Knowledge (and I'm speaking of a general idea-mediated understanding, approaching but not exclusively defined by truth, justification, and belief) is by its very definition tied up with language. The knower may actually meet the flesh and bones beyond his abstractions in the real world, but every bit that he may be said to rightly know must be capable of transmission through language, or else it's simply not worth his time, not worth knowing. There's a clear tendency to arrogance with knowledge, and perhaps this is what Paul had in mind when he said that knowledge "puffs up, but love edifies." For in a very real and terrible sense, the world of concepts and ideas that makes knowledge possible is a parallel world to the experiential phenomena that constitute the real world. And any world that's possible is one in which you can imprison yourself with the unfalsifiable claim that you have the better hand, all the worse given the potential infinity of ideas that any well-intended self can get webbed up in. Precisely because knowledge works through concepts, any attempt to explain a different way of relating to the world besides knowledge negates itself, given that in explaining, you're using ideas, concepts -- which can be known.
But there is another world, and "world" must be understood metaphorically, like a transcendent symbol that doesn't define something but simply points out from the world of knowledge into the unknown of human experience. For reality (or "reality") is by definition unknown. It's the foundation on which we ultimately hang our concepts (although not all, for some knowledge is properly a priori). It's the grand nothingness, grasped best by its negation in contrast to our concept-soaked minds, like a black hole in the midst of space flecked with shrapnel-like pieces of matter floating past. The wise admit this negation, and the sages rejoice in it. After all, it's so much easier to define the world we would like into existence, and this is precisely what so many of our billions-membered terrestrial souls do day after day. We secretly know we can't change the deepest reality, objective reality, but we can scramble the web of our concepts in such an interconnected and harmonic way as to give ourselves the impression that we have the truth, because, after all, it's too pretty and harmonic not to be called truth. And we guard and growl over our precious systems of thought, and like magnets each reality-denying self attaches itself to others under the guise of culture.
For knowledge the pinnacle is the scholar, whose world is painted with his own projections. After all, our non-innate ideas are built up based on our experiences with reality and the filters our cultures hand us, and it's in this packaging up through ideas that we lose the fullness and pregnant beauty of each thing as it is in the real world. I can know the meaning of a leaf through my collective experiences of the phenomenon of leaves, but how many leaves have been murdered by my reduction of each individual to a signified of leafness. For wisdom the pinnacle is the sage, who prefers his eyes beyond the grey flesh inches behind them that limits his world to a collection of ideas, and ascertains with a cool resignation when to leave his battered words at the mental door for the sake of the grander, indefinable Being, and smiles perpetually in the process. After all, the world is much better than our ideas about it, and life is more than thinking about life.
The wise yell from the mountaintop that the mountaintop can only be fractionally known. The knower arrogant with his own knowledge snuffs himself away from the living, breathing world because he thinks in Hegelian fashion that his mind which paints the world with his ideas is the breaking point of the worth knowing, when in reality he cancels out the lushness of existence by the very ideas he puffs himself up with. The knowers content with knowledge are the cosmic adults of the universe, caught up self-assertive claims to certainty, closed up and cut off from the way toward experience. Wisdom is the way of the child, free from the anthropocentric constraints of a concept-riddled world.
