Phronesis

Phronesis (Greek phronēsis, usually translated as practical wisdom or prudence) is the intellectual virtue Aristotle identifies as the master capacity for ethical action. It is the trained perception that grasps what this particular situation calls for and how to act on the grasp; no rule or principle can substitute for it.

Definition

Phronesis is treated systematically in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, where Aristotle distinguishes it from the four other intellectual virtues: epistēmē (scientific knowledge of necessary truths), technē (productive craft), nous (intuitive grasp of first principles), and sophia (theoretical wisdom, combining nous and epistēmē). What distinguishes phronesis from the others is its object and its mode: it concerns the variable, the domain of human action where things could be otherwise, and it issues in correct action rather than in correct understanding alone.

Origin

The term predates Aristotle — it appears in Homer, the Pre-Socratics, and Plato's dialogues, generally in the broader sense of thoughtfulness or good sense. Plato uses it in the Republic and elsewhere as roughly equivalent to wisdom in general. Aristotle gives it its technical sense by sharply distinguishing it from theoretical wisdom and assigning it the specific role of bridging general ethical knowledge to particular ethical action.

The core claim

The core Aristotelian claim about phronesis has three parts.

First, moral virtue requires phronesis to be complete. You cannot be fully courageous without phronesis, because being courageous in the right way — at the right time, toward the right object, for the right reason — requires the perception of what this situation calls for, which is what phronesis supplies. Without phronesis the disposition would still need an external rule-giver to apply correctly, which is no longer virtue proper.

Second, phronesis requires moral virtue. The person whose desires are systematically corrupted will misperceive what the situation calls for; the corrupt perceiver is not exercising phronesis at all but a degenerate facsimile. The mutual implication — virtue and phronesis require each other — is the structural reason Aristotelian ethics is not a moral theory of rules.

Third, phronesis is not codifiable. There is no algorithm for what a phronetic agent perceives; the practical syllogism (general principle + particular fact → action) gestures at the structure but leaves the perception of the particular fact essentially unformalized. This is sometimes cited against Aristotelian ethics as a defect; defenders take it as the point.

How phronesis is acquired

Phronesis is acquired through experience and habituation, not through study. Aristotle is clear that the young can have epistēmē and even sophia (consider mathematical prodigies), but not phronesis — they have not lived long enough to have accumulated the cases. The model is closer to clinical judgment in medicine or aesthetic judgment in the arts than to theoretical knowledge: it is built up by exposure to particular cases under guidance, and only checkable case by case.

The doctrine has informed contemporary work on expert intuition (Hubert Dreyfus's skill model), medical ethics (Jonsen and Toulmin's casuistical revival in The Abuse of Casuistry), and professional ethics more generally (the work of Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground).

Common confusions

Phronesis is not cleverness (deinotēs). Aristotle is explicit: cleverness is the bare capacity for finding effective means to whatever end; phronesis requires that the end be the genuinely good. A clever villain has deinotēs without phronesis.

Phronesis is also not technē. Technē is productive craft, oriented toward an external product; phronesis is action that has no product beyond itself. The carpenter's expertise in making a chair is technē; the just person's perception of what justice requires in this situation is phronesis.

Place in the wiki

Phronesis is a satellite of the Pillar concept Virtue and is closely related to Eudaimonia (which the exercise of phronesis aims at) and to Dialectic (the structurally similar capacity for grasping what arguments require).

Further reading

• Virtue — the Pillar concept
• Eudaimonia — the end phronesis aims at
• Aristotle — the philosopher who gave the term its technical sense
• Nicomachean Ethics — Book VI is the central treatment
• Aristotelianism — the tradition the concept anchors

Satellite of Virtue. Master concept of Aristotelian moral psychology.