Abstract
The concept of wisdom is largely ignored by contemporary philosophers. But given recent movements in the fields of ethics and epistemology, the time is ripe for a return to this concept. This article lays some groundwork for further philosophical work in ethics and epistemology on wisdom. Its focus is the distinction between practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom or between phronesis and sophia. Several accounts of this distinction are considered and rejected. A more plausible, but also considerably more complex, account is offered. The discussion sheds light on the relation between practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom, and on the positive character of each.
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Notes
Zagzebski (1996) touches briefly on wisdom at various points in her treatise on virtue epistemology (see esp. pp. 216-21).
I engage in some of this more focused work in a pair of recent papers: “Sophia” (forthcoming) and “Wisdom in Perspective” (draft).
In this way they differ, apparently, from “wisdom” simpliciter.
Ryan (2007) suggests a similar distinction within commonsense thinking about wisdom. Aristotle likewise makes the point that more or less commonsense thinking allows that a person might, say, have a kind of theoretical wisdom while not being practically wise (NE VI.7).
Riggs (2003) makes a similar claim.
Nozick (1989) underscores this aspect of wisdom.
I do not claim that the knowledge in question must be especially sophisticated or articulate. Indeed it may largely be implicit. Therefore, I remain unwed to any strongly “intellectualist” way of understanding practical wisdom.
See NE VI.5.
Aristotle disagrees (see NE VI.7); however, his reason seems to be that these disciplines are not the “best” or “highest” sciences. I do not dispute this much. What I dispute is that sophia or “theoretical wisdom” is limited strictly to knowledge of the (very) highest science or principles. More on this below.
That said, it does seem essential to theoretical wisdom that it be concerned with certain reasonably general or universal features of reality. One cannot, after all, be theoretically wise on account of one’s grasp of even a very wide range of first-order truths or particular facts or states of affairs. In this way the objection is consistent with our commitment to maintaining a “general faithfulness” to Aristotle’s account of sophia.
See Thomas Hibbs’s treatment of Aquinas’s view of practical wisdom (2001: 98f) for more on this suggestion.
I appeal to the general/particular distinction rather than the necessary/contingent distinction here because we have already seen that the former cannot ground a distinction between theoretical and practical wisdom. Also, while it may be that theoretical wisdom tends to have a more general focus or to be about matters of necessity and practical wisdom tends to focus on particulars or contingent matters, the resulting distinction between the two types of wisdom is superficial. And we do not yet have reason to think that this is the best or deepest distinction that can be drawn.
See NE VI.3, 6-7. Aristotle makes a similar claim about in VI.3 about episteme, since episteme concerns truths that can be logically deduced from necessary first principles. In more recent literature, Kekes (1983) argues that theoretical wisdom or sophia is necessarily of a priori truths.
Here as well there is something to the Aristotelian picture. Surely theoretical wisdom tends to involve a greater a priori component than practical wisdom (and practical wisdom a greater a posteriori component). This indeed is something that any developed theory of theoretical or practical wisdom ought to account for. But, again, this hardly makes for a very deep or interesting distinction between the two types of wisdom.
Though I will not develop the points here, by the end of this section it should be clear enough that the present proposal is also susceptible to at least two of the further proposals considered below (viz. one to the effect that the practically wise person is concerned with epistemic goods like truth; and another to the effect that the theoretically wise person can, as such, be concerned with “the good” understood even in a relatively narrow and strictly moral sense).
Indeed, on one reading of Aristotle, this is the whole of living well, at least so far as theoria or contemplation is the ultimate good. One might respond to this objection by adopting a narrower definition of “the good” that excludes true belief. However, I know of no such conception that is non-arbitrary and broadly plausible. This includes an identification of the good with the moral—see (4) below.
A further problem, which I will not develop here, concerns the very distinction between the moral and the epistemic. There are reasons for thinking that this is, in fact, a very difficult distinction to draw, and that any successful attempt will not permit a very deep distinction between theoretical and practical wisdom. See the Appendix of my (2011) for more on this issue.
Moreover, as I will get to below, if we were to think of theoretical wisdom as a kind of skill or competence that “involves” the relevant kind of cognitive grasp in the sense that it aims at this grasp, then we would have yet a further reason for thinking that theoretical wisdom is concerned with deliberating and acting well, and thus for rejecting (5).
See Baehr (2012) for more on this point.
This is entirely consistent, of course, with the possibility that the knowledge in question is also instrumentally valuable in various ways. Nor need it be viewed as favoring any particular metaphysical account of morality or other metaethical view. That is, it is neutral about what the relevant “nature and structure” amount to.
This is suggested, for instance, by Aristotle’s claim in NE VI.5 that the end of practical wisdom is “acting well itself.”
Moreover, if some beliefs just are actions, this would make for a further sense in which a practically wise person might be concerned with believing well or correctly as such. See Zagzebski (2001) for a defense of the idea that beliefs can be actions.
See my (forthcoming) for a development of this view of theoretical wisdom or sophia. The account bears certain interesting similarities with Aristotle’s, including the appeal to “epistemically significant subject matters,” which would appear to be roughly similar to Aristotle’s notion of “honorable knowledge” (NE VI.7).
