Phronēsis — Aristotle on Practical Wisdom

The Wisdom that cannot be Separated from Character

George Edward Robertson, Mark Antony’s Oration over the Body of Caesar, c. 1894–1895, oil on canvas.

Practical wisdom is the part of Aristotle’s thought that bears most directly on how a man actually lives. The standard description treats phronēsis as a trained perception, so the developed capacity to see what a situation calls for. That description is correct as far as it reaches. What it leaves unexplained is what that accuracy of perception depends on.

Trained perception by itself does not account for it. Take two men who have both lived a long time and seen a great deal, and set them in front of the same situation. The first reads it correctly and the second does not. Yet the second is not less experienced, less attentive, or less intelligent. Both were formed by the same kind of experience, over the same years, with the same close attention to the world. But still, when they look at the same thing, what each sees is different. So if correct perception were only a matter of training, then this could not happen, because identical training would produce an identical reading. So the accuracy of perception is not produced by experience alone. It depends on something else, and that something has more to do with the man who is doing the seeing than with the hours he has put in.

Phronēsis, Epistēmē, and Technē

Aristotle takes up phronēsis in Book Six of the Nicomachean Ethics. Until then he has been concerned mostly with the virtues of character, with courage and generosity and temperance, with the excellences that govern how we feel and act and what we become through habit. But in Book Six he turns to the excellences of thought – the intellectual virtues.

And he sets out several. Epistēmē is scientific knowledge, knowledge of what cannot be otherwise. Technē is craft, the knowledge involved in making things. Sophia is theoretical wisdom, which he treats as the highest form. And then there is phronēsis, and what makes phronēsis distinct is the way he separates it from each of the others.

Begin with epistēmē for example. Scientific knowledge concerns what is necessary and what cannot be otherwise. The truths of mathematics do not change with the situation. The angles of a triangle do not depend on who considers the triangle or under what circumstances. Phronēsis isn’t like this. It concerns precisely the things that can be otherwise. It deals with the variable, the particular and the domain where the same act may be right in one instance and wrong in another. For this reason phronēsis cannot be a science, because there is no fixed body of universal rules that, once mastered, tells a man how to act well in every possible situation.

Then we have technē. It is the knowledge a person uses when he brings something into being, when he makes a table or builds a house or writes a poem. The carpenter knows how to make a table because he understands the materials, the form, the sequence of actions, and the standard by which the finished object counts as successful. His knowledge is not merely theoretical. It is directed toward production.

The decisive point is that in craft the end lies outside the activity. The carpenter’s measuring and joining and smoothing are all ordered toward something beyond those acts, which in this case is the finished table. And once the table exists the activity has reached its end, and the thing that got made stands apart from the maker and from the process that produced it. Craft is therefore a knowledge of production and not a knowledge of action.

This is also why craft can be taught and systematised in a way that living well cannot. A craft breaks down into procedures and standards of completion. We can say in fairly determinate terms whether the table was made well or badly, because the product is visible and separate from the process. Phronēsis doesn’t work this way. It does not belong to making but to acting. Its domain is praxis and not poiēsis.

This is what makes practical wisdom different in kind from craft. Craft aims at a result beyond the activity. Practical wisdom aims at acting well within the activity. The point of a courageous act is not some detachable product called courage. The point is to act courageously in the situation that calls for it. And the point of a just act is not to manufacture justice as an external object. The point is to do the just thing here, now, with these people and under these conditions. So phronēsis cannot be reduced to technique, because it is not the knowledge of how to produce a thing. It is the wisdom by which a man acts well in circumstances that always contain particulars.

Phronēsis is therefor not scientific knowledge, because it concerns what changes, and it is not craft, because it does not aim at an external product. And from this Aristotle draws the conclusion that there is no technique of living well. There is no method a man can acquire and no system he can master that will hand over the good life the way learning carpentry hands over the capacity to make a table.

Living is not making, and the wisdom that living demands is not a skill.

