Phronesis - Influence

Influence

Aristotle's importance to mediæval European thought led phronesis to be included as one of the four cardinal virtues.

Bent Flyvbjerg has argued that instead of trying to emulate the natural sciences, the social sciences should be practiced as phronesis. This would unlock the real potential of the social sciences and move them beyond their role as perennial losers in the Science Wars, according to Flyvbjerg.

In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre makes a similar call for a phronetic social science, combined with weighty criticism of attempts by social scientists to emulate natural science. He points out that for every prediction made by a social scientific theory there are usually counter-examples. These derive from the unpredictability of human beings, and the fact that one unpredictable human being can have a world-changing impact. Following Pascal, he argues that the shape of Cleopatra's nose changed the course of history, for if her profile had not been beautiful it is unlikely (according to this argument) that Mark Anthony would have pursued her, with significant consequences for Roman political history.

In light of his fundamental ontology, Martin Heidegger interprets Aristotle in such a way that phronesis (and practical philosophy as such) is the original form of knowledge and thus primary to sophia (and theoretical philosophy). Heidegger interprets the Nicomachean Ethics as an ontology of Human Existence. The practical philosophy of Aristotle is a guiding thread in his Analysis of Existence according to which facticity names our unique mode of being in the world. Through his ‘existential analytic’, Heidegger recognises that ‘Aristotelian phenomenology’ suggests three fundamental movements of life including póiesis, práxis, theoría and that these have three corresponding dispositions: téchne, phrónesis and sophía. Heidegger considers these as modalities of Being inherent in the structure of ‘Dasein’ as being-in-the-world that is situated within the context of concern and care. According to Heidegger phronesis in Aristotle’s work discloses the right and proper way to be Dasein. Heidegger sees phronesis as a mode of comportment in and toward the world, a way of orienting oneself and thus of caring-seeing-knowing and enabling a particular way of being concerned. While techne is a way of being concerned with things and principles of production and theoria a way of being concerned with eternal principles, phronesis is a way of being concerned with one’s life (qua action) and with the lives of others and all particular circumstances as purview of praxis. Phronesis is a disposition or habit, which reveals the being of the action while deliberation is the mode of bringing about the disclosive appropriation of that action. In other words, deliberation is the way in which the phronetic nature of Dasein’s insight is made manifest. Phronesis is a form of circumspection, connected to conscience and resolutness respectively being-resolved in action of human existence (Dasein) as práxis. As such it discloses the concrete possibilities of being in a situation, as the starting point of meaningful action, processed with resolution, while facing the contingencies of life. However Heidegger’s ontologisation has been criticised as closing práxis within a horizon of solipsistic decision that deforms its political sense that is its practico-political configuration (Volpi, 2007).