In The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Philosophy of Christian Classical Education (Version 2.0, Revised Edition), Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain argue for a recovery of the tradition of moral philosophy against the reductionism of the modern social sciences. Their account of the intellectual history that led to the replacement of this classical and Christian paradigm for wisdom in ethics and the humanities, broadly considered, faithfully unpacks the faulty assumptions of this shaky modern and postmodern problem. In this series on replacing Bloom’s taxonomy with Aristotle’s Intellectual Virtues, we have already had occasion to bring the razor edge of their intellectual knife to bear upon Bloom’s taxonomy itself. After all, Bloom’s taxonomy majors on a false analogy from the natural sciences (i.e. a taxonomy for ordering biological species) for the emerging social science of modern education, now obsessed with measurement, clear objectives, and abstract knowledge.
But as stunning as Clark and Jain’s tour de force is from a broad, intellectual perspective, it leaves us with something missing that only a full recovery of Aristotle’s intellectual virtue of prudence can help us grasp. In order to understand this missing link, we will need to explain more completely Aristotle’s distinctions between prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis) and not only philosophic wisdom (sophia), but also their forerunners, scientific knowledge (episteme) and intuition (nous), as well as the moral virtues, with which prudence is inextricably linked. This set of distinctions will help us recognize more clearly the nature of this lost goal of education, the student’s prudence to decide and act reasonably with regard to human goods.
(Read the first article in this series: The Counsels of the Wise, Part 1: Foundations of Christian Prudence.)
The key to Aristotle’s distinctions can be found in kernel form in a passage of C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man, which we have already cited. In defending the moral law against modernist skepticism, he claimed, “I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite sceptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers” (24). Lewis’s point is that the character of a person is influenced by his upbringing and habits, more than his skill or intellectual attainments in philosophical speculation. Such a consideration raises the question of whether we are merely aiming at creating clever devils, or if we intend to educate students for genuine moral virtue and wisdom. In fact, in claiming that there is a type of wisdom, a moral philosophy even, which does not require the moral virtue of the philosopher, Lewis is underlining a crucial set of distinctions found in Aristotle.
Different Intellectual Virtues Have Different Ends
Aristotle began his Nicomachean Ethics by noting that different arts and sciences have different sorts of goals: “Now, as there are many actions, arts, and sciences, their ends also are many; the end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of economics wealth” (Book I, 1; Revised Oxford Trans., p. 1729; 1094a1ff.). The intellectual virtues contribute in different ways to the ultimate goal of happiness, Aristotle’s eudaimonia or human flourishing. These goals are not ancillary to the nature of the intellectual virtues themselves, but are part and parcel of their nature. It is because of this that we not only can but must distinguish between moral philosophy or science and practical wisdom or prudence, even though these seem to have the same subject matter.
Perhaps Aristotle’s most helpful example of this set of distinctions occurs when he is discussing the difference between artistry and science. Using an example where the subject matter seems to overlap, he contrasts the perspective of the carpenter and the geometer:
For a carpenter and a geometer look for right angles in different ways; the former does so in so far as the right angle is useful for his work, while the latter inquires what it is or what sort of thing it is; for he is a spectator of the truth. We must act in the same way, then, in all other matters as well, that our main task may not be subordinated to minor questions. Nor must we demand the cause in all matters alike; it is enough in some cases that the fact be well established, as in the case of the first principles; the fact is a primary thing or first principle. Now of the first principles we see some by induction, some by perception, some by a certain habituation, and others too in other ways. But each set of principles we must try to investigate in the natural way, and we must take pains to determine them correctly, since they have a great influence on what follows. For the beginning is thought to be more than half of the whole, and many of the questions we ask are cleared up by it.
I, 7; R. Oxford, p. 1736; 1098a29 – 1098b8
The first part of this paragraph is clear enough; a carpenter doesn’t bother with the speculative complexities of angles and their essence like a geometer does. All he needs is a good-enough right angle to be getting on with. In fact, if he paused and contemplated the angle’s essence and relationships too long, he would cease acting as a carpenter.
What is perhaps harder to see is how Aristotle’s train of thought applies this idea to his own treatise on ethics. We might expect him to side with the geometer, but instead he is claiming to avoid the “minor questions”of moral philosophy or speculative science that might distract him from the “main task.” What is his main task, we might ask? To instruct human beings in making decisions regarding what is good for them (i.e. to teach prudence), we must conclude. He needs a good-enough right angle, which any practiced carpenter can perceive just fine; right angles are one of those “facts” or “first principles,” with which a carpenter must work all the time in his craft. When we get these straight, the battle is more than half-won.
In artistry or craftsmanship, these principles are perceived, reasoned at by induction, or habituated. The same is true of philosophic wisdom, where intuition (the Greek nous) must perceive first principles correctly, while scientific knowledge (episteme) demonstrates universal truths. Prudence or practical wisdom (phronesis) likewise has its forerunners; in fact, when Aristotle mentions “habituation” he most likely has in mind the habit-forming process as the necessary background for the intellectual virtue that deliberates well with regard to human goods. The moral virtues must link arms with the intellectual virtue of prudence for either to be complete.