This runs against the modern assumption that everything important can be reduced to a procedure and that all expertise is just some technique practised to perfection. Aristotle’s position is close to the reverse. The highest form of human wisdom is the one that cannot be reduced to a procedure at all.

Aretē and Phronēsis

Phronēsis is therefore the intellectual virtue of action. It operates in the domain of what changes and is ordered toward the human good. But this raises a further question: what determines the aim? and where does the good that phronēsis serves come from?

Aristotle’s answer is that virtue makes the aim right and phronēsis makes the things toward the aim right. The end a man is ultimately striving toward is fixed by virtue and by the state of his character. Phronēsis just works out how to reach it. It looks at the situation in front of him and sees what is required if that end is to be reached. It does not set the target. Character sets the target. Phronēsis simply finds the way to it.

This is why Aristotle ties phronēsis to deliberation. We do not deliberate, in the deepest sense, about whether the good is worth wanting. We deliberate about the things toward the end, about what this situation requires, what can be done here, which means are available, which action fits these conditions, and how the end can be realised in this particular case. Deliberation does not create the end from nothing. It works within the direction character has already set.

But what exactly does it mean for character to set the aim? The easy answer would picture a conscious decision, as though the good man sat down one day, weighed his options, and reasoned his way to the right end. But that is not what Aristotle meant.

The right end is not something the good man concludes. It is something he wants.

To the man whose character is properly formed, the right end appears as the thing worth pursuing, in the way good food appears desirable to a man whose appetite is sound. He does not argue himself into valuing it. He values it because of who he is and what he has become. The aim belongs to virtue and not to calculation. Reason only works out the means. What is worth aiming at is settled in the part of us that years of correct habituation have shaped.

And within this context, Aristotle says that there is no phronēsis without moral virtue and no moral virtue in the full sense without phronēsis, since each requires the other to become complete.

At first this looks circular, because it is. Aristotle resolves it by distinguishing natural virtue from virtue in the authoritative sense. According to him, human beings are born with different tendencies. One man is bold from an early age. Another is generous by temperament before any moral formation has occurred. And a third is gentle by disposition, slow to anger without having trained himself to gentleness. These tendencies are real and they exist before judgment has formed. A child can have them. Even an animal can have something resembling them. But natural virtue of this kind is not yet virtue in the full sense, because it lacks judgment. Natural boldness does not yet know when boldness is called for and when it becomes recklessness. It just pushes in one direction regardless of the situation. So the tendency we are born with may be good, but it does not yet know its proper occasion.

So the thing that turns raw tendency into genuine virtue is phronēsis. Practical wisdom supplies the judgment the disposition lacks. It makes boldness into courage by teaching it when to advance, when to hold, and when not to act at all. Without that judgment, boldness stays an uncalibrated forwardness that is right only by accident.

And this relation does not just run in one direction. Judgment needs the disposition as much as the disposition needs judgment. Phronēsis could not make boldness into courage if there were no boldness to direct. The two develop together. The tendency gives judgment something to shape, and judgment gives the tendency discrimination. Then, across years of acting and choosing and failing and correcting and attending to consequences, disposition and judgment sharpen each other into one formed condition.

This circle is therefore not vicious but developmental.

Virtue in the full sense is the state in which natural disposition and practical judgment have become one.

In that state character wants the right end and judgment finds the way to it. There is also a consequence on the other side. If virtue sets the aim, no amount of practical intelligence can rescue a man whose aim is wrong. Judgment only works out the route to the end character is already pointed toward. If character is pointed toward the wrong end, greater skill carries the man there more efficiently. Which means that there is a capability that can look almost identical to practical wisdom. It can read situations, find means, and execute well. But because it has no authority over the end it serves, Aristotle does not call it wisdom. He calls it cleverness.