The competence conception, for instance, is at least suggested by the very idea of sophia understood as an intellectual virtue, since “virtue” suggests some kind of personal quality or power (rather than a settled epistemic state or kind of knowledge). Likewise for Aristotle’s claim that sophia is a “part of the soul” (NE VI.1, 3) and the “divine element” (X.7-8) in human nature. Again, these descriptions suggest a view of sophia according to which it is a kind of capacity or power that allows its possessor to lay hold of a certain type of knowledge or understanding—not the knowledge or understanding itself. Some translators and interpreters of Aristotle suggest the same: for instance, Kenny’s (1979) translation of sophia as “learning” and various identifications of sophia with something like a pursuit of truth or a quality central to that pursuit. As Conway (2000: 17) points out, if sophia is a kind of knowledge or explanatory understanding, then the pursuit of it, or the qualities useful in the pursuit of it, must be distinct from the thing itself. Nevertheless, at other points, Aristotle seems clearly to favor the epistemic state conception of sophia, for instance, when he describes episteme, a core ingredient of sophia, as a state in which “a person believes in a certain way and understands the first principles” (VI.3; my italics). Here sophia (or a core aspect of it) seems clearly to be a settled cognitive state—a state of grasping or understanding a certain cognitive content.
For various reasons, the know-how and trait conceptions of practical wisdom are not straightforward analogs of the state and competence conceptions of theoretical wisdom noted above. For instance the “know how” in question is very different from the relevant “state,” insofar as the former is (largely) knowledge of how to proceed in pursuit of a certain end, while the latter is (largely) a matter of grasping various general and fixed features of reality. Similarly, the “trait” at issue is quite different from the relevant “competence,” since the competence in question need not (at least insofar as I have described it thus far) involve the volitional or motivational element essential to the trait. See my paper “Wisdom In Perspective” and Baehr (forthcoming) for more on some of these possibilities.
This is not true of all commonsense thinking about wisdom proper. For, as we saw above, such thinking appears to recognize some kind of distinction between practical and theoretical wisdom or between certain practical and purely theoretical elements of wisdom.
Nor, in fact, is it clear that it even represents an estimable epistemic state, given its highly particular and practical focus. Also, while the knowledge in question might prove morally valuable for others (e.g. for those who are counseled on the basis of it), this does not make it morally valuable considered in its own right. The problem, of course, is that practical wisdom or phronesis presumably is valuable considered in its own right. Aristotle makes a similar point regarding both practical and theoretical wisdom, claiming that each is choiceworthy in itself (NE VI.7).
See, e.g., NE VI.12-13 and VII.10.
Aristotle offers a similar error theory concerning the clever person, whom he says possesses an ingredient of and is sometimes (mistakenly) thought actually to possess practical wisdom. See NE VII.10.
I have no objection to the idea that practical (and theoretical) wisdom comes in degrees and thus, to the extent, say, that Mephistopheles has the knowledge required by the trait conception, he has a degree of practical wisdom. According to the know-how conception, however, such knowledge is necessary and sufficient for practical wisdom in its entirety, that is, practical wisdom just is a matter of the relevant practical knowledge. And it is this claim that I am arguing against.
In fact it might be argued that he is acting in accordance with such knowledge given that his only alternative is to succumb to a terminal disease. There is, in any case, a sense in which “living well” for someone in his predicament requires taking the disabling drug. To the extent that this is right, the case fails to provide even a prima facie reason for thinking that practical wisdom need not involve an ability to live well.
As this suggests, the doctor in Whitcomb’s initial description of the case could and indeed should mention “an inability to live a good life” as one of the drug’s side effects. Looked at from this angle, it does not seem unreasonable that the doctor might also (with considerable regret, of course) mention the loss or at least a significant impairment of the patient’s wisdom as a side effect. This also underscores a possible reply to Whitcomb’s observation that if he “ran across such a person, I’d take his advice to heart, wish him a return to health, and leave the continuing search for sages to his less grateful advisees” (97). If the advisees are merely seeking wise counsel or wise advice, then I agree that they need look no further than the depressed sage. But if they are, say, looking for paradigms of wisdom or for wise persons, then a continuation of their search seems to me quite warranted. And it is the latter that we are concerned with here.
In this respect, he is akin to the “merely clever” person described by Aristotle. See NE VI.12 and VII.10.
I briefly mention a few things that would merit consideration if we were to undertake this task: (1) the knowledge component of theoretical wisdom conceived of as a cognitive competence would partly constitute the knowledge component of practical wisdom conceived of as a kind of know how; however, (2) the demands of theoretical wisdom conceived of as a competence (which presumably involves an ability to do that which the competence is a competence for) would exceed the corresponding demands of practical wisdom conceived of as know how; (3) finally, the further requirements involved with thinking of practical wisdom as a trait (vs. as mere know how) might exceed those of theoretical wisdom conceived of as a competence, since having the competence might not require having the motivation or willingness to use it (while having the relevant trait does require such willingness). In this respect, it might turn out that theoretical wisdom conceived of as a competence does not fully coincide with or isn’t quite a “mode” of practical wisdom conceived of as a trait.
For an attempt to get at some of the finer-grained psychological elements of wisdom, see Sternberg (1998).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to audiences at a UC Irvine colloquium in May of 2011 and at the 2011 Bled Philosophy Conference for helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper. I am especially grateful to Michael Pace for very helpful conversations about the same.
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Baehr, J. “Two Types of Wisdom”. Acta Anal 27, 81–97 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-012-0155-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-012-0155-3