As he explains, the prerequisite for understanding the subject matter of prudence is a proper moral upbringing:
Hence any one who is to listen intelligently to lectures about what is noble and just and, generally, about the subjects of political science must have been brought up in good habits. For the facts are the starting-point, and if they are sufficiently plain to him, he will not need the reason as well; and the man who has been well brought up has or can easily get starting-points. And as for him who neither has nor can get them, let him hear the words of Hesiod:
Far best is he who knows all things himself;
Good, he that hearkens when men counsel right;
But he who neither knows, nor lays to heart
Another’s wisdom, is a useless wight.
I, 4; R. Oxford, p. 1731; 1095b4ff.; quotation is from Works and Days 293-7.
A person cannot even “listen intelligently to lectures about what is noble and just” without some measure of moral excellence or “good habits,” according to Aristotle. It’s not that the situation for such a person is hopeless, but he must listen to and store up in his heart the counsels of the wise if he is to remedy the faults of his uninstructed conscience.
So far so good, as we have already mentioned the link between the moral virtues and prudence. But the presence of Lewis’s imaginary “moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers” seems to put the lie to Aristotle’s claim that good habits are a prerequisite… unless we consider the possibility that our modern moral philosopher is not a prudent man at all, but simply a scientist. He may reason accurately from accepted starting points or first principles in the tradition of inquiry for his discipline, but these do not originate from his personal convictions or familiarity with human goods through personal habituation. He is a professional, an academic, a peddler of abstract knowledge.
This then is the danger of missing Aristotle’s distinctions in intellectual virtues, because they are distinctions in the goals or ends of education. The carpenter’s goal is to create something with the material he uses; right angles are part of the necessary means to his product. The geometer aims to demonstrate abstract truths about angles and their relationship. What then is the moral philosopher’s goal? Is it demonstration of abstract truth about human nature? Then he is a scientist and he may or may not be very wise in his own life. But the prudent person requires a different sort of intellectual precision, because he must deliberate and make practical choices about how to live his life, in the midst of all the particularities that he inhabits. Too precise a moral science may not, in fact, be very useful to him.
As Aristotle explains,
Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, exhibit much variety and fluctuation, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention and not by nature. And goods also exhibit a similar fluctuation because they bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage. We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better. In the same spirit, therefore, should each of our statements be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits: it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.
Book I, 3; Revised Oxford, p. 1730; 1094a13ff.
In a way, Aristotle is going further than our claim to say that moral science may be a flawed endeavor in and of itself. This coheres with Clark and Jain’s critique of the modern move toward the social sciences rather than accepting the tradition of moral philosophy. For Aristotle’ prudence is the goal of moral philosophy: his is a practical philosophy for life.
Filling the Gap in PGMAPT
The gap in Kevin Clark and Ravi Jain’s The Liberal Arts Tradition comes from the fact that they trace an intellectual history of the shift in assumptions or first principles for the academic disciplines of the social sciences or moral philosophy. While important in its own right, this move neglects the goal of prudence as an intellectual virtue: the person’s actual well lived life. But one way of developing the Aristotelian distinctions would argue that even moral philosophy is a form of sophia, philosophic wisdom. And while Aristotle ultimately regards sophia as a higher intellectual virtue than phronesis, he does not thereby exclude phronesis as necessary for a happy life (book VI, ch. 13).
For this reason, we propose an addition to Clark and Jain’s PGMAPT (Piety, Gymnastic, Music, liberal Arts, Philosophy and Theology) paradigm of the liberal arts tradition. Piety, Music and Gymnastic may help form the habituated moral sensibilities necessary for prudence, but none of them seem to constitute the intellectual virtue of prudence itself. The liberal arts (as well as the fine and common arts) are traditional paths of artistry, as we contended in our series on Apprenticeship in the Arts. Philosophy has been traditionally divided into wisdom about the natural world, human goods and affairs (or moral philosophy) and divine philosophy or metaphysics, but the traditional terms for intellectual virtue in these areas are either science or scientific knowledge (episteme), or its more finished attainment of wisdom (sophia), which assumes an accurate perception and understanding of first principles (intuition or nous).
Aristotle’s terminology and distinctions bring to light the need for another category alongside the acquisition of the liberal arts at the heart of this paradigm: the intellectual virtue of practical wisdom or prudence (phronesis). Otherwise, we leave out the reasoned outcome of moral formation: the educated person’s intellectual capacity to deliberate about what is good for himself and for other human beings. Andrew Kern of the CiRCE Institute has discussed rhetoric as the master art to rule them all, defining it as the art of decision-making in community. This helpfully draws out part of the connection between the liberal arts and prudence; they are in fact interdependent. On the other hand, Kern’s move unhelpfully collapses Aristotle’s distinction between the intellectual virtues of prudence and artistry. One can be skilled in the liberal arts and imprudent; likewise, a person could be prudent but a poor communicator.