Deinotēs

Deinotēs, cleverness, is the capacity to find the means to an end and reach it, whatever that end happens to be. But cleverness is indifferent to the end. It is pure capability. Give the clever man a target and he will find a way to reach it. He will see what must be done, calculate the steps, judge the timing, and act. If the end happens to be good, the capacity is useful and admirable. But if the end is base, then the same capacity becomes a readiness to do whatever is necessary in service of something that should not govern action at all.

This is why the clever man is so easily mistaken for the wise man. From the outside he can look extraordinarily impressive. He reads people quickly, sees where a situation is heading, notices the opportunity and knows which actions will get him what he wants. His ability is real. The error is not in recognising his intelligence. The error is in treating that intelligence as though it already contained wisdom. Cleverness shows mastery of means. It does not show whether the end is worth pursuing.

That is the decisive distinction. A man may prevail in every dealing, secure advantage after advantage, read every room and every person correctly, and still lack phronēsis, because the larger direction of his life is wrong. His defect is not that he cannot execute. His defect is that his execution serves an unworthy aim. Cleverness does not fail him. It succeeds, and the success is the danger, because it carries him efficiently toward something that should never have governed him.

Phronēsis is not opposed to cleverness. It includes the ability to find means, judge timing, read particulars, and act well. The practically wise man is not less capable than the merely clever man. His capability is governed by the right end. Phronēsis is the power of means placed under the rule of formed character. There is a real difference between the man who can get what he wants and the man who has learned to want what is worth getting.

The Eye of the Soul

This returns us to the problem we began with: two men can have the same experience, the same attention to detail, even the same intelligence, and still not see the same situation in the same way. One reads it rightly and the other does not. Aristotle’s answer is that the difference lies not simply in what they have seen but in what kind of man has been formed through the seeing. Experience does not enter a neutral instrument. It enters a character, and character determines what experience becomes.

This is what Aristotle means by the eye of the soul. There is a part of us that grasps the starting points of action and the ends for the sake of which everything else is done, and this part can be in better or worse condition. It can be clear or it can be damaged. It can see what matters or it can take the lower thing for the higher one.

His claim is that this eye does not reach its proper condition without virtue. It isn’t a neutral instrument that works the same in every man and needs only experience to sharpen it. The way a man sees is shaped by the character he has, because phronēsis does not merely register the visible facts of a situation. It grasps what matters in those facts. It sees which features are decisive and which are secondary, what the situation is really asking for, what end should govern the response.

This is why vice is so serious for Aristotle. Vice does not merely make a man choose badly after he has already seen clearly. It corrupts the seeing itself. The bad begins to look good. The merely pleasant begins to look worth pursuing. The easier thing begins to look more reasonable than the better thing, and the smaller thing presents itself as the greater. In that condition the man is not acting against what appears good to him. He is pursuing what appears good, and the appearance has been distorted by the state of his character.

So the accuracy we attribute to trained perception was resting on character all along. The man whose character is sound sees the end rightly, and because he sees the end rightly his reading of the particulars serves the right thing. He does not simply notice more detail. He notices it under the right aspect. He can tell what merely attracts attention from what actually matters. The clever man may read the particulars with great accuracy and still be wrong about the one thing that finally matters, the end those particulars are being used to serve.

Phronēsis is therefore not a perceptive skill. It is the condition in which perception and character have become one. The practically wise man sees rightly because he has been formed to want rightly. His judgment does not float above his character as a separate faculty correcting it from outside. It is the expression of a character that has learned what is worth aiming at. That is what carries the perception. Not experience or abstract intelligence, but the formed character of the man who is doing the seeing.

This is why phronēsis matters beyond any single decision. It is not the ability to handle situations well as they arrive. It is the wisdom by which a man’s actions begin to compose a coherent life. Without it, even good impulses stay scattered and even intelligence can serve the wrong master. With it, character and perception and desire and deliberation and action begin to point in one direction.

Aristotle’s conclusion is not that the practically wise man has learned a better technique. It is that he has become the kind of man for whom the right thing appears as worth doing, and who can then see what doing it requires.