by David Blockley, directly quoted from Oxford University Press blog
“Some people who do not possess theoretical knowledge
are
more effective in action (especially if they are experienced) than others who
do possess it.”
Aristotle was referring, in his Nicomachean Ethics,
to an attribute called practical wisdom – a quality that many modern engineers
have – but our western intellectual tradition has completely lost sight of. I
will describe briefly what Aristotle wrote about practical wisdom, argue for
its recognition and celebration and state that we need consciously to utilise
it as we face up to the uncertainties inherent in the engineering challenges of
climate change.
Necessarily what follows is a simplified account of complex
and profound ideas. Aristotle saw five ways of arriving at the truth – he
called them art (ars, techne), science (episteme), intuition (nous),
wisdom (sophia), and practical wisdom – sometimes translated as prudence
(phronesis). Ars or techne (from which we get the words art and
technical, technique and technology) was concerned with production but not
action. Art had a productive state, truly reasoned, with an end (i.e. a
product) other than itself (e.g. a building). It was not just a set of
activities and skills of craftsman but included the arts of the mind and what
we would now call the fine arts. The Greeks did not distinguish the fine arts
as the work of an inspired individual – that came only after the Renaissance.
So techne as the modern idea of mere technique or rule-following was only one
part of what Aristotle was referring to.
Episteme (from which we get the word
epistemology or knowledge) was of necessity and eternal; it is knowledge that
cannot come into being or cease to be; it is demonstrable and teachable and
depends on first principles. Later, when combined with Christianity, episteme as
eternal, universal, context-free knowledge has profoundly influenced western
thought and is at the heart of debates between science and religion. Intuition
or nous was a state of mind that apprehends these first
principles and we could think of it as our modern notion of intelligence or
intellect. Wisdom or sophia was the most finished form of knowledge – a
combination of nous and episteme.
Aristotle thought there were two kinds of virtues, the
intellectual and the moral. Practical wisdom or phronesis was
an intellectual virtue of perceiving and understanding in effective ways and
acting benevolently and beneficently. It was not an art and necessarily
involved ethics, not static but always changing, individual but also social and
cultural. As an illustration of the quotation at the head of this article,
Aristotle even referred to people who thought Anaxagoras and Thales were examples
of men with exceptional, marvelous, profound but useless knowledge because
their search was not for human goods...
Read the article: Blockley, D. (2014).
Practical wisdom and why we need to value it. Oxford University Press
blog.
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