In actual fact, the proper goals of education must include prudence separately from the liberal arts, otherwise we will end up neglecting the beating heart of education, just like the modern educators that C.S. Lewis bemoaned. In our zeal for the traditions of the liberal arts of grammar, logic and rhetoric, or arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, we will neglect teaching students to reason effectively with regard to their own choices as individuals. At the school where I work we have a Latin saying that we often repeat at assembly, non scholae, sed vitae, not for school, but for life. The liberal arts, as I have argued elsewhere, are in fact also practical tools for the workaday world, in spite of our Aristotelian love of leisure and the contemplative life. But viewed in and of themselves and without the guiding heart of prudence, without practical reasoning in line with the traditional moral virtues, the liberal arts are hollow. They must have blood of real moral decision-making pumping through them, if the body of our education is to be more than a hollowed-out corpse.
Another way of putting this might be to call for a third strand through the trunk of the tree of Clark and Jain’s PGMAPT paradigm. Instead of piety simply remaining in the grounding or roots of the tree, “governed by theology” up top, it should intertwine with the liberal arts in the form of prudential wisdom, as distinct from moral philosophy (nota bene: the trivium might more naturally find its culmination in metaphysics then). To be clear, I am not claiming that Clark and Jain have forgotten about or been unconcerned with matters concerning the development of prudence, only that without naming practical wisdom distinctly as an intellectual virtue, it does in fact tend to be neglected by teachers in a modern educational environment.
Moral virtue has been and will continue to be a major concern of the classical education movement. The point of this series, however, is to see what light Aristotle’s specific and unique paradigm of five intellectual virtues sheds on the goals of education. Aristotle’s distinction between the moral virtues and the intellectual virtues, specifically the intellectual virtue of phronesis or practical wisdom calls for a recognition of prudence as a proper goal of education:
Excellence too is distinguished into kinds in accordance with this difference; for we say that some excellences are intellectual and others moral, philosophic wisdom and understanding and practical wisdom being intellectual, liberality and temperance moral. For in speaking about a man’s character we do not say that he is wise or has understanding but that he is good-tempered or temperate; yet we praise the wise man also with respect to his state; and of states we call those which merit praise excellences.
I, 13, p. 1742; 1103a4-10
Influenced as we are by Bloom’s taxonomy of objectives in the cognitive domain we tend to separate moral matters from so called academic ones; of course, simply by adopting a Christian frame of reference, we may go some way toward the practices that attempt to habituate piety and good morals in the young. Our teachers may also be less reticent in teaching various subjects to bring up aspects of goodness within a committed moral frame of reference. But this does not mean that students are actively instructed in moral reasoning in any substantive way through a standard course of study.
The liberal arts can be used in service of prudence or practical wisdom, but they can also be used in the service of episteme, scientific knowledge, or nous, intuition or understanding. They are formidable tools in this sense. But between Is and Ought, the reasoning of Fact and of Value, Truth and Goodness, there is a wall of separation. Just because something is so does not make it right. Modern skepticism about value judgments posits that “they are entirely subjective and relative to the individual who makes them,” Mortimer Adler points out in Six Great Ideas (68). Therefore, the modern academic bred on Bloom’s has been inclined to collapse all prescriptive statements into merely descriptive ones. Teachers trained in modern colleges and graduate schools have been trained in this sort of descriptive precision, and will therefore be unlikely to venture out into the prescriptive arena of moral reasoning in their teaching of literature, history, science and mathematics, unless practical wisdom is made a specific course goal of their instruction.
How would we in fact instruct the consciences of our students for prudence throughout the K-12 sequence? This will be the subject of future articles. But before we close we can note a one promising idea for teaching prudence already present in the classical education movement. That is David Hicks’s conception of the Ideal Type in Norms and Nobility:
An Ideal Type tyrranized classical education. The ancient schoolmaster in his intense struggle to achieve a living synthesis of thought and action exemplified this Ideal and passed it on to his pupils by inviting them to share in his struggle for self-knowledge and self-mastery, the immature mind participating in the mature. Against this Ideal were the master’s achievements and his pupil’s judged. All fell short, of course, but some – and here’s the rub – far less short than others.
David Hicks, Norms and Nobility, 43.
Hicks’s educational vision is described by Gene Veith and Andrew Kern as “moral classicism” for good reason (Classical Education: The Movement Sweeping America, revised and updated, Capital Research Center: 2001; see pp. 37ff). In his restoration of “norms” Hicks seems to fuse the ideals of artistry, practical wisdom and philosophic, in the persons of master and pupil, as aspiring individuals. In this way his fusion represents dramatically the type of inquiry of the Great Books and humanities that would cultivate practical wisdom; even science “must be pulled down from its non-normative pedestal,” and be turned toward practical wisdom. Scientific “analysis must be framed within the normative inquiry [of human values] if science is to serve life, not destroy it” (Norms and Nobility, 145).
Reviving moral philosophy in the later years of K-12 education is not enough. Instead, we must fully recover the intellectual virtue of prudence as a major goal of education in our classical Christian schools and allow a vision of the Ideal Type to shape our curriculum and teaching methods in all subjects and grades